The Tragedy of the Tradwife

For mine, it was Martha Stewart, a tycoon masquerading as a domestic goddess, who taunted us with her lazy afternoons on the farm picking peaches and tending to her flock of Old English Game hens and Silkie bantams. The online generation is cursed with the tradwife, who usually serves up the homemaker fantasy with an aggressively retrograde worldview.Tradwife influencers such as Hannah Neeleman might bake bread, tend chickens, and pick from their orchards much like Stewart did, but they also take care of an impossibly large brood of children and declare themselves contentedly, even ecstatically, subservient to one very lucky man. “My husband does not have to lift a finger when he is at home,” another tradwife influencer, Estee Williams, has cooed to her tens of thousands of followers on Instagram. (Stewart, by contrast, was divorced by the time she launched Martha Stewart Living. She had one child and, although she never said so explicitly, seemed to believe that children and straight men would just dirty the furniture.)The author Caro Claire Burke had been happily married for a few years when she downloaded TikTok and the algorithm served her a tradwife video. By then, she had already consumed the writings of Noam Chomsky and been “radicalized,” as she put it, so the image of a woman in a prairie skirt with her smiling children both soothed and infuriated her. Burke eventually started her own TikTok criticizing the tradwife, whom she defines as “someone who adheres to norms that we understand as traditional, so subservience, taking care of children, staying within the home, obeying your husband.”She extended that critique into her first novel, Yesteryear, about a modern tradwife who finds herself transported to 1855. The novel has become an instant best seller; already its film rights belong to Amazon, and Anne Hathaway is attached as