Blood, butter and sourdough: The tradwife has entered the novel and she is furious

The tradwife and the incel are in love with each other and don't know it. He thinks the world owes him a woman like her. She has decided, given the circumstances, to become the woman the world rewards. Same structural misery, same burnt-out audience, same lie told from opposite ends. The only difference is that one of them is also selling sourdough starter.

I've been sitting with this for months and I still don't fully know what to do with it. What I do know is that Tate tells men the system is rigged and the answer is dominance, and the tradwife tells women the system is rigged and the answer is submission, and both of them are right about the first part.

More from Lifestyle

I despise Andrew Tate in a way that feels almost physical. Refused to watch anything for months. Then he showed up on Substack and I got curious — just curious, just a look — and watched the beginning of several videos, telling myself this was research and definitely not the same as watching.The algorithm didn't care what I told myself. It took my view and moved on. You watch to hate and it spends exactly the same. I don't entirely know what to do with that either.

One would think the tradwife figured this out too. She just has better lighting.

This is why fiction is having a tradwife moment right now, and why it matters more than another thinkpiece. Fiction can hold the thing that journalism keeps fumbling — that she is neither villain nor victim, that the performance and the belief have become genuinely indistinguishable, that you can find her both appalling and completely understandable without those feelings cancelling each other.

The tradwife — "traditional wife", has come to mean a woman who embraces rigid gender norms centred on housekeeping and child-rearing. The most famous is probably Ballerina Farm's Hannah Neeleman — Juilliard-trained dancer, nine children and10 million Instagram followers.

Gone girl in an apron

The novel everyone is losing their mind over is Yesteryear, Caro Claire Burke's debut, oddly reminiscent to Gillian Flynn. Flynn built Gone Girl around a woman who had performed the assigned role so completely, so ruthlessly, that whatever was underneath had basically stopped being a question worth asking. Burke is doing the same thing and arriving somewhere different.

Natalie Heller Mills is "the mother every woman wanted to be, and the wife every man wanted to come home to" — six children, butter-churning, sourdough-baking, 8 million Instagram followers. Amy Dunne in an apron. A self so completely optimised for consumption that you cannot tell, ( I genuinely could not tell, reading it) whether Natalie believes any of it or whether belief stopped being relevant somewhere around follower count 500,000.

Then she wakes up in 1805. Unfamiliar children about and a husband with well … let’s just say an attitude of the past.

The contradictions pile up almost comically: organic lifestyle, pesticide use on the crops. All-American brand, merchandise made in China. Undocumented workers nobody mentions. She is the driving force behind an empire built entirely on telling women to stop driving.

The interesting part is what it says about what happens when a genuinely talented woman has been handed exactly one acceptable container for that talent. The book went to an 11-way auction. Anne Hathaway is producing and starring in the film.

Rosemary said yes

Saratoga Schaefer's Trad Wife goes full horror and I think horror might actually be the genre that fits this subject best. Camille homesteads, posts, performs. But she's missing what her followers keep asking for: a baby. She finds a well behind her property. She makes a wish. Something answers. Everyone is calling it Rosemary's Baby for the Instagram age.

Because here's the thing about the tradwife that the cleaner arguments miss: she is not simply a victim of misogyny, though she is that too. She is a woman making a calculation in circumstances that are genuinely bad. The labour market punishes mothers and the domestic load still (largely) lands on women regardless of who earns what.

Murder at MomBomb

Jo Piazza's Everyone Is Lying to You became an American bestseller last year and it earned it — it's propulsive and it did the actual work. Piazza interviewed dozens of former and current tradwives and went to the influencer conferences. She found an entire sub-industry of people renting out immaculate kitchens so influencers can film their "home" cooking.

Two estranged college friends — one a struggling journalist, and one tradwife with millions of followers, and then the tradwife vanishes and her husband turns up murdered on the ranch. A murder mystery about the violence that accumulates inside a performance.

Why now

The fiction is essentially about the audience. The millions of women watching Ballerina Farm at midnight who don't want to be Hannah Neeleman but can't explain why they keep watching. Women who are exhausted and undersupported and were sold a version of liberation that had a lot of invisible labour in the small print.

The iconography of submissive, beautiful, chaste motherhood has shaped the cultural imagination since the 19th century — gender, politics, capitalism, all of all of it.

You look at Natalie and see a woman trapped in a performance and also a woman who has by some measures won and also a cautionary tale and also a completely rational response to irrational circumstances and also, uncomfortably, something that rhymes with your own life in ways you'd rather not examine before you've had coffee.