You can almost smell the bread baking as the camera pans through the immaculate kitchen, taking in children crafting at the table. Their attractive mother gives a quick tutorial on how to make butter from scratch. Then, she serves it to the kids on a homemade loaf.
This is the life of the “trad wife”, an internet phenomenon that has given rise to ‘traditional wives’ and homemakers sharing idyllic snapshots from their simple lifestyles.
From Hannah Neeleman of Utah’s Ballerina Farm to Leah Lane’s Mulberry House in the UK and Jasmine Dinis in Australia, they each have an audience of millions of followers on social media.
Until two years ago, Alena Pettitt, who runs the website The Darling Academy, counted herself among their numbers. Sharing her life in the picturesque English countryside on Instagram, she was one of the original trad wives, emphasising the importance of a woman’s place in the home and their husband’s position as breadwinner.
“It was always my greatest ambition to be a wife and mother. Some people are just wired that way,” Alena, 38, tells Woman’s Day.
Alena shared pictures of herself in floral dresses to her 40,000 followers. With it, she wrote about how “cooking and cleaning” was her job.
She blogged about her life with her husband Carl and her now-12-year-old son, as well as her desire to return to traditional values.
But when Alena was interviewed by the BBC in 2020, her life blew up.
“The hate and trolling started,” she says. “I felt confused, I wasn’t trying to say anything political. I just like being at home and I didn’t think there was anything wrong with that.”
Alena didn’t understand why other women found her lifestyle so objectionable.
“People have bullied me all my life. I’ve never fitted in, so I was able to ignore it. But what hurt the most was the trolling from young women not in my situation,” she explains.
Strangers in online discussion groups frequently picked apart Alena’s posts and activities.
“They were so vehemently against the idea of staying at home. But how do they know what they’ll feel after they have children?”
Amid the negativity, Alena also received thousands of emails from women saying they held the same beliefs. But despite this, she started feeling sucked into “a monster”, as she describes it, of her own making.
“Posts where I was wearing a pretty dress were clicked on most and I started making banana bread that nobody could eat until I took a photo of it,” she says.
While she wasn’t making any money from what she was doing, younger, more polished and more controversial “trad wives” had jumped on the bandwagon.
Many suggested women should have no autonomy and men should be in complete control.
“It made a mockery of what I’d fought for and I was being lumped in with them,” Alena explains.
In February 2022, she closed her Instagram. She and Carl made the decision to move to Australia, where they both have family. They searched for a new adventure away from the media glare.
“It didn’t make sense to keep fighting all the time,” she reflects. “I had a family to look after.”
Alena still has a blog but doesn’t post new content for clicks any more.
“I’m still a housewife, but do I see myself as a trad wife in the sense of what it’s became? No. I’ve always just enjoyed the lifestyle at home with my family.”
Living the dream?
With 10 million followers, Ballerina Farm’s Hannah Neeleman is the queen of trad wives.
She’s a Mormon homesteader with eight children, who milks cows, bakes bread, churns butter and takes part in beauty pageants days after giving birth. But the 34-year-old faced controversy after inviting UK newspaper The Times to her Utah ranch, revealing details about her “idyllic” life and relationship with husband Daniel, the son of an airline billionaire.
These included how marriage meant giving up her professional ballet dreams, how Daniel prefers they don’t have nannies and how she frequently becomes so “exhausted”, she can’t get out of bed for a week.
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