What the heck is a trad wife?

KERA's Think

KERA

Society & Culture, 071003, Kera, Think, Krysboyd

4.8 • 861 Ratings

🗓️ 30 August 2024

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

From hand-churned butter for the children to a full face of makeup in the kitchen, the role of the traditional wife is taking off online. Megan Agnew, senior features writer for The Times, joins guest host Courtney Collins to discuss the “trad wife” movement, its retro look at wifedom and motherhood, and one woman in particular with a huge following on Instagram who’s caught the curious attention of tens of millions. Her article is, “My day with the trad wife queen and what it taught me.“

Transcript

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0:00.0	No matter what you think about gender roles, division of labor, housekeeping, and child raising, most people are pretty bold over by what self-proclaimed trad wives are up to at home, making paper from scratch so their kids can color,
0:24.3	scraping vanilla beans out of pods for a baking project, milking a cow directly into a coffee cup.
0:30.7	The traditional wife movement is all over social media, and the women who adhere to it have millions of followers.
0:36.9	But how much of it is real and how much is Internet magic? And for the women who adhere to it have millions of followers. But how much of it is real and
0:38.7	how much is internet magic? And for the women living this life, are their doubts and regrets
0:43.8	lurking just out of frame? From KERA in Dallas, this is Think. I'm Courtney Collins in for
0:49.0	Chris Boyd. Journalist Megan Agnew got an up-close look at life for one well-known social media family when she trekked out to Utah to spend some time with Hannah Nealman, known to many on Instagram and TikTok as Ballerina Farm.
1:02.3	Megan's piece for The Times is called Meet the Queen of the Treadwives and her eight children.
1:07.4	Megan, welcome to think.
1:09.6	Hi, thank you.
1:13.6	So before we get into your visit with the Nealman family in Utah, I was hoping you could share a little bit about why you wanted to write this piece in the first place.
1:18.6	Well, it came out of a conversation that we'd had in, among the team in the office.
1:26.6	So back in London, which is where the magazine team is based,
1:30.9	they had read the article, the interview with her in the New York Times in January,
1:37.8	and since then there'd been this sort of rumbling ongoing debate. And particularly the women in the office, actually, were getting
1:46.7	increasingly pushed this content on social media, this super domestic, perfect-looking,
1:56.0	idyllic home lives from various influences. And so we decided that we should try and just do a profile
2:07.7	interview with her, spend some time on the farm, spend some time with the family to try and
2:12.7	understand what it is that she was hoping to do with her internet platform and more widely why this
2:20.5	content has become more and more popular, especially among women whose lives look very different
2:26.7	a lot of the time. So for the folks listening who may not spend a lot of time on social media or
2:32.0	maybe are in a totally different side of the algorithm.
	...

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