## Colophon tags:: [[&article]] url:: https://web.archive.org/web/20260520081528/https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/fantasy-of-the-tradwife-yesteryear.html date:: [[2026-05-23]] %% title:: The Relentless Fantasy of the Tradwife type:: [[clipped-note]] file:: published:: 2026-05-19T06:00:03.067-04:00 author:: [[@Sarah Jones]] [Click to Archive](https://web.archive.org/save/https://web.archive.org/web/20260520081528/https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/fantasy-of-the-tradwife-yesteryear.html) %% archive:: ## Notes short:: - ## Full text ## The Relentless Fantasy of the Tradwife - 20260523 - fulltext --- publish: false creator: Prateek Waghre --- ## Full Text %%  Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty Images, Disney, Instagram/BallerinaFarm *This piece contains spoilers about the novel* Yesteryear*, including its ending.* Over the last decade, the tradwife has become unavoidable. She haunts our screens in *The Testaments*, in Mormon reality shows, in TikToks, and on Instagram. She’s in the White House. She lives like it’s the 1950s or maybe the 1800s. She has babies while other women languish in cubicles. She bakes sourdough. She might have a “ [side hustle](https://web.archive.org/web/20260520081528/https://americanreformer.org/2025/08/eight-lessons-for-side-hustle-tradwives/) ” but answers primarily to her husband, upon whom she also depends. She inspires headlines and polls and jokes but mostly anxiety, from both her critics and her friends. Either she is real and a threat to our freedoms, or she is real and in danger from feminism. Perhaps she is whatever we hate most, a Rorschach blot who reveals more about her observers than she does about herself. Tradwifery can be an illusory concept, in practice. Women are not dropping out of college or the workforce in masses, begging to go back to their kitchens. Three out of four Gen-Z women disagreed “that the country would be stronger” with traditional gender roles, an NBC News poll f [ound](https://web.archive.org/web/20260520081528/https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/young-men-women-are-taking-poll-gender-gap-staggering-new-levels-rcna202672) last year. The [percentage](https://web.archive.org/web/20260520081528/https://news.gallup.com/poll/267737/record-high-women-prefer-working-homemaking.aspx) of American women who prefer a career over a role as a homemaker has risen steadily over time. Even the women most associated with a traditional lifestyle — conservatives, the devout — aren’t much like tradwives, either. Erika Kirk is leading Turning Point USA after the killing of her husband, Charlie, and Karoline Leavitt is the White House press secretary. Hannah Neeleman, the influencer and creator of Ballerina Farm, transformed wholesome homesteading content into a collection of products. If the tradwife won’t die, it’s because she was never alive. We are boxing with an apparition. Without a psychology to map, the tradwife is challenging to examine. One of the buzziest renderings can be found in [*Yesteryear*](https://web.archive.org/web/20260520081528/https://www.thecut.com/article/yesteryear-book-review-tradwives-ballerina-farm.html), Caro Claire Burke’s best-selling novel about Natalie, a contrarian who broadcasts her quaint farm life and growing family to millions of followers on social media. Then, horror of horrors, she travels back in time to the 19th century and struggles for survival in the Idaho backcountry. There is a twist, which is visible from the reaches of space by the time it arrives. This is not *Outlander*; Natalie has simply gone mad. The tradwife gets her comeuppance while *Good Morning America* gets a book-club pick. In a post- *Dobbs* country, there is something satisfactory about Natalie’s suffering. She is loosely based on influencers like Neeleman, who is cherished for her domesticity by some on the right — although her life is easier than it initially seems. Neeleman’s husband is an heir to the JetBlue fortune, so he can afford a photogenic [AGA cookstove](https://web.archive.org/web/20260520081528/https://www.instagram.com/p/CMck2S4Ant6/?hl=en) that costs thousands. Natalie’s husband is the son of a conservative senator who pays for their land, with conditions attached. The *Times of London* [revealed](https://web.archive.org/web/20260520081528/https://www.thetimes.com/magazines/the-sunday-times-magazine/article/meet-the-queen-of-the-trad-wives-and-her-eight-children-plfr50cgk) that a neighbor teaches Neeleman’s children “a Mormon-Christian syllabus.” Natalie pays someone to homeschool the kids while she performs the occasional chore on-camera. Both live in the American West, Neeleman in Utah and Natalie in Idaho. Neeleman shares little of her inner life, while Burke lays Natalie bare. *Yesteryear* tells us what she thinks about herself and her choices, promising insight, if not exactly an explanation. Traditional values can be hard to pin down: Is a woman trad if she gets filler or stays natural, if she has three children or eight, if she is Evangelical or atheist? Instead, Burke adopts that non-specificity for her own. Natalie’s faith, while key to her backstory, is a vague Christianity that never coheres. She attends a strict congregation in her youth and quotes Scripture here and there. When she prepares to leave Idaho for Harvard, where she will soon be a student, the airport is crowded with families “nearly all of whom were dressed like us, in