In recent years, some of the most vocal tradwives have left their husbands, renounced their religious faith and promoted financial independence. What is behind this sudden and seismic shift?
When Bernadine Bluntly posted a video earlier this year renouncing the tradwife movement she had championed, it caused shockwaves through the “alt-right” social media world. Previously, posts of her and her six children had flooded feeds as the Maga movement gained ground. She was one of the defiantly anti-feminist influencers who promoted a return to patriarchal gender roles, pronatalist ideals and fundamentalist Christian values – particularly around the sanctity of marriage. Bluntly, whose real surname is Barber, had, in the past, sold T-shirts reading “RIP Feminism”, supported Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the supreme court and developed a course, Simply Smitten, to help young women attract husbands who were “traditional masculine men”.
Then, last year, she left her husband. Her divorce was finalised this year. In the proceedings, she got a restraining order against her ex, whom she said was abusive (he denies this). In April, the 36-year-old posted a video titled: “What I got wrong about the trad movement”, in which she said that, while she is still a Christian and believes in the differences between men and women: “I no longer believe in extreme gender roles, especially when they’re wrapped in spiritual language and used to justify control, silence or harm.” She said that the tradwife movement, one she initially thought was about a “return to strong family values”, has “become indistinguishable from the current wave of the red-pill manosphere”. She concluded: “If my past content contributed to that, I am so genuinely sorry.”
Bluntly is part of a growing movement of ex-tradwife influencers. Even those who have not outrightly denounced the term seem to be distancing themselves from it. Nara Smith, the model and influencer who was married at 18, had four children by the time she was 24 and posts content of herself wearing cutesy dresses to cook for her husband to her 12.5m TikTok and 4.8m Instagram followers, told the Guardian last month that there is no secret tradwife “agenda” to her content. Even 36-year-old Hannah Neeleman, perhaps the archetypal modern tradwife, appeared to backpedal from the movement in a recent interview with New York magazine. Neeleman’s content, which she posts as Ballerina Farm, romanticises the homestead lifestyle of her Mormon family on their Utah ranch and became a blueprint for other tradwife wannabes. She and her husband have nine children, rear cattle and pigs and have built a 10m-strong following on Instagram. “If there’s things that I’m sharing that people think are actually doing harm to our sex, then OK, let me take the feedback,” she said.
Jennie Gage, 52, was one of the first ex-tradwife influencers. She grew up in what she describes as a “very traditional, old-fashioned” Mormon family in Arizona. Gage went to scripture evenings, studied Bible texts and, at 12, joined her church’s women’s programme, where she was taught how to care for children, iron men’s shirts and clean toilets. It was, she says, an “immersion programme to prepare you for tradwife life”.
At 18, Gage got engaged, but was told by a church bishop that God wanted her to be with another man, whom she ended up marrying six weeks later. From the outside, her 24 years of marriage seemed idyllic – raising five children, cooking and feeding chickens. She was a Maga devotee; her social media profile picture was of Donald Trump and she was elated when he was elected. But behind closed doors, she says, she was in an abusive marriage, in which she was forbidden from working or having a bank account. When she caught her husband meeting a sex worker in 2018, she left him, her church and her politics behind.
Some of her ex-tradwife content is mocking: in one TikTok, she posts a video recorded during her tradwife years, in which she shows off the cookies she had prepared for her ex, who was heading off on a long journey for work. “I view my role as, like, you know when you’re flying and the flight attendants get you all your stuff and everything?” she said to camera. That video now makes her “want to barf”, she writes in the description. But there is also the more serious problem of the financial ruin that trad women can be left with when they leave a breadwinning husband who has total control of the household budget. “I can’t go back and undo my past and erase all the horrible things I had to go through,” Gage tells me over a video call from her home in Arizona. But she can, she says, “warn other people” against the trad lifestyle – something she wishes someone had done for her.
“I’m not out to fight Ballerina Farm,” Gage says. “Because [Hannah Neeleman] is financially safe. I’m out to fight women not being financially safe.” For most of her marriage, Gage was given cash in an envelope to go grocery shopping. “If it wasn’t enough money, I would just put stuff back,” she says. After the couple divorced, Gage says she was left with nothing. She set up a GoFundMe to pay for her divorce lawyer and borrowed money from friends and family to survive. Now, she tells young women, by all means: “Have babies, get married, fall in love. But have a prenup, have a spousal trust, make sure that retirement’s in your name.”
Tia Levings, 52, has also made a career out of being an ex-tradwife, as a social media influencer and the author of two books about her experience. Like Gage, Levings married young, at 19, after which she and her husband moved around, and were part of several extreme, non-denominational fundamentalist Christian groups. One of these was the Institute in Basic Life Principles, which teaches that husbands have God-given authority over their wives, who in turn should not work outside the home and remain “well groomed” to “please their husbands”. It is an organisation that has faced allegations of misconduct – its founder, Bill Gothard, resigned in 2014 amid allegations of sexual abuse. It has also been alleged to have been “cult-like” by Jinger Duggar, a member of the family at the centre of the 00s reality TV show 19 Kids and Counting, who were members of the ministry.
