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Front Burner Transcript for January 2, 2025

Host: Jayme Poisson

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JAYME POISSON: Hi, it's Jayme.

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Video clip: I don't want to be a corporate girlie, I don't want to climb the ladder, I don't want to be a boss babe. I don't want to do any of that. I don't want to be a breadwinner. I do not want to do that. I want to be home. I want to be cooking in the kitchen...

JAYME POISSON: For some time now, this has been a growing trend on TikTok and Instagram. Young women with huge followings sharing their day-to-day lives as 'trad wives' or traditional wives. But it's not just a picture of domestic bliss and its aesthetics that's being painted here. It's also wrapped up with religion and politics, economics and influencer culture. Back in the spring, I talked to journalist Sophie Elmhirst about all of this. In March, she wrote a piece for the New Yorker called 'The Rise and Fall of the Trad Wife.' It was a really fascinating conversation. Have a listen.

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JAYME POISSON: Hi, Sophie. Thank you very much for being here.

SOPHIE ELMHIRST: Hi. Thank you for having me.

JAYME POISSON: So before we get into all the stuff surrounding trad wives, I want to get to know some of the big influencers. A couple of names that have popped up, Nora Smith, Hannah Neeleman, Estee Williams. Who are these women? What kind of backgrounds do they come from?

SOPHIE ELMHIRST: Right. So I guess it's, you know, inevitably with a kind of meme or an influencer term like this, they all get bracketed under one thing. And actually, if you go down a level and you see that they're all quite distinct, although there are very clear kind of shared traits. Hannah Neeleman, who you mentioned, is probably the kind of leading light of all of them. She is a mother of eight. She's a homesteader. She lives on a farm.

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Video clip: The voice teacher is just about to come over. And we've been doing all sorts of sourdough and wheeler today, so we got lots to clean up.

SOPHIE ELMHIRST: And, you know, she's milking cows and baking sourdough and essentially kind of running the domestic side of this farm and this family life, but very doggedly documenting it all on Instagram.

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Video clip: So these two steers that we're trying to catch, they ran all the way up here on the hill. They're giving me a workout.

SOPHIE ELMHIRST: And the picture she paints is of a kind of very hardworking but very wholesome domestic life. Sort of spliced with... she also appears in beauty pageants, so there are some surprising elements as well. But she has like nearly nine million followers, I think, now. And so she's a very, very kind of well-established and leading figure, I guess, in this whole scene.

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Video clip: Tonight is supper club. So basically, what that means is every few weeks, we invite some friends and family over and we have a meal together. And we make a meal with food that we either raised, or we buy it from a farm that we know and trust.

SOPHIE ELMHIRST: And then, yeah, then there are a whole host of others who… there are of a variety, and so you can find them in different countries. It's not just North America. Estee Williams, who you mentioned, is also in North America. She has a kind of Marilyn Monroe aesthetic. She really emphasizes a lot more of the sort of visuals, the food, the outfits, the hair curling.

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Video clip: Get ready with me to go to our oma's. I'm going to be walking you through some of my makeup. This is my favourite lip colour. This is the new confident by L'Oreal.

SOPHIE ELMHIRST: But she is also much more explicit in her content than Hannah Neeleman in terms of much closer to a sort of political messaging. And I say political in a kind of small p way, but around whether women should go to college.

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Video clip: The problem is not girls going to college and getting an education, right? It's not the classroom. It's the environment of the universities where girls and boys are separated from their family and the structure, the morals that they grew up with.

SOPHIE ELMHIRST: You know, more provocative content in a way, and is very sort of vocal about I guess one of the fundamental tenets of the trad wife movement, which is like obeying your husband.

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Video clip: I submit and I serve my husband. This is a biblical thing, so don't twist this into something that it's not. It is a blessing to be my husband's helpmate. And the Bible has the man of the household, not the woman. So he leads.

SOPHIE ELMHIRST: And then you've got a bunch more. You've got Gwen The Milkmaid in Canada, Jasmine Dennis in Australia, Abigail Roth in America, who is known as Classically Abby. Nora Smith, you mentioned, is another very, you know, relatively… sort of relatively newer on the scene, but has gained a huge following in a short space of time.

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Video clip: I could be giving birth to my third child in four weeks, which is so crazy to think about. I never thought I'd be 22 with three kids three and under, but it's been a very wild ride that I'm so excited for. So today, let's spend a realistic morning together.

