Ladies, We Need To Talk - Why tradwife content is so seductive

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0:30ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more. Today is my husband and I's fourth wedding anniversary, so I decided to wake up super early and make some bagels and cream cheese from scratch. He gave them a 10 out of 10, which is very rare. I was very pleased with that. In 2025, a couple of new words were added to the Cambridge English Dictionary. One of those words was dilulu, which is basically...

1:06deluded but with a sprinkle of playful Gen Z on we. The other new word was tradwife. It didn't used to exist, but now it does as a word and as a thing. A tradwife as we've come to know her is a social media creation. She's perfect, immaculately dressed with linen clad, beatific children and a huge fucking subtext. The subtext is, you know, all those things that you find really impossible.

1:38like the pressure to look appealing after you've had kids, or the demands of cooking healthy meals for your family all the time, or the boredom of childrearing? Well, the tradwife performs these duties with saint-like devotion while looking breath-takingly beautiful, rich, clean and sexually alluring. So the subtext is, you might not be nailing life, but she is! Look at her!

2:05And of course, off Instagram, there are women who live in those traditional gender roles far away from the brand deals. But I'm interested in the ones in front of the camera and what it says about us watching along. Should we be worried about the influence of this highly curated version of domestic life that squarely places a woman back in the home and positions the man as the head of the family? Or is it just entertainment?

2:35I'm Yumi Stein's Ladies. We need to talk about the Tread Wife trend with Hee Jung Chung. I think in the pandemic, a lot of us were juggling four, five, six, seven roles at a time, homeskilling the kids while trying to work on Zoom. It was a bit of a fantasy. Professor Hee Jung Chung has spent years researching how workplaces shape and are shaped by gender at King's College in London.

3:13During pandemic lockdowns, Heejung was one more working mum trying to balance the continuing demands of her job while home was complete chaos. And it was at this time she noticed that her algorithms were starting to serve up lifestyles of women in a very different reality to hers. There are certain elements which really just look like parody, and majority of the people in the comment sections were just really dismissive, you know, talking about how improbable this is. But...

3:42What we've seen in the last couple of years is that rather than being this incredibly outlier, weird thing that's on the internet, it has become mainstream. For anyone who's not familiar with this world, can you explain what a tradwife lifestyle looks like?

4:03So a tried-wife lifestyle, you have to be a bit careful because these were not actually the lifestyle that women back in the 18th century or like the 1950s have lived. So the tried-wife in quotation marks, lifestyle, as someone who has given up work, they stay at home mom, but they're not just a stay at home mom that needs to do the toilet cleaning or, you know, doing the washing and the laundry and making sure to, you know, get the lifestyle of your kid's hair.

4:31The key to the draw of the Tradwife lifestyle is the aspirational aesthetic. Soft lighting, happy children, luxurious backgrounds. Hee Jung says that previous attempts to picture more traditional, stay-at-home lifestyle online didn't have the same appeal.

4:49because it focused on the actual work that has to be done in a home to keep it running. As opposed to polished sound bites of egg collecting and baking bread while wearing couture, which my friends is very sexy. So previously there were people who were also selling these kind of content images in terms of how to be a good housewife. They didn't really take off very much because they didn't have the luxury and they were not as aesthetically pleasing.

5:17Unlike me and every other mum I know, the new tradwives do not look like they wash any dishes. So these are traditionally beautiful women, fully made up, fully polished look, who you wouldn't really find in most households. One of these beautiful women you've probably heard of is Hannah Nealman, a former ballerina who runs the improbably wholesome ballerina farm with her husband. Last night.

5:46We have a new addition to the family. Baby number nine. She was so happy about it. You want to tell them the gender? It's a girl. That means we've had six girls in a row. We had the three boys. We'd never get a girl. And then we started farming, and it's been six straight girls. Hannah is a Mormon with nine children.

6:17In her videos her kids often pop in and out and she spent so much time kneading bread on camera that her website sells artisan bread knives. Hee Jung says that this slow intentional focus on cooking and children is part of the appeal of tradwife content. We had these women in these pristine kitchens completely relaxed.

6:41And without their children in tow, actually, in most of the videos, you just have the woman spending hours on it and really focusing on making, let's say, one piece of bread and dressed immaculately, just leisurely doing that bit of work. I'm curious about you. Do you find yourself getting sucked into the fantasy?

7:02Oh, absolutely. I'm a staunch feminist. I'm a working mom. I try to not completely devout myself to work or anything, but there is an element where it's just like life gets so stressful and it's aesthetically pleasing to look at. I've actually talked to my guy friends as well. These are men in their 50s. They're like, oh, God, yeah, I want to be a trans woman. I would like to live like that. There is an appeal not just for women, but Everyone who just feels so time-poor, energy-poor, and feel like someone dragged them through the streets the last kind of few hours. Another hugely popular tradwife influencer is Nara Smith, a 24-year-old US-based model. Millions watch Nara for her cooking content, which she performs in beautiful outfits that are better suited for a gala than a galley.