long prairie dresses with hair braided down their backs, and nearly all of whom were larger than us by a factor of two or three.” I have not been to Idaho, but I think it’s unlikely the residents all dress like they follow Warren Jeffs. Natalie reaches the Ivy League, prairie dress intact, and loathes her roommate, Reena, who is stupid, drinks, and has sex. A girl from a college church group takes pity on Natalie, who joins even though she believes the women in it “are dumb as rocks, and the idea of sharing spiritual communion with them would probably feel like getting intellectually stoned to death.” Burke has said that she left Natalie’s religion intentionally unclear. “A specific thread of Christianity would really just be more distracting,” she [told](https://web.archive.org/web/20260520081528/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/10/briefing/yesteryear-caro-claire-burke.html) the New York *Times*, and would “imply more of an intelligence than Natalie has about her own religion.” It’s a strange choice. Natalie hates everyone, other women above all, but people get their misogyny from some place, and “traditional values” don’t exist without a tradition. *Yesteryear* is a dreamscape, hazily sketched. Burke flattens Natalie into a hypocrite, the most uninteresting possibility. Unkind and unmaternal, Natalie thinks about fucking her father-in-law and relies on the labor of others to market her life. Her husband is the only name on their deed, and she sneaks her earnings into a private bank account. When she loses her mind, it’s inevitable, because no one can be two contradictory people at once. In our world, however, a conservative woman is usually lucid. She is making a choice, prompted by ideological, financial, and aesthetic priorities. For someone like Neeleman, “living off the land is a point of pride, not a requirement for survival,” Gaby Del Valle [points out](https://web.archive.org/web/20260520081528/https://thebaffler.com/salvos/land-ho-del-valle) in the *Baffler*. Whether she is an influencer, a politician, or a housewife, she submits to her place in the order of things, and if her obedience buys her some influence, that is part of God’s plan. She can have a little power, within the appropriate sphere. In *Lead Like Jael: 7 Timeless Principles for Today’s Women of Faith*, Emma Waters criticizes the “romanticized imagery of the tradwife” while defending hierarchy in the home. “Yet Scripture gives us the framework: the husband is called to be the primary provider and protector, and the wife is called to be the primary caregiver and cultivator of the home,” explains Waters, who works for the Heritage Foundation. In this authoritarian logic, tradition and tradition alone “can salvage love from modern indignities and the early-morning commute,” Zoe Hu [write](https://web.archive.org/web/20260520081528/https://dissentmagazine.org/article/the-agoraphobic-fantasy-of-tradlife/) s in *Dissent*. Natalie admits, once, that she’s selling “a temporary escape” to her audience. All influencers do, tradwives most of all. “Like a trapdoor, the idea swings open to reveal a baby-pink fantasy too fragile and nostalgic to be taken in the open air,” Hu observes. That mirage benefits the right, which sells an ersatz American history the way an influencer might sell raw milk. When the tradwife does borrow from the past, it is to create something new, “an anachronistic pastiche of rugged pioneer individualism and midcentury familial plenty,” Del Valle argues. The alternative, the right says, is a nightmare. The movement is obsessed with women like Natalie’s roommate, Reena, who wastes her time with degrees and professional ambition. She sleeps around while her ovaries wither. She hectors, she whines, she weeps. “Imagine at least one crying woman in every board room, newsroom, faculty meeting, and government office, and you can understand the decentralized force that has led us to this point,” Richard Hanania, the [white nationalist](https://web.archive.org/web/20260520081528/https://www.huffpost.com/entry/richard-hanania-white-supremacist-pseudonym-richard-hoste_n_64c93928e4b021e2f295e817) turned mainstream pundit, [writes](https://web.archive.org/web/20260520081528/https://www.richardhanania.com/p/womens-tears-win-in-the-marketplace). Because she denies her “biological destiny,” in [the words](https://web.archive.org/web/20260520081528/https://x.com/KatieMiller/status/2042226870201000428) of Katie Miller, she destroys herself and civilization too. “The problem is not that women are less talented than men or even that female modes of interaction are inferior in any objective sense,” Helen Andrews [hedge](https://web.archive.org/web/20260520081528/https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-great-feminization/) s in a piece for *Compact*. “The problem is that female modes of interaction are not well suited to accomplishing the goals of many major institutions.” But the deluded career woman is no more than a shadow; her shape is the only human thing about her. Like the tradwife, she belongs to the world of propaganda, and she can shape the lives of human beings without having much in common with them. %% ## Colophon title:: The Relentless Fantasy of the Tradwife type:: [[full-text]] url:: https://web.archive.org/web/20260520081528/https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/fantasy-of-the-tradwife-yesteryear.html date:: [[2026-05-23]] published:: 2026-05-19T06:00:03.067-04:00