Caro Claire Burke on Tradwives

I (bravely!) consider myself a pioneer in tradwife studies. When I first started feeling inexplicably drawn to Ballerina Farm content, for example, Hannah Neeleman had roughly 150,000 followers. This was in 2021; Ballerina Farm now boasts 15 million followers across platforms and has exploded into a widely recognizable lifestyle brand. A lot has changed in five years. And, when it comes to the American appetite for romanticized models of ideal womanhood and motherhood, not much has changed at all. Since the 19th century, the iconography of submissive, beautiful, chaste, thin, white motherhood has reigned supreme in the cultural imagination. This impossible ideal has also critically informed gender, politics, and capitalism.