SOPHIE ELMHIRST: And Alena Pettitt, who was the main subject of my profile, who was a rare kind of Brit on the scene, who is less vocal than she used to be, but was very influential in her time.

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Video clip: Hello and welcome back to The Darling Academy. My name is Alena Kate Pettitt, and I talk about etiquette, feminine lifestyle, homemaking and being a traditional housewife.

JAYME POISSON: I want to come back to Alena with you in one moment, but I wonder if you could tell me a little bit more about Gwen The Milkmaid. Just because this is a Canadian podcast, so it'd be nice to learn a little bit more about her.

SOPHIE ELMHIRST: Yeah, she is a fascinating one. So, you know, there are all sorts of little like nuances and distinctions to be drawn out in this scene, in this movement, as some of them like to call it. And she exemplifies, I guess, a particular strand of it. Whereas you have a Hannah Neeleman who you feel like, okay, she's… whatever you think of it, her lifestyle and her choices and the way she is raising her family, you can tell this is actually how she is living day to day. It feels very real to a certain extent. There are issues with that, but then we can come back to those. Someone like Gwen The Milkmaid, it doesn't take long in a kind of internet exploratory mission to find that she's pivoted to this identity, that she used to be on OnlyFans. She used to have a YouTube channel where there was a lot of ASMR content.

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Video clip: Hey, I’m so glad to meet you. I’m Gwen.

SOPHIE ELMHIRST: She used to do a lot of different things. And she sometimes refers back, and she's been very open about that. She's made videos, you know, saying how she kind of has come to this sort of trad wife identity, but affiliated to that, to a sort of religion, to different ways of seeing the world, of being in the world. But it's something that she has, you know, come to later, and that she kind of regrets some of these earlier choices.

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Video clip: Three years ago, back in 2020, I made an OnlyFans account. And despite making more money than ever before, simply put, it destroyed my life. But thankfully, praise God, he saved me and he helped me to turn my life around.

SOPHIE ELMHIRST: But I guess if you were more cynical, you would maybe argue that she has sort of gone where the following might be leading her, or at least the algorithm, where the algorithm is rewarding her. So it's essentially switching out one online identity for another. And her content is one of the most sort of extremely aesthetic.

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Video clip: As I told you guys last week, the aprons finally came. You can't really see it fully here, but it's got beautiful ruffles on the bottom as well, ruffles all down the back. And it's just this really pretty flowery print.

SOPHIE ELMHIRST: It's all about the dresses and the kind of the visuals and the showing the kind of particular perfection of her sourdough loaf. And sourdough really is a thing that crosses many of these women.

JAYME POISSON: It is such a thing. And just, you know, if we're going to talk about through lines, of which sour dough is one, I know, I know, I take your point that there's a lot of variation going on here. But if you were to try and kind of sum up the movement, how would you do that? How would you describe it?

SOPHIE ELMHIRST: Sure. I think there are some fundamental tenets. I think one of them is you stay home, you raise your family. I mean, they don't all have children, but your emphasis, your whole identity, your whole… your day is essentially devoted to supporting your husband in the first instance, and that's key.

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Video clip: My husband does not have to lift a finger when he is at home, because if he's the breadwinner and he goes out, the provider, he works. And he works long hours, and he works a very physical labour job. He's an electrician, so he does not need to come home and clean up. He doesn't need to help me cook.

SOPHIE ELMHIRST: And I think that is the sort of fundamental. At the core of what being a trad wife is, that is it. And then a religious component is not necessary, but is very, very common that a lot of them, you know, they find this sort of basis for this in the Bible, in the book of Proverbs specifically. I think the time that’s devoted to them, or at least how it's documented on these platforms is, you know, where your energies are going. So it's absolutely about taking care of the home. Food cooking is very important, but also, so is your appearance, because you're there to please your husband. You're there to kind of look the part as well as act the part.

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Video clip: I always make sure I am put together. This is a really big thing. I think that waking up in the morning and just staying in pyjamas all day, it's not the way to go. Pull yourself together, put some makeup on, put a cute outfit on, do your hair, do something and make yourself look a little more put together. And trust me, he does notice.

SOPHIE ELMHIRST: And I would say that's not… Obviously, these are very visual, especially when you're talking about TikTok and Instagram. These are very visual platforms, so they reward that kind of content. But I would say that is also very key to a lot of these women's output and sort of self-presentation.

