Should forgiveness be extended to de-tradders recusing themselves from aesthetics they served out of commercial self-interest?

The tradwife pivot is on: some female influencers whose family, faith and from-scratch cooking content brought headship-of-a-husband “traditional” households into anti-feminist view are “stepping away” from the label.

Tradwives are a subculture of digital content creators. They’re instantly recognisable for an aesthetic in which a heavily feminised gender role is performed with retro styling, harking to a fantasy past in which women were socially submissive, financially dependent and fastidiously joyful in their execution of unpaid domestic labour.

Among the soft renouncers is Nara Smith, the former teenage model and presumed Mormon convert who has been homemaking for her husband and children everything from bread to sunscreen in a parade of sleek couture since she married and started having kids at 18. Rich and beautiful, she has recently come clean that her 90-second videos take eight hours to make; that, yes, she has domestic help; she is “ambitious” for her career and business interests and – surprise! – has a cookbook to sell.

Smith also clarified, in a recent Guardian interview, that she was “never baptised” in her husband’s conservative Mormon faith. The church’s cultural insistence on strict gender roles and women’s performance of child-bearing, cooking, domestic labour and feminine presentation are widely credited as the inspirational infrastructure of the tradwife aesthetic.

Which is why it’s a surprise to see Smith’s friend and confrere, the still-very-much-Mormon mother-of-nine Hannah Neeleman of “Ballerina Farm” branding also reject the “tradwife” label.

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