7:55It's worth pointing out that both Nara and Hannah reject the label of tradwife, but the aesthetic they're selling is built around glamourising this slow lifestyle and traditional family structures. That's how they're making big bucks. In one of Nara's satirical videos, she's wearing a pink baby doll dress and is preparing breakfast for one of her kids. But reaching for a box of cornflakes and decanting some into a bowl like me or any other normal person, That would be way too easy and peasant-like. Instead, she's making it from scratch. I toddler stumbled into my room this morning asking for cereal for breakfast. He saw someone eating fruit loops and wanted those specifically. So I caved and just made her some. I started by combining some almond flour, maple syrup, coconut oil. I smushed down my cereal and added a little hole in the middle before peeking them for about 8 to 10 minutes.

8:52I let them cool completely, topped them with some milk, and she absolutely loved them. It's so infuriating, and yet so mesmerizing. I've strongly reacted when I first saw a Nara Smith video. I think she's so beautiful. And I was like, this is bullshit. So I thought we were getting trolled. I was like, no one is doing this. You're trolling us right now. Is that kind of the idea? They're gaming the algorithm?

9:22we don't know what's happening in the background in terms of algorithms. But what we do know is that a lot of the tradwives have tens of millions of followers and millions of views. They also seem to be more visible in many cases in comparison to what a lot of people say like, let's say feminist content. And we know that psychological studies show when you get angry by looking at someone make cocoa pops for three hours, Anger is a really big sell of getting people to come back and look at more content. So a lot of the followers not necessarily following her because They want to live the lifestyle, but they just want another shot of anger. Right. Right. They get a hit of rage and it makes them feel alive again. I totally believe that because the first one I saw was the Coco Pops one where it was like my kid wanted to try Coco Pops, but I didn't want them eating that crap. So I decided to make them from scratch. There's always something sort of implausible about it. Like one of the videos she's wearing this gown with wrist cuffs that are

10:30made out of feathers, like you just wouldn't cook in something like that. Her nails are always perfect. She's wearing a small elegant piece of jewelry on her hands. For a woman to do that in the kitchen, it wouldn't be very effective. Something would get broken, something would get dirty. I mean, it's like someone doing housework as a hobby, right? This is not like housework as a job. This is a housework as a side hobby for a person who has You know, just infinite amount of time. That's kind of the image I get. Yes. And time is sexy because that's what we really don't have much of. By the way, that video, she only makes one bowl. She makes one bowl. It takes her like three hours and she makes one bowl of cereal. I think this is really important to say. She's not mass producing them for a whole month. It sounds sysophane.

11:23But it's probably not as exhausting, overwhelming and futile as juggling a career while being the primary caregiver and doing most of the housework. An annual study in the UK tracks attitudes to social, political and moral issues, and it found that one in five people believe that work is detrimental to both their mental and physical health. That's double the number of any other age groups in the survey.

11:50It also showed they're increasingly disillusioned with their future prospects. Across the world and in industrialised countries, most households have two earning couples. There's a very, very high level of stress. One study in the UK found like 80% of parents have at least one sign of stress and burnout. Other studies looks at young people, about a quarter of young people have issues around mental health, stress, burnout.

12:15People are tired of the rat race. And if you're already a wife or mum watching this artful tradwife content, He Jung says that the messaging can be persuasive. It's saying, like, you don't have to be like that. You don't have to try to juggle and be stressed and feel like you're, you know, just running in the hamster wheel all the time that there is another alternative life that you can lead, which is, voila, this.

12:44As well as her work at King's College, Hee Jung is the director of the Global Institute for Women's Leadership. The Institute recently surveyed 1,000 women aged between 18 to 34 about the tradwife phenomenon. A resounding number dismissed the idea of returning to traditional roles, and they didn't want to discard their careers. But 79% said they were attracted to the calm, relaxed lifestyle depicted in tradwife content.

13:11More than half found the cooking and childcare content appealing. And a big chunk, 44%, said the idea of not having to worry about a career was enticing. We have a huge group of young people who are really struggling. They're struggling to get into the job market, get on the housing ladder, and really struggling mentally. So in that context...

13:33I think there is some sort of an idea among young people to find a fix, right? Like, oh, things are not working out, working hard, going to university or getting education and going into a job market isn't necessarily guaranteeing success or good life. So I need to find something else. And, you know, for women, tried wife and wife duties as more of a mere hobby while having an army of nannies and cleaners is kind of seen as aspirational lifestyle.

14:03Running parallel to the fantasy of wading into a slower kind of life is the compelling idea that like SD Williams and Ballerina Farm, you too can become wealthy by having 15 babies looking hot and filming yourself making fruit loops from scratch. The tradwives that we do know...

14:23that are famous are making incredibly lucrative deals, not necessarily just on the social media, but also outside of it. They're selling products, they're selling a lifestyle, and they are really gaining monetary values out of selling the product that is tried by. But what they are selling and a lot of women are buying isn't necessarily the social media influencer lifestyle, but actually this falsified notion of being a tried wife and having a very happy life where you submit to your husband and that is actually a solution to many of the problems that you have. Which is actually what some men want. A 2026 global study found that one third of Gen Z men think a husband should have the final word on important decisions. And Hijung says that as we settle into our nightly doom scrolls, we should think critically about the messaging behind tradwife content.