JAYME POISSON: Yeah.

SOPHIE ELMHIRST: Is how they… is playing the part.

JAYME POISSON: Yeah, there's like a lot of beautiful kind of flowing dresses, if that's like a fair way for me to describe, just from what I've seen in the last couple of days.

SOPHIE ELMHIRST: And by the way, that has a kind of moral and almost political component as well. Like, you know, a lot of them talk or write about modest dressing and modesty being an important part of their identity. And that has all sorts of connotations and sort of historical like…

JAYME POISSON: Yeah.

SOPHIE ELMHIRST: Resonances. But yeah, it's more than just the aesthetic, I'd say.

JAYME POISSON: You mentioned Alena before, who in your piece, you talk about her as kind of like the OG trad wife, right? And just tell me a little bit more about her and interestingly, how she's now been distancing herself from like the current iteration of this whole movement and why.

SOPHIE ELMHIRST: Yeah. So she is a fascinating case, and she was in a way kind of early adopter. She was a trad wife before we kind of all knew the term. So in that sense, she's almost… I think of all the ones I've come across, certainly the ones I spoke to, she's the most authentic, if you like, of all of them, in the sense. The way she described it to me, she wanted to live this kind of life. She wanted to stay home from when she was a little girl. You know, all she wanted to was to be a parent and take care of her house. And she sort of loved playing dolls and all these things.

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Video clip: I grew up in a single parent household, and my mom had to go out to work. The home became just this huge burden for her. And I suppose at that point in time, I probably identified that I didn't want that same life.

SOPHIE ELMHIRST: She then went through the motions of a career. But as soon as she had sort of settled with her partner and married, and especially once she’d had a baby, they had a discussion and they decided that's what she's going to do. She would stay home. And it was really only after all of that and after she was living the life in a way that she started to talk publicly about it and write publicly about it. She set up a blog. Only then, once she'd started to kind of talk even more publicly about it, started to go on TV and got more and more active on Instagram. But she was very early in the kind of whole trad wife movement and wave. Then once people kind of caught on to this being a more widespread thing, people became more and more interested in what she was doing. And what she described to me, I think that the sort of turn for her in a way away from the movement was hearing from a lot of women who would write to her saying, well, hang on, I don't seem to match the aesthetic that I see. You know, all these sort of perfect, slim, often white women who, you know, wearing these dresses. I can't wear those dresses, you know, for whatever reason. Maybe I'm not the right shape or feel like I'm the right shape, or maybe I'm disabled or I'm, you know, there are all sorts of reasons why they didn't feel that they saw themselves represented. And yet, they were all saying that this was the life that they were leading, the values that they also believed in, of staying at home and being a traditional wife. And so she suddenly was like, oh, hang on, maybe we're doing a disservice to this. And she felt the principles of it very deeply, and she kind of saw this influx of other trad wife influencers, I guess, and felt that that was a kind of exploitation of the idea of what she felt was very sacred values going on, where people were kind of pivoting to this for commercial gain or for provocation or for political reasons. And she found herself becoming increasingly uncomfortable, I guess, with sort of publicly holding this identity. And it was getting more and more heat as people were starting to kind of also therefore, other people were starting to question these women more and more and saying, well, hang on, how does this connect to the alt right? How does this connect to lots of sort of questionable sort of thinking and politics? You know, her great sort of radical act was to come off Instagram, although she still blogs and she still is I would say relatively active participant. But in her mind, she's, you know, it's a separation from that kind of main what has become this kind of highly aestheticized and quite politicized sort of online movement.

JAYME POISSON: Tell me more about those criticisms. So you mentioned there have been many questions and criticism about how this connects to the alt right. Just elaborate on that for me.

SOPHIE ELMHIRST: Yeah. I mean, it's so interesting and it's… I think it's really complicated, and it's more complicated than it seems. I think it's easy to sort of look at some of this and make those kind of loose connections between, you know, there's a lot of talk now about Christian nationalism. There's a lot of talk about, yes, of white supremacy. And I think sometimes, these links are made quite casually, and I think you have to be careful. Like a lot of these women who I spoke to very adamantly said, I don't, you know, I've never talked about politics on my channel. I'm not interested in politics. I'm talking about the home and the family and marriage. And I guess I would take the view that, well, all those things are equally political in a way. They might not be kind of about, you know, who you vote for or which presidential candidate you're supporting, but those are all, you know, marriage and the home are political spaces as well. A lot of the views that they espouse, whether it's on whether women should go to college or how women dress or on abortion, on, in some cases, home schooling or education, deep suspicion of the government, vaccination, you know, this ends up being a political picture, I guess, that they're painting and an influential one. And I would also say what's key, where these women live, in a sense, are on social media platforms. And how those platforms work is by connecting you to similar people, you know?

