The Tragedy of the Tradwife
Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts Every generation of feminist has the tormentor it needs. 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 …
