What’s in a hashtag? A lot, it turns out, if it’s one of the breakout categories of the TikTok era: “tradwife.” The term has become something of an inkblot test, as influencers who have found popularity in the category are now apparently trying to shake off the label.
Viral creators like Nara Smith, Hannah Neeleman and Savanna Faith Stone are now distancing themselves, signaling a subtle vibe shift.
“I think it’s because the social tides are turning,” Shampaigne Graves, who works with companies to understand women’s consumer behavior, told Straight Arrow.
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The simmering question of who is really a “tradwife” boiled over into the mainstream in July, triggered by Smith’s appearance on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast. In a 90-minute interview that has been watched 1.8 million times, Smith squarely denounced the idea that people could ever have thought she was “just” a mom, emphasized her relationship to her business and underscored that she had never asked her husband’s permission to carry out her work. Smith has been trying to escape from the label for a while, but the interview hit social media algorithms in a new way.
Responses to her interview ranged from the confused — “Is Nara Smith gaslighting us?” and “It doesn’t matter if Nara Smith is a tradwife”— to the supportive — “she makes a great point,” with some highlighting the ironies in her strategic game, “Yall got GOT by Nara Smith”.
What did Smith say?
In her interview, Smith — who has almost 5 million Instagram followers — took offense to the term “tradwife,” and emphasized that she is “a very ambitious and driven and hardworking woman.” She made sure to highlight that she did not ask her husband’s permission to become an influencer. “It wasn’t even a conversation” when her content career took off, she said.
“I was just like, ‘Well you gotta watch the kids hun, cause I’ve gotta film,’” she said.
She also claimed that the aesthetic combination that defined her most viral content — soft-toned narration of her gentle efforts toward cooking from scratch to satisfy whatever her “husband said he was hungry for,” while wearing a range of beautiful dresses — came together as an alchemical accident, rather than a deliberate content strategy. Her hushed tone has become synonymous with a type of “soft life” content that started becoming popular during lockdown. But that wasn’t about femininity, Smith claimed. She was just trying not to wake her sleeping baby with her corporate work.
As for her husband, she emphasized that they have a very modern marriage; she doesn’t touch the dishes or even clean the house. They both work, they share childcare, and both provide for the family. She added that she originally had no idea what the definition of a tradwife was. The first she heard of the label was after people associated her posts with the term — without her input.
“I had to look up the term, because I wasn’t familiar with that,” Smith said.
But Graves disagreed with that claim. “In her earlier posts, when she was trying to promote herself, she did use the hashtag tradwife,” Graves told Straight Arrow. “And it’s still up on some of her posts.”
What’s the history?
“Know Your Meme” dates the concepts of tradwife (and the associated trad girl) to memes that were created around 2019. These comics had links to toxic internet groups like the incel movement; the National Women’s Law Center recently described the two trends as having a “dangerous overlap” because both groups see women’s financial independence as undesirable.
But tradwife video content really gained steam on TikTok during the COVID lockdowns, when much of humanity was at home making bread, and desperate for content that made being stuck inside look and feel cute.
There was a range of different “trad” selling points. It could be a time-saving hack or a way to avoid workplace-related injuries. It could be about religion, cooking or kids; a subcategory of “stay at home girlfriend” videos even took off. In 2022, anyone scrolling long enough would encounter an influencer like Estee Williams — with a vintage hairstyle and floral dress — smiling under a caption like “in a world full of boss babes, I decided not to be one and I’ve never been happier.”
Williams’ explanation of the term emphasizes that a tradwife is a “woman who chooses to live a more traditional life, with ultra-traditional gender roles. So the man goes outside the house, works, provides for the family, the woman stays home, and she’s the homemaker”
But things changed.
By 2025, Williams was sharing that she wouldn’t “be posting much regarding the controversial tradwife movement,” telling People magazine that this was to focus more on her family. In June, Savanna Faith Stone posted a YouTube video explaining that she didn’t like the label — it’s “not a compliment or a description. It is a tool designed to put me in a box so you stop listening,” she said.