JAYME POISSON: Right.

SOPHIE ELMHIRST: You scroll down one person and you get to another person, right?

JAYME POISSON: Well, similar or even more extreme, I guess. Yeah.

SOPHIE ELMHIRST: Yeah, exactly. And you're very quickly, and I did this experiment a bunch of times, you're very, very quickly getting to way more extreme, way more niche, and way more explicitly political or extreme accounts. So it's naive, I think, of them to think that there's no connection. Well, also, I think you have to be careful about overstating that connection. But yeah, it's very real, I think.

JAYME POISSON: Another criticism that I've heard mounted many times is that by, you know, encouraging other women to live this kind of lifestyle where you're financially dependent on a man or, you know, we should say, you know, these are largely based on heteronormative…

SOPHIE ELMHIRST: Right.

JAYME POISSON: Relationships, that women can find themselves in abusive situations or find themselves with nothing if their husbands leave them. So tell me more about what you think about the criticism that these, you know, trad wives are influencing young women into potentially unsafe situations.

SOPHIE ELMHIRST: Oh, for sure. I mean, I think in personal terms, I think it's very valid. But I think what has really provoked and hurt a lot of women is this idea of what seems to be a kind of undoing of years of feminist effort to establish women's rights in all manner of ways, but not least in like the 19th century, at least in my country, in the U.K., a woman's right to own property and to be financially independent. And if she's earning an income, to hold on to that income. And, you know, these were things that were established a very long time ago, relatively speaking, but were very precious, and the idea that a woman might willingly be giving that up. And as you say, where does that blur sometimes into? You know, it's hard to speak about the inside reality of how those decisions are made. But we all know and are better educated about issues of coercive control. And one of the key elements of coercive control is kind of financial control. And that is, you know, now a form of… essentially a form of domestic abuse. And I think those lines can be very blurry. And for every trad wife who is absolutely kind of in control, you know, Alena would say this was a feminist choice of hers because it's a choice.

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Video clip: My view of feminism is about choices. And to say on one hand, you can go into the working world and compete with men, yet you're not allowed to stay home, that's actually taking your choice away.

SOPHIE ELMHIRST: You know, she's aware of all the options available to her, and she's made the choice to live, you know, according to these traditional values. Yeah, you don't know how many are maybe living this traditional values, but it hasn't entirely been their choice, or it's not one that they feel that they can opt out of. So I think it's a really valid and kind of worrying side to all this.

JAYME POISSON: Yeah, I've seen some of them, you know, they talk about, you know, even finances aside, like the importance of the husband making family decisions. And, you know, submission is something that is kind of idealized in some ways. You know, I have to say this kind of ties into my gut reaction to a lot of this, and I think probably other women's too who are listening right now, that you're kind of listening in horror a little bit. Like is this what women before us fought for, for women to like idealize ironing their husbands shirts and having no financial independence? But, you know, I guess if I'm trying to step back here and be a little bit more charitable, I think I do see some of the allure, right? Like, you know, I have little kids. I work in a home where two adults are working. This idea that you can have it all, right, it does kind of seem like a farce. You know, you can have it all, but you have to do it all, right? And that can be exhausting and overwhelming and make you feel like you're failing in everything. And I think that's magnified, right, if you don't have a partner that's sharing equally in the house. And so from that perspective, I kind of understand why this idea of putting on like a flowing dress and having time to bake your kids fresh bread is appealing and perhaps more peaceful. And what do you make of that? It's sort of like a clapback to late, late stage capitalism.

