Tradwives and the Pressures of Modern Motherhood  🔗 **Source:** [Tradwives and the Pressures of Modern Motherhood](https://share.snipd.com/episode/ca4be534-6661-40b6-b844-6b114d759524) ## Highlights - **Marble Run Didn’t Save Motherhood** - Sarah Peterson chased a wooden marble run sold by a momfluencer believing it would calm her children and transform her motherhood experience. - The toy arrived but produced no lasting change, illustrating how momfluencer quick fixes often fail to address real burdens. Transcript: Leah Dinella And on the outside, it may have looked serene. But on the inside, a woman named Sarah Peterson was starting to feel a little bit frazzled, maybe even a little desperate. Speaker 3 My kid's probably screaming at me for something. Leah Dinella And in the midst of this screaming, Sarah is hunched over her phone, trying frantically to order something very, very important off of Instagram. Speaker 3 A wooden marble run? A marble run? Leah Dinella Like one of those old-timey toys where you push marbles down a little slide? Precisely. And the reason she needs this marble run is because a momfluencer that Sarah follows on Instagram has this marble run. And that momfluencer claimed... Speaker 3 I haven't seen the boys in four hours. They've been so entranced with the marble run. Leah Dinella Move over, Appids. Right? So Sarah sees this caption and she's like, I need that freaking toy yesterday. It was like, oh my God, four hours? Four hours? Speaker 3 Yes, like, yes, yes. Click, click. Yes, yes. I don't care how much it is. Yes. Leah Dinella And a few days later, the marble run arrives. She gives it to her kids. They're mesmerized. And suddenly, Sarah's life goes from chaotic and harried to calm and peaceful. Honestly, she said that was a huge turning point in her identity as a mom. Wait, really? No. Oh. Not at all. The marble run arrives and absolutely nothing changes. ([Time 0:03:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/10aaea74-7b5b-4037-b5e2-29e2a3b6fb46)) - **Praise Without Policy Leaves Moms Struggling** - The U.S. reveres motherhood rhetorically but provides weak structural support like paid leave and affordable child care. - Hosts contrast political praise for mothers with the lack of federal paid leave and reproductive autonomy, linking policy gaps to maternal strain. Transcript: Leah Dinella We don't have any federal paid leave. Speaker 3 We don't have access to affordable or accessible child care. We don't have reproductive autonomy or the ability to make decisions about our lives or about how many ([Time 0:05:56](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1152d2b7-a71d-4043-a035-135d8c77dc33)) - **Tradwives Sell Clarity And Purpose** - Tradwives present clarity and certainty by framing full-time motherhood as sufficient, noble, and fulfilling. - That message attracts viewers craving meaning, promising identity and purpose through domesticity and submission. Transcript: Leah Dinella If you are not familiar with the term tradwife, it is a woman who chooses to live a more traditional life with ultra-traditional gender roles. B.A. Parker So the man goes outside the house, works, provides for the family, the woman stays home, and she's the homemaker. Leah Dinella She takes care of the home and the children if there are any. B.A. Parker Oh, I'm quite familiar with Trad Wives. They're all over Instagram and TikTok and they're usually in their 20s or 30s. Very poised, put together, hair done, makeup done, mostly thin, mostly white. And they promote the joys of being a mother and a wife so the videos they share are of things like them making their own yogurt or picking wildflowers with their kids or you know washing Dishes doing the dishes i'm a five-star missus rinsing up the crumbs like it's part of my business. They seem to love hand-washing dishes. Never in the work of the domestic kind. There's never just one fork. Leah Dinella And we love watching them hand-wash dishes. I mean, Parker, Tradwife accounts have exploded in the past few years. That term went from being pretty obscure to being widely understood and even kind of a national obsession. One of the biggest examples is Hannah Nealman, who has 10 million followers. B.A. Parker Hannah Nealman, that's Ballerina Farm for those not in the know. Speaker 3 Making an egg salad on sourdough bread. So last night I started the bread. Leah Dinella I just added my flour, water, salt and starch. Right. Another popular one is Esty Williams. She's the one who was defining what it means to be a proper trad wife in a clip that was liked almost 80,000 times. Trad wives also believe that they should submit to their husbands and serve their husbands and family. And that triggers people because the word submit and serve, it makes women think that we're saying that we're less than a man. That's not what we're saying. She goes on to say that she doesn't believe that she's less than a man, just that her values as a Christian inform her ideas about submission, servitude, and the importance of traditional Gender roles. B.A. Parker Right. I know that a disproportionate number of people who represent the trad wife lifestyle are members of the LDS church. A lot of them also seem to be hearkening back to what they see as a simpler time, whether that be a 50s style Mad Men era. Leah Dinella Mm-hmm. The vacuuming in heels and a string of pearls. B.A. Parker Or the more pioneer times with the prairie dresses and the homesteading. Leah Dinella Yeah, there are so many different looks and different belief sets that inform any given person. But Sarah Peterson said there is something that seems to connect trad wives across that sort of superficial variation? Speaker 3 I think the number one thing they're selling is the idea of clarity. And they're very certain that leaning into their femininity and their nurturing and their maternity and their domesticity will make them completely fulfilled and happy. Leah Dinella They affirm something really important for a lot of