Feature: Tradwife by Michelle Brandon & The Fantasy That was Never for Us

Welcome to October, y’all. What better way to kick off spooky szn than with the real horrors we live with! But for real, in just a few days, it will be Banned Books Week and we are featuring books by authors who have experienced censorship as well as other content related to censorship (like this!). If you’re looking for ways to fight censorship, we recently posted an interview with Dr. Alyssa Chrisman on ways you can help!

Feature: Tradwife & The Fantasy That was Never for Us

Nara Smith appeared on Call Her Daddy recently in an episode titled Stop Calling Me a Tradwife and said she had to google the term because she was not familiar with it. She said being called the poster child for the tradwife movement was very bizarre to her. She said she finds it very concerning that we need to put women in very specific, very narrow boxes.

She has been making content since 2023 that shows her in full glam, whispering in a closet so she does not wake her children, making everything from scratch in an immaculate home. She got married at eighteen after Lucky Blue Smith’s father asked her father for her hand in marriage the first time they met. She has shared content about her religious lifestyle. She built a platform, estimated to have earned her $7.5 million last year, on content that is indistinguishable from tradwife content. And now, on one of the most listened to podcasts in the world, she wants us to know she had to look up the word.

I do not believe her.

Nara Smith is not alone in this move. Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm, a Juilliard-trained dancer married to the son of JetBlue billionaire David Neeleman, lives on a 328-acre Utah ranch with her eight children, makes everything from scratch, and has nearly twenty million followers across TikTok and Instagram. When The Sunday Times profiled her in 2024 and reported that her husband did not allow nannies in the house and that she sometimes got so ill from exhaustion she could not get out of bed for a week, she called the article an attack on her family and said it could not be further from the truth. She also does not consider herself a tradwife. Then there is Estee Williams, who does openly discuss biblical submission to her husband and reportedly does not leave the house without his permission, which is at least the honest version of what the aesthetic is actually selling.

Three very different women. Two of them say the label does not apply to them. One of them agrees it does and explains exactly what it means. The interesting thing is that all three of them are building the same audience for the same ideology, just with different levels of plausible deniability attached.

The tradwife aesthetic is not accidental. It has a target audience, a political function, and a very specific set of people who benefit from its normalization. The performance of confusion, the wide eyes, the I just like cooking, the why are people putting me in a box, is itself part of the performance. It is a very old move: take up the aesthetic of a regressive ideology, collect the audience and the money, and then distance yourself from the ideology the moment the association becomes inconvenient. Keep the platform. Lose the accountability.

What none of them are wrong about is the box itself. Women should not be put in narrow boxes. But the content they built is a very specific kind of box with very specific walls, and it was built on purpose and monetized at scale. Being angry that people noticed is not the same as being innocent of it.

I grew up inside a version of that framework. Not the same as any of theirs, but close enough that I know exactly what it looks like from the inside and from the outside. I had my mouth washed out with soap. I was taught that when I started menstruating I would be a woman, with all the weight that word carried in that world, which meant I would be marriageable. The men in my life had opinions about who I would marry. The adults around me sexualized me in ways I did not have language for until much later. And none of it was framed as control. All of it was framed as love, as protection, as the right way to be a girl. The box was so comfortable and so familiar to the people who built it that they genuinely believed they were giving me something. Some of them were not performing anything. They were just inside it too.

That distinction matters. Not everyone promoting the tradwife aesthetic is calculating their platform. Some of them are women who were handed a framework so early and so completely that they cannot see its edges. But the people at the top of this particular food chain know exactly what they are selling and to whom. And the people in Washington writing the policy version of it know too.

This is what Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke understands so clearly and so viciously. Natalie Heller Mills is a tradwife influencer on Yesteryear Ranch in Idaho, performing pastoral domesticity for millions of followers from behind a carefully managed production involving farmhands, nannies, and social media producers she never mentions. Her husband cosplays as a cowboy but is actually an incompetent scion of an ultra-wealthy political dynasty. If that sounds familiar, Caro has acknowledged the parallels. The whole thing is a production staged to look like a natural life. And when Natalie wakes up in 1855, in the actual version of the world she has been selling as an aesthetic, it nearly destroys her. The pioneer life she monetized is brutal labor, genuine danger, real submission without the production budget to make it look cozy. The horror of the book is that Natalie built her entire performative identity around a fantasy of a past that was always worst for people exactly like her.

