A woman kneads bread as her children giggle and run in and out of frame, chased by her silent and enigmatic husband. The scene is interspersed with shots of the idyllic Utah countryside.
These are the types of videos that populate Hannah Neelman’s TikTok page. Known as Ballerina Farm, Neelman is a prominent figure in the “tradwife” movement — a trend of women following traditional gender roles and marriages, which gained traction during the COVID pandemic.
She joins other content creators, like Estee Williams, Gwen Swinarton and Jasmine Dinis, in promoting traditional gender roles online. These women have garnered millions of likes, and a scroll through #tradwives on TikTok reveals an endless stream of women wearing long dresses with perfectly styled hair, some preaching about how good it feels to “relax while my husband tells me what to think.”
These women are not simply stay-at-home moms or housewives. Rather, they buy into a very specific brand of 1950s-style gender roles, as their content critiques birth control, abortion, divorce and vaccines, promoting a narrow and regressive vision of womanhood.
This aestheticized nostalgia for a time when women had fewer rights is not just unrealistic — it’s harmful.
Despite the growing popularity of trad wife content, the United States is experiencing a near-record high percentage of 57% of women in the workforce.
Still, many young women may be drawn to these videos as an escape from the monotony and tediousness of life in a 9-to-5 or college.
These videos fail to acknowledge the loss of agency inherent in a marriage built on such “traditional” principles. They also omit the actual struggles of engaging in stay-at-home motherhood, which is work — valuable work — often written off as “easy.”
There’s nothing wrong with choosing to be a stay-at-home mom. In fact, we believe there should be greater appreciation and less judgement for women who decide to do so. However, many tradwife influencers actively argue against women in the workforce — despite the irony that they, themselves, are working.
Their monetized content, along with sales of products like Dinis’ “Biblical Woman Affirmations” for $2.99 or Neelman’s baking accessories, reveals that their supposed reliance on their husbands is largely an illusion.
Further, few women can actually afford to be a tradwife due to the growing necessity of a dual-income household in today’s sour economic times.
The impact of tradwife content extends beyond those who actively participate in the lifestyle. It contributes to a broader cultural shift that diminishes women’s intelligence and ambition, subtly reinforcing the idea that a woman’s value is tied to her domesticity rather than her intellect or achievements.
Beyond the tradwife phenomenon, which often sneaks its way onto women’s For You Pages, there have also been a popular trends that feature phrases like, “girl math,” “I’m just a girl,” “turning off my brain when I’m with my boyfriend” and “coloring while he does his big boy work.”
These trends encourage women to infantilize themselves, positioning them as less competent in order to fit into traditional “feminine” roles.
Studies show that women are likely to be called “girls” well into their thirties, while the same is not true for men. This infantilization negatively affects women’s self-perception and leadership confidence.
Additionally, female-dominated fields have long been looked down upon. Even in 2025, when women outpace men in higher education, careers they dominate remain underpaid, according to the Pew Research Center.
This is true even when a formerly male-dominated field becomes female-dominated — positions like biologists, human resource managers and designers have all experienced this drop in wages. So, seeing women online willingly contributing to this devaluation is unsettling.
While these trends may seem like harmless fun, they parallel the rise of misogyny. Figures in the “manosphere” argue that men are naturally “dominant,” citing biology as a justification for “traditional” gender norms.
Influencers such as Andrew Tate, who was arrested in Romania for sex trafficking, the Fresh and Fit podcast, Pearl Davis, and Matt Walsh spread this rhetoric, attracting hundreds of millions of views in return.
The rise of the tradwife movement, the manosphere and self-deprecating “girl” trends demonstrates that the days of 2010s “girl boss” feminism are long gone.
That wave of pop-feminism encouraged women to dismantle the patriarchy by climbing the corporate ladder. But it was criticized for ignoring institutional causes of misogyny and for its snappy slogans, like “grl pwr” or “eyeliner sharp enough to kill a man,” that could be printed on a t-shirt and sold at Forever 21.
Even though this version of feminism lacked nuance, it at least exposed young girls to the idea that they could do anything when it dominated internet culture.
Now, a young girl passively scrolling through TikTok may instead be mesmerized by a woman chasing chickens in a paisley dress, a girl coloring in Hello Kitty characters while her boyfriend does “big boy work” or a wide-eyed influencer being pulled along by her boyfriend while she “turns her brain off.”
The message she internalizes? She really is “just a girl.” And that’s dangerous.
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