women, that motherhood is hard work. But they also go further. They say it's important work and full-time work and sufficient work. You know, you don't also have to go be a girl boss. You can be totally satisfied with this one, all-consuming identity. ([Time 0:11:26](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8c92e58e-1354-4a90-8c10-07d1d2e24646)) - **Ballerina Farm Turned Homemaking Into Millions** - Hannah Nealman aka Ballerina Farm became a tradwife icon with glossy content and millions of followers showcasing breadmaking and domestic craft. - Her massive following exemplifies how aestheticized homemaking can scale into influencer fame. Transcript: Leah Dinella National obsession. One of the biggest examples is Hannah Nealman, who has 10 million followers. B.A. Parker Hannah Nealman, that's Ballerina Farm for those not in the know. Speaker 3 Making an egg salad on sourdough bread. So last night I started the bread. Leah Dinella I just added my flour, water, salt and starch. Right. Another popular one is Esty Williams. She's the one who was defining what it means to be a proper trad wife in a clip that was liked almost 80,000 times. ([Time 0:12:44](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f0a359d0-e266-4d6e-97b9-621c19a39b53)) - **Tradwife Fantasy Is Economically Exclusive** - The tradwife identity is inaccessible to many: low-income and single mothers often can't afford to be homemakers. - Hosts note structural constraints like finances and single-parenting that make the fantasy unrealistic for most. Transcript: Leah Dinella Sarah said low-income moms and even middle-class moms can't be trad wives for the most part because they can't afford not to work outside of the home. B.A. Parker And single moms like mine also can't do the trad wife thing because it inherently relies on a man to be there acting as the quote-unquote breadwinner. I mean, growing up, I was surrounded by my mom's single black mom friends and my grandparents. And if one of them saw a kid running around, whether it was their kid or not, they'd yell, hey, you know, sit your ass down. Leah Dinella So it was always like a community effort, you know? Totally. I mean, in real life, there are so many different versions of motherhood and parenthood. ([Time 0:17:27](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e45fb77c-a2db-4e2d-8149-9b0cf46d3823)) - **Tradwife Aesthetics Echo Mammy Stereotypes** - Tradwife aesthetics echo the historical mammy trope where women of color did domestic labor without the choice or glamour. - Marcy Alvis Walker links tradwife pride in domesticity to a past where Black women were forced into servitude, exposing racial baggage. Transcript: Leah Dinella Subservience has always been the expectation. Right. Not to mention the fact that, historically, women of color have so often been forced to fulfill the role of homemaker and child reer, not for their own partners and children, but for Someone else's. B.A. Parker I would say the biggest difference between the mammy and the trad wife is that the trad wives just filter. The mammy doesn't have the filters and doesn't have the ring light, doesn't have all that. And everything that's happening to her, she's not consenting to it. Leah Dinella Ooh, who's that? That's a woman named Marcy Alvis Walker. She's an author and a blogger. And not long ago, she wrote a piece about this idea that the original trad wife was the caricature of the mammy. B.A. Parker Her job was to make sure that the master had no worries. Leah Dinella The house was taken care of. That was the priority. Marcy said that mammies were also responsible for taking the pressure off of the mistress of the house so that she would have time to inhabit these other roles. You know, gracious host, doting mother, sexy wife. Even as the Black women were doing most of the actual work of those roles, the cooking, the child rearing, the submission to the man of the house. B.A. Parker We all know, based in all our DNA here in this country, mammies weren't safe from the bedroom with the master. But we don't talk about that. Leah Dinella Yeah. She's saying that everything trad wives pride themselves on doing, that was stuff that, as you said, Black women were expected to do. First during enslavement and later as domestic servants. ([Time 0:21:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1c0607b6-d645-4387-94e8-da928342cec8)) - **Host Admits Tradwife Lifestyle Tempts Her** - Leah Dinella admits the tradwife image still tempts her as a way to escape political stress and craft domestic calm like making stromboli or knitting. - Her personal conflict shows how the aesthetic offers emotional refuge even to engaged journalists. Transcript: Leah Dinella Yes, could be any second now. B.A. Parker Golly. So we've been talking about how hard motherhood is and what a particular paradox it is for women of color. What are you feeling about all of this this time around? Leah Dinella I mean, to be honest, I feel a lot of the same things that I did before. Like, I'm definitely excited, but I'm still experiencing a lot of denial, a lot of wishful thinking, a decent amount of panic. And Parker, I'll admit, I still do feel like there's something kind of compelling about the trad wife life. Even now that you have like a real like tiny human in your home? Even more so actually probably because like so I'll be at work you know reading about different ways like immigrants are being terrorized or the Trump administration deciding to bring Back firing squads and then a part of my brain will be like, what if instead of doing this, I were making a beautiful stromboli like from scratch for my kids? Or what if I were knitting them a blanket? Or what if I were using this time to take them to the zoo? Like, wouldn't that be better? B.A. Parker Sure. ([Time 0:25:48](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9f5d5b79-c132-4d17-a4b2-f950797ec896)) - **Polished Motherhood Converts To Political Influence** - The assumed moral authority of white, put-together mothers confers real political power that other mothers don't receive. - Examples like Jenny McCarthy's anti-vax influence and Moms for Liberty show how maternal image amplifies political reach. Transcript: Leah Dinella Quite a lot sometimes. I mean, I want you to think about Jenny McCarthy for a second. B.A. Parker I mean, I haven't thought about her for a minute, but all right. Leah Dinella I'm bringing you back. This is a woman who was famous as an actress and a model, but she became more famous, or perhaps infamous, for being the face of the anti-vax movement. Something different happened to our children, which then led to autism. Do I know that exact link? No. I don't have that proof, but I've got evidence in Evan, and I've got evidence in thousands and hundreds of thousands of parents all over the world. And these are the mommy warriors that will make change because we have to. Jenny McCarthy spent years and years spreading disinformation that has convinced tons of people that vaccines cause autism. And she's been able to do that in large part by wielding the image of a concerned, caring, devoted, white mom. And you can contrast that with the kind of power that other categories of moms have. So, like, you know, many people have talked about how long and hard Black moms have organized to convince people that police violence is something that negatively affects their kids And needs to be addressed. And thousands and thousands of Black moms cannot get the same attention put to that issue that one white mom was able to draw to her issue. ([Time 0:28:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b44cf1f2-aff4-4bf8-aa6d-0951bfea21a5)) - **Momfluencer Route To Radicalization** - Ayla Stewart evolved from hippie momfluencer to white nationalist-adjacent speaker, promoting ideas like the white babies challenge. - Her trajectory illustrates how mom content can radicalize followers toward explicit racial and political agendas. Transcript: B.A. Parker One woman whose account was wife with a purpose and i remember her tweeting her white babies challenge a few years back where she's like, I've made six, match or beat me. Leah Dinella Yeah, that was a woman named Ayla Stewart. Most of her accounts are inactive right now, but she was popular and pretty prolific for a while. Speaker 3 Ayla Stewart was this woman who started sort of into like witchy, hippie women's circles. And she just like really gradually veered further and further right. She was invited to speak at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville for context. Leah Dinella She was actually at one point the only woman slated to speak there, although she ultimately wound up not being able to go. Speaker 3 She talked a lot about how, you know, mainstream culture doesn't care about my motherhood. They don't care about my concerns as a mother. They don't care about, you know, how valuable my work is. Leah Dinella And the right does. After Donald Trump was elected president the first time, she posted a video on YouTube about how excited she was to be pregnant with a baby that would be born during his administration. And she expressed her gratitude to the people who made that happen. B.A. Parker My fellow white people who got out to vote, thank you. Thank you for not being ashamed to be traditional, to be Christian, to be conservative, and to be white. And it's okay to vote. Our interests, of course we want to. Our ancestors are the ones who built and created this beautiful country and we want to keep it wonderful. We don't want it to become Brazil. We don't want it to become a third world socialist hellhole. Oh, we're using a lot of dog whistle phrases. Oh, this is great. Leah Dinella Coming back to her white babies challenge, you know, that didn't come out of nowhere. It seemed to be a pretty direct homage to something that happened under Nazism. Speaker 3 The Nazis used to give white mothers medals based on how many children they had. Really, really explicit, like, you will be rewarded for, you know, raising more white babies. B.A. Parker I mean, there's definitely a sense of history repeating itself. Yeah. Leah Dinella And of course, people like Ayla Stewart are on the extreme ends of the spectrum. But I think one of the things that her story demonstrates is that there is this pathway for white moms who feel exhausted and underappreciated to look for meaning in some really dangerous Places. ([Time 0:33:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/099f0f8b-79b5-4b09-b522-9028fa0be065)) - **Prioritize Policy Over Aesthetic Support** - To meaningfully support parents, focus on systemic changes like paid family leave, affordable child care, and financial support rather than aesthetic validation. - Hosts argue trinkets and recipes won't fill policy gaps that drive fertility and parental stress. Transcript: Leah Dinella Of the people who preach about the joys of motherhood focus on these really small, intimate ways that you can make being a mom beautiful. You know, the lipsticks and the home-cooked meals and the precious moments with your chubby little babies. But it seems like the concerns that a lot of people have about parenthood are so much wider than that. So the question I'm left with is, how do you fill the voids that actually exist? The void of resources, the void of choices, the void of money, the void of hope. B.A. Parker Yeah, because a pat on the back or a medal for having more babies doesn't seem like it's going to do it. At least it wouldn't for me. Parker, they don't want your babies anyway. Leah Dinella I mean, that's fair. But like, some of the momfluencers I've encountered seem like they could sell salt to a slug. But could they sell the idea of paid family leave to the Trump administration? And would they want to? Because that's what it seems to keep coming back to. That what struggling families need is not trinkets or recipes. ([Time 0:38:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6d839c66-598c-4efe-bada-dbef57c58256))