Tradwife by Michelle Brandon is working a different angle on the same material. Three women in Crystal Harbor, a small beach town built around traditional values and female submission, are managing the gap between the life they perform publicly and the life they actually live. A man goes missing. Old secrets surface. The town’s carefully maintained facade starts to come apart. Michelle is less interested in the ideology than in the human cost of maintaining it, the specific exhaustion of performing a version of yourself that someone else designed.

Both books are arriving at a moment when the tradwife aesthetic is not just a TikTok trend but a policy destination. The Heritage Foundation has senior fellows arguing that Title IX should be rolled back because competitive women’s sports make women less oriented toward motherhood, and that women’s bodies should be oriented toward natural conception within marriage rather than given access to technologies that expand their options. The SAVE Act, which has passed the House, would make it significantly harder for women to register to vote in federal elections. These are not abstract ideological positions but architecture of a world where women’s choices narrow until what remains looks like what was always intended.

There is also the economic reality that the tradwife fantasy requires a specific kind of wealth to function. Most women cannot afford to not work. The households where one income covers everything are not the norm. Nara Smith earned $7.5 million last year from content about domestic life. Hannah Neeleman’s husband is the son of a billionaire. The women the ideology actually targets are not wealthy influencers with production teams. They are women in economically precarious situations being told that the solution to their precarity is submission and domesticity rather than structural change, better wages, affordable childcare, healthcare that does not depend on a husband’s employment. The fantasy is sold to women who cannot afford the fantasy. That is not an accident. Women who are economically dependent are easier to manage.

And then there is the race of it. The tradwife aesthetic has a very specific default image and it is white. Nara Smith is South African and German and her face being attached to this movement is complicated in ways worth sitting with, because the ideology underneath the aesthetic has historically excluded and actively harmed Black and brown women who were never offered the domestic protection the fantasy promises. The women who spent generations working in other people’s homes so that white women could perform domesticity are not in the frame of the tradwife TikTok. They have never been in the frame. When the policy version of this ideology shrinks women’s options, it shrinks them most for women who already had the fewest.

And it starts with girls. Not women. Girls. The Heritage Foundation’s arguments about Title IX are specifically about what girls are allowed to want and become before they are old enough to fully understand what is being taken from them. The rollback of competitive sports for girls is not about sports. It is about who girls are allowed to believe they can be, what bodies they are allowed to have, what futures they are allowed to imagine for themselves. I was a girl when the framework was built around me. I did not have the language to see it as a framework. I just knew the rules. The people building it now are building it for girls who are children right now, and those girls do not have the language for it either yet. That is the point.

Nara Smith is not a tradwife, she says. But the people using her image to sell an ideology are not confused about what they are doing. They know exactly what they want the box to look like. They want it to look like a beautiful woman in a gorgeous dress making food from scratch in a spotless kitchen, whispering softly, never asking for anything, never taking up more space than she was assigned.

I know what that box looks like from the inside. I lived in a version of it. I got out. Not everyone does. Actually, most don’t.

Tradwife

by Michelle Brandon
Published by: Avon
Genres: Adult
Bookshop, Audiobook Libro.FM
Goodreads

Inspired by the #tradwifetok phenomenon, a novel in which trad wives with dark personal secrets in a small beach town find themselves embroiled in scandal when one of their husbands goes missing, and their traditional—and not so traditional—lifestyles become a national sensation, from the author of Rush Week.

In an idyllic coastal town, life appears picture-perfect—until it’s not. Families are drawn to Crystal Harbor for its more traditional values and gender roles, a step back in time to an era of female submission and patriarchal leadership. But beneath the layers of perfectly coiffed, manicured, and attired wives; freshly baked sourdough; faithful Sunday churchgoers; bake sales; and backyard barbeques, lies a secret lifestyle that’s only revealed when the sun goes down—and a man goes missing. Worse, the disappearance dredges up a dark truth several of them thought they buried years ago, threatening to shatter the community’s carefully maintained façade.

Told from the alternating perspectives of three women at the center of it all, Tradwife is a juicy, drama-packed novel that dives into the controversial, trending social media lifestyle and gender role stereotypes of tradwives, the taboo behind-closed-doors participation in wife-swapping, and what happens when the lies they’ve told themselves inside a gilded cage turn inside out, with the potential to not only destroy their existence, but end them…

Yesteryear

by Caro