Before social media, in the 00s, Levings was an early tradwife influencer on the blogosphere. At the time, her husband had moved their family into what she now describes as “a high-control family patriarchy cult”. On her blog, she wrote about “beautiful homey days and put pictures up of my cloth diapers and my beans and my bread”. She says that had she had social media then: “I definitely would have used it to do the same thing, to extol the virtues of this beautiful choice that you can make for your family.”
In reality, Levings’ life was neither virtuous nor beautiful. She says her husband abused her throughout their marriage and, because she had spent her whole life hearing that “divorce was wrong”, she was “too scared” to tell her parents or the authorities. The only person she felt she could approach was one of her church leaders: “What he told me was that I just needed to obey my husband more,” she says.
Levings says her husband’s behaviour became “much more violent” as the years went on and she was growing increasingly concerned that “I was teaching my children that it was OK for men to treat women this way.” She was also worried her family might not survive the violence. She knew she had to leave when her husband left the house suddenly in the middle of the night – she believes in order to retrieve his gun from his office – and she took the opportunity to flee. She now has custody of the couple’s four children.
When she looks back on her blogging days, she now sees how naive she was. “We join in, thinking: ‘Oh, we’re going to have a pretty family. We’re going to be happy traditional women,’” Levings says. What she wasn’t told was “what was also true of a traditional movement: here’s what happens when we don’t vaccinate kids. Here’s what happens when we take them out of education. Here’s what happens if your husband’s beating you and you can’t get out.”
Levings never thought she would go public with her story. But then she noticed the tradwife movement gaining traction on social media in about 2015 when Trump was first running for office. When figures in the American Christian right began to endorse Trump, Levings thought back to sermons she had listened to “where they were talking about taking away women’s rights to vote, taking away abortion, taking away education, turning America into a Christian nation”. She says: “I knew right away, this is the danger everyone’s in. And it was the moment I also understood that my lived experience was going to be relevant out here.”
Gage and Levings say their churches pushed white supremacist ideology. Levings recalls hearing a sermon on the “great replacement” theory as a child – which promotes the false idea that a group of Jews and Democrats is trying to “replace” white Americans with people of colour. Levings says she was told: “The way that we were going to fight that was by having as many white babies as possible.” They both now strongly renounce those views in their content.
Seyward Darby is the author of the 2020 book Sisters in Hate, about women on the frontline of white nationalist movements in the US. She says when she began researching her book in 2016, the first online performances of “trad life” online were “being really pushed by anti-feminists and also white nationalists”. Those origins might have become blurred in the years since, but “that’s still the DNA … so even though a tradwife today on TikTok might not say, ‘I’m a white nationalist,’ they might actually outright reject that, they’re still drawing on a trend that ultimately came from that space.” The tradwife aesthetic is seen as the perfect way to package extreme beliefs, says Darby, because of “the sexist assumption that women are nicer, women are softer” – so they become “the palatable faces of these rightwing movements”.
Lauren Southern was 19 when she went viral in 2015 with a video titled “Why I am not a feminist”. She has called Islam “dangerous to the west” and was refused entry to the UK in 2018 because of her extreme views. Recently, though, she has stepped away from the tradwife lifestyle for which she once advocated. In 2023, she divorced her husband. Now 31, she self-published a memoir last year, This Is Not Real Life, in which she detailed how she was forced to rethink her views on sexual assault (she once protested against a Vancouver feminist rally with a sign that read: “There is no rape culture in the west”) after, she alleges, the online misogynist Andrew Tate sexually assaulted her. (Tate has denied this claim.)
“You’re like a symbol or a tool for the movement, which I guess happens to everyone, men and women, but women are certainly held to significantly higher moral standards within the rightwing sphere,” says Southern. She now compares the tradwife movement to a game of live action role-playing – a product of the internet becoming “escapism from the difficulty of real life”. Even on occasions when she hadn’t seen her husband for days after he had stormed out: “I would cook parmesan chicken and film it on Instagram and say, ‘I’m being a good wife, here are my pies, I love being married, being a mom is so fulfilling,’ because that’s what I wished my reality was,” and what she felt she “should be promoting”.
Unlike Gage and Levings, Southern still believes in “traditional old-school conservatism” and is reluctant to call herself a feminist. She also doesn’t see the point in apologising for any of her former words and actions: “I can’t change the past, I can’t give myself information I didn’t have when I was younger,” she says. “I can just tell the truth.”
Levings is hopeful about what the apparent demise of the tradwife trend could mean. “Just as it splashed very widely online, it’s also crashing very widely online,” she says. “There’s something to be learned in that accelerated pace: the life cycle didn’t even have the stamina to make it through this first wave of kids’ childhood.” Though she says she carries a lot of guilt about “the complicity that I played in my own story”, she is able to recognise that the decisions she made “were foreclosed choices”, because of her limited access to information. “Grief is a big part of it,” too, she adds. “You don’t get those young years back. You don’t get to redo the mistakes you made with your children.” But she is proud to count herself as part of the ex-tradwife movement. “If I’d had access to a real-life testimonial, I would have chosen differently at 19,” she says. “We really need to listen to the older women who’ve been there.”