SOPHIE ELMHIRST: Yeah, I think that's… well, I think that's the really interesting point, because I think that's when you get onto the kind of socioeconomic side of this in a wider sense, in a societal sense, and where I think a lot of younger women and younger people find themselves more broadly as just kind of in a place of real economic insecurity, job insecurity, future insecurity, climate insecurity. You know, we live in an anxious age. You know, this is well documented. And I think some of what is being communicated on these trad wives accounts isn't just about the sort of fundamental values, but it's also about this sense of sort of safety and warmth, and there's a kind of coziness to it. So I think part of what is being communicated is this idea of almost having an escape route out of the hustle and out of the kind of economic pressures. Like if you can kind of outsource all that to a partner. You've been trying so hard for so long, and that maybe you could just like retreat home. And there's a kind of cocoon like earlier too, I think, which who knows how long that would last for so many of us? But I think it ties in a little bit. I don't know whether this is as resonant in Canada, but there's a lot going on in my country at the moment about these movements of like slow living and wanting to like, you know, reduce hours, or people sort of actively trying to work less.

JAYME POISSON: Quiet quitting. Yeah.

SOPHIE ELMHIRST: Yes, exactly. All of this, and this sense that this whole game that we were kind of sold, which is like to work harder and harder, hustle more and more, you know, rise up the ranks, whatever, that it hasn't come good, right? Like, you know, most of the sort of younger generation kind of can’t afford the rent, let alone to sort of buy a property or, you know, that this whole thing feels like a stitch up. And I guess there's this strange… what this movement seems to sort of offer is a kind of off ramp to some degree. And, you know, when you read the comments on a lot of… under these women's posts, and it shocked me, honestly, like the number of very young women, or at least by their account, if you believe them in the comments, of young women, you know, way before having kids who were like, God, I really… the tone was aspirational. It was like, oh, I hope I can live like this one day. You know, it wasn't like, you know, well done, you, and sort of looking back and sort of, you know, as a traditional older mother or whatever. It was 22-year-olds saying, you know, this is my dream. As someone 20 years older than that, that was not… ever was I sort of raised to sort of think should be my dream.

JAYME POISSON: Right. And I imagine that you were raised on like the idea of the girl boss.

SOPHIE ELMHIRST: Right. And that was so prevalent not just sort of family or friends wise, but just in the culture, right? It was all girl power. You know, that kind of late 90s, early 2000s, it was all about female empowerment and breaking glass ceilings and everything else. And I strongly believe from the other perspective that we still have a long way to go on that, you know? Like there are still issues around many things, not least equal pay. But absolutely, the culture was sort of to hustle and sort of that you have every right to sort of the equal place. And so this seems like a kind of unbelievably retrograde by comparison.

JAYME POISSON: Mm hmm. I'm just like curious because you've spent so much time with your head in this, how harmful do you think that this is to the progress that feminism has made?

SOPHIE ELMHIRST: Again, I don't think it should be overstated. I think, you know, this is sort of another economic reality which is again expressed in these comments, which is like, oh, I would love to do this, but I could never afford to because, you know, my household needs two incomes. And then as someone put it to me recently, he was like, well, hang on, a lot of these women, you know, especially the very, you know, the successful ones, the Hannah Neelemans, Ballerina Farms, well, it is two incomes because she's earning, I would imagine, through, you know, various sponsorships and everything else, a tidy sum.

JAYME POISSON: There's like kind of a deep irony here. Yeah.

SOPHIE ELMHIRST: Yeah. Which is its whole own story because it's like, well, hang on. So, you know, this is what I call the sort of hustle of the anti-hustle because in a way, it's become its own hustle, right, that they are turning a very traditional non-working identity into, you know, quite ambitious working, you know, way clever branding working identity. So I think in a way, what it's done is probably given visibility to a life choice that many women or more women than we realize were making for all sorts of reasons. And what it's done is just sort of in one way, kind of publicize that, but also commodify that to a certain extent. I think where the concern is, if there is one, is where it does intersect with political movements and where it kind of galvanizes, I guess, some of the more worrying, you know, sort of outright or just sort of far right political movements, especially in the kind of North American context, especially given an American election coming up, you know, that it's playing its role in that kind of deep sense of cultural and political division, I guess. And I think that role is probably not insignificant.

JAYME POISSON: Okay. Sophie, this was great. It was really fascinating listening to you. I could talk to you about this whole day. Thank you very much for coming on.

SOPHIE ELMHIRST: No worries. Thank you for having me.

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JAYME POISSON: Okay, that is all for today. I'm Jayme Poisson. Happy New Year. Talk to you tomorrow.

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