15:19There's been a lot of debates, especially in the US, where Christian nationalists really wanted women to go back into the house and maybe give up their jobs. And there's a lot of emphasis on fertility, having a lot of children. Heejung says there's political groups in the US promoting Tread Wifi deals. They want to see a return to very traditional, usually Eurocentric, social norms with a nuclear family and a sole breadwinner. I'm afraid to say that the people who are promoting these ideas are also tying very closely to somewhat a rhetoric that we find in terms of feminism has gone too far and that is all tied together. They're not necessarily separate things that are just popping up by themselves.

16:07Ballerina from Narasimha is not so much, but other Tread wife influencers do actively talk about women needing to submit to their husband, women not being as intelligent or should not be kind of making decisions. And in the US, they are talking about taking votes away from women, right? So it kind of trickles in and seeps through.

16:30But these are not innocuous imagery of rich women doing houseworks as their hobby. It can be quite dangerous if we let this kind of become normalized. Yeah, I see what you mean because the idea of taking women's votes away seems preposterous and far-fetched, but so did taking away abortion rights 10 years ago. Absolutely. And it creeps in. So if you sort of have these very wonderful, very aspirational women saying, I just want to do what my husband says, I just want to make him happy. Well, why not give him your vote? You don't need to vote. He's got it all under control. You just keep rolling those little cocoa puffs, lady.

17:11I'm curious about your thoughts about this. Do you think that feminist messaging needs to adapt to counter the Tread-Wife fantasy? Yes. I think the feminist messaging that has been the dominant one in the last decade or so has been what we call a liberal feminist view. It was really about, hey girls, you could be as good as men and It has kind of led to this whole boss girl image, right? And a lot of people have realized, oh, actually, it's kind of like, we can't have it all. He Jung says that liberal feminism and the girl boss era didn't unpack the structures that make patriarchy thrive. That kind of feminism messaging was very, very marketable kind of image of like, let's buy this. This is for feminist, yay, women, girl empowerment. It didn't ask enough.

18:07changes in society or in companies or government where it never asks, oh yeah, if women go into the labor market, maybe men should be doing some more child care and housework. It never disrupted that kind of division. So we've kind of made women become like men, but we've not asked society to change or men to change. And a lot of women got the kind of shorter end of that stick. And that's the context in which Wala, a tried-wife imagery comes in and you're like, oh, actually, that looks really attractive. And Hee Jung is worried about this attraction. A lot of these kind of imagery or lifestyle, which we thought were quite an extreme version of life, is now becoming normalized.

18:55The problem I have with this is that it's not just a choice. It's first of all a false imagery, but also it's like it just has such a bad consequence for both men and women. But Hee Jung is also hopeful that the popularity of the content will make us question why being a working woman or a working mother can be so bloody hard. If we don't make things change, we're looking into a future that looks pretty grim, especially for women but also for men. So this...

19:25It's seen as a wake-up call to make those changes that are necessary to have a different gender role moving forward, that we need a society where women are not just fantasizing about trans-wife lives, but that it really supports working parents, both men and women, provide them with equal parental leave so that men are as much involved.

19:51and childcare and housework, and that women are able to kind of balance it and be able to have a couple of hours to do something that they really love. And perhaps one of the things I would love to see is to be able to show that beautiful imagery of when men and women are able to be equal carers and equal workers and be able to have that balance and see their families online and how it's hard, but how beautiful and wonderful and rewarding that is. And that drowns out some of the other maybe tried life content or the man of fear content. That is a beautiful idea. Would you be the star of that show? It will be an incredibly messy kitchen and I would look not as beautiful, but beautiful in the inside. But sure, and there'll be a dog barking at all times. But yeah, you know, you give and take.

20:47But that's what it's beautiful about. And I think it also doesn't put everybody else to shame because life is how you live it rather than like what you want to show to others, right? That's a good start. If I did a show, all my food would have one dog hair in every mouth. I love that so much. That's a great note to end on. Thank you so much for your time. No worries. Take care. Bye.

21:15I can't blame younger generations for feeling like the future's bleak. They are not Delulu. We're in a climate crisis. There's ongoing war and genocide. AI is out here destroying jobs and house prices are creating generations of lifelong renters. Staying home to bake a loaf of saldo sounds calming and quiet. It's also fine to centre your family and aspire to a more whole foods way of life.

21:42But if that's motivated by what you're seeing on socials, remember that we're seeing the 90-second supercut. Their videos may depict a slow life, but away from their kitchen-centred personas on social media, the Tread Wife influencers are furiously hustling to sell an unattainable lifestyle that they're not actually living. This podcast was produced on the lands of the Gadigal, Muwanina and Darawaal people.

22:15Ladies We Need To Talk is mixed by Ann-Marie Debettencore. It's produced by Elsa Silberstein and Sarah Mashman. Our supervising producer is Emma Morris and our executive producer is Taymar Kranswick. This series was created by Claudine Ryan.