And Hannah Neeleman, whose Ballerina Farm Instagram has 10.3 million followers, also disavowed the term and said she didn’t identify with being a “traditional woman.” Most of her content features her farm, her nine children, and her baking. She recently went viral for using a beetroot as blush.
The category has become so commonplace that it has spawned its own satire. Alexia Delarosa makes exaggerated versions of the Nara Smith template (she wears a wheat dress while making a bag out of bread, makes dessert for her “crush” rather than her husband and amps up the cottagecore with concepts like “POV your kids requested a glass of water,” which involves, of course, moonlit mason jars). She describes herself not as a wife, but as a “kitchen witch with a variety of interests” in her Instagram bio.
The idea reached a cultural boiling point with this summer’s blockbuster novel “Yesteryear” (slated to star Anne Hathaway in its upcoming film adaptation), in which an influencer wakes up in the 1800s and has to live the traditional lifestyle she’s been promoting — without any of the comforts of the Instagram age.
No older tradwives?
So why are people becoming more disillusioned? One reason, according to Graves, is that “older traditional wives are talking now.” Videos are appearing from “older, former traditional wives that are divorced, have no education, are working minimum wage jobs and warning young girls to not listen to figures like Nara Smith,” she said.
“I think that the narrative is emerging more and more, specifically online: the idea that there’s no such thing as an older tradwife,” she said. “Because they’re all divorced.”
Last summer, for example, @CortneyGetsFit, a 37-year-old mom who had never had a paid job outside of her home, posted a video explaining how vulnerable she felt after her husband decided to divorce her.
“No one prepares you for how financially vulnerable stay at home moms are,” she captioned the video. Another clip explains, “I married an older man thinking I’d be safe.”
As more women share their negative experiences of life after leaving a financially dependent marriage, Graves explained, young internet tradwives’ arguments become less convincing — and their selling power decreases.
Business moves?
Another reason people might not be buying it anymore, Graves explained, is that the amount of work that goes into the content is undermining the message.
“These women have teams behind them, they have management teams, they have social media teams. And so they are essentially a business, their personal branded business,” she said.
Smith may not consider herself a tradwife, but people now have more awareness that she’s been profiting from a trend, Graves said, leaving people on both sides of the political aisle upset. While liberal women might not like tradwife content in the first place, “on the conservative side, women would probably be feeling a little betrayed by Nara” for jumping ship when it was no longer profitable, she said.
Smith may be caught in a cyclical trend; the popularity of conservative-themed content, in general, appears to be declining. In November 2024, the New York Times was reporting that “Liberals Are Left Out in the Cold as Social Media Veers Right.” But, by this summer, the paper reported the opposite — that “The MAGA Media Machine Is Fracturing.”
“She is being money-minded and business-focused,” said Graves.
Some of the responses to Smith’s shift have described this business focus more cynically. Creator Jess Britvich, who analyzes social trends about women, posted that “it doesn’t matter if Nara Smith is a tradwife,” and explained that, either way, this content is part of an ecosystem that sells “misogyny to women.”
There is some evidence that tradwife content might be a pretty door to a more toxic corner of the internet. Algorithmic platforms that prioritize clicks and engagement can lead young women to increasingly harmful content — like videos from people who support eugenics and share medical misinformation. And, by emphasizing the appeal of staying home, tradwife content might skip over the fact that, for a lot of women, it’s actually less of a choice and more of an economic necessity.
Ultimately, Graves thinks Smith might simply not have realized that tying her personal brand to a particular aesthetic or trend would shape her entire career — she’s only 24 years old. It’s easy to be “addicted to clout, or, you know, really trying to hop on a wave,” Graves said.
In the podcast interview, Smith stated that she had lost contracts because people didn’t want to work with a “tradwife.” Perhaps this pivot is an attempt to shake off a complicated internet label before her upcoming cinematic debut — alongside Charlize Theron.
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