Tradwife creators retreat, but cultural damage remains

Since 2024, magazine spreads have repositioned Hannah Neeleman, a Mormon mother of nine, as an agrarian entrepreneur, even as her “Ballerina Farm” brand remains attached to her.

Her business sells asparagus-shaped candles, farmer-themed electrolyte mix and protein powder made with bovine colostrum. Neeleman has said she is open to feedback if people consider her content harmful to women. She also rejects the “tradwife” label, marking a public retreat from a role that made her a prominent symbol of domestic submission.

The shift extends to Nara Smith, a former teenage model previously presumed to have converted to her husband’s conservative Mormon faith. Smith has homemaked for her husband and children, whom she began raising at 18. Her sleek videos cover everything from bread to DIY sunscreen.

She recently disclosed that each 90-second video takes eight hours to produce. Smith also has domestic help, a cookbook to sell and career and business ambitions. In a recent Guardian interview, she said she identifies as a feminist and was “never baptised” in her husband’s faith.

A Sunday Times profile of Neeleman’s marriage detailed a central contradiction in her tradwife persona. Her billionaire husband described the duties of his homemade-meal-making, milkmaid-influencer partner. He said the role left her “so sick with exhaustion … she [couldn’t] get out of bed for a week.”

What does “de-tradding” mean?

Tradwives are a digital subculture built around retro styling and a fantasy of women as socially submissive, financially dependent and cheerfully devoted to unpaid domestic labor. Their family, faith and from-scratch cooking content brought husband-led households into anti-feminist view.

Smith and her friend Neeleman are not isolated cases, according to Massey University academics Veronica Hopner and Sophia Sykes. They have named the retreat “de-tradding,” describing women stepping away from explicit tradwifery.

Hopner and Sykes cite anecdotal evidence from women who performed submission and dependence at home. Some encountered unequal power within those roles; other accounts describe violence and rape. One online mother of five concealed an abusive marriage until she learned her husband was denying her grocery money while spending it on sex workers.

For some survivors, de-tradding means producing content that critiques tradwifery and explains their escape. Many come from conservative, cult-like religious communities that function as sealed information environments. Girls married at 18 or 19 receive little encouragement to explore alternatives, according to the analysis.

Why did the aesthetic gain political force?

The explicit trend is commonly dated to around the mid-2010s, when alt-right communities formed online spaces around explicit misogyny. At the same time, Christian nationalists recognized an opening for norm-breaking radical-right politics after Donald Trump fused nostalgia with cultural resentment and made both electorally viable.

Raw-milk-drinking, “natural” tradwives became emblematic of the aspirational woman within that worldview, while feminized pronatalism received substantial cultural promotion. Not every self-described tradwife is a white supremacist. Still, reproducing the aesthetic now amplifies its symbolic language.

Eighteen months before this analysis, the American far right’s project to build a “womanosphere” of media products was under scrutiny. One aim was to steer women and girls toward submissive homemaker identities. “Evie” magazine pursued that project, and Neeleman appeared on its cover.

The analysis links the retreat to the fracturing of Trump’s popularity during his second term and the weakening of his movement’s institutional ambitions. It argues that the “propaganda assault” on young women has lost some force. Hopner and Sykes instead emphasize personal-brand contamination: association with the radical right can burden creators whose domestic imagery remains marketable.

The analysis also says the appeal of a highly packaged “soft life” built around DIY sunscreen and personal domestic divinity is impaired by fantasies of “creepy old white guys with starring roles in the Epstein files.” Smith’s eight-hour production schedule, paid help and commercial ambitions make that tension harder to ignore.

Does rebranding erase the influence?

Neeleman’s reinvention and Smith’s clarification may soften their current images, but neither removes the submissive template their content helped normalize or the politics that amplified it. The analysis voices unqualified solidarity with survivors, while the question of forgiveness for commercially motivated renouncers remains unresolved.

No audience-size, engagement or budget figures accompany the account, so estimates of lost reach or spending would exceed the evidence. For creators and sponsors, the practical risk is inherited association. Smith’s disclosures also show that polished domestic performance can conceal substantial production time and paid support.

The next test for de-tradding is whether domestic entrepreneurship can separate itself from ideological exploitation without erasing the workers and survivors represented along the way.