The Trap of the Trad Wife
Critics at Large | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.4 • 679 Ratings
🗓️ 5 September 2024
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This summer, scrutiny of the figure of the “trad wife” hit a fever pitch. These influencers’ accounts feature kempt, feminine women embracing hyper-traditional roles in marriage and home-making—and, in doing so, garnering millions of followers. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss standout practitioners of the “trad” life style, including the twenty-two-year-old Nara Smith, who makes cereal and toothpaste from scratch, and Hannah Neeleman, who, posting under the handle @ballerinafarm, presents a life caring for eight children in rural Utah as a bucolic fantasy. The hosts also discuss “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” a new reality-television show on Hulu about a group of Mormon influencers engulfed in scandal, whose notions of female empowerment read as a quaint reversal of the trad-wife trend. A common defense of a life style that some would call regressive is that it’s a personal choice, devoid of political meaning. But this gloss is complicated by societal changes such as the erosion of women’s rights in America and skyrocketing child-care costs. “In American society, the way choice works has everything to do with child-care options, financial options,” Schwartz says. “When you talk about the idea of choice, are we just talking about false choices?”
Read, watch, and listen with the critics:
@ballerinafarm
@gwenthemilkmaid
@naraazizasmith
“How Lucky Blue and Nara Aziza Smith Made Viral Internet Fame From Scratch,” by Carrie Battan (GQ)“The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” (2024)
@esteecwilliams“Mad Men” (2007-15)
The Little House on the Prairie series, by Laura Ingalls Wilder
“Wilder Women,” by Judith Thurman (The New Yorker)
“Meet the Queen of the “Trad Wives” (and Her Eight Children),” by Megan Agnew (The Times of London)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Critics at Large, a podcast from the New Yorker. |
| 0:07.0 | I'm Vincent Cunningham. |
| 0:08.2 | I'm Alex Schwartz. |
| 0:09.3 | And I'm Nomi Fry. |
| 0:10.7 | Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here. |
| 0:16.4 | Hello, guys. |
| 0:17.5 | Welcome back. |
| 0:19.0 | Back for the fall. It's all happening. Oh, my God. I just can't believe it. We're back in the studio and we're so excited to see each other in person and to talk out some of the happenings in culture. But before we actually start, something really exciting happened while we were away. Vincent had a baby. I did. Vincent had a baby. I did. This is like, muzzledo of Vincent. Thank you so much. This is one of like the longest times I've spent without her these couple hours. It's so cool. I'm literally beaming. We're beaming. I can't stop beaming. And this. I showed Alex the photo of my baby peering. And I'm still beaming. |
| 0:55.1 | She's still beaming. |
| 0:56.1 | This was a soft predicted on your episode, on your one-on-one episode with Jen Wilson. |
| 1:05.7 | Perhaps in early. |
| 1:06.6 | Wasn't she saying that something big is going to happen very, very soon? |
| 1:10.7 | Oh, yeah. |
| 1:11.1 | And then your baby came like a month early. |
| 1:14.3 | That's right. |
| 1:14.8 | So woo works is what we're learning here. |
| 1:20.3 | My eyebrows raised because, you know, soon could have incorporated the actual due date, but |
| 1:25.9 | baby's here and that's what counts. |
| 1:28.2 | That is what counts. That is what matters. And you know what also counts? What? |
| 1:33.7 | The secret lives of Mormon wives. You've not lost any of your skill for a hard transition, |
| 1:40.5 | know me. What a segue. Delighted to see it in action. Still got it. So today, we are going to |
| 1:48.4 | talk about this new show that is just out on Hulu, which tells the story of a particularly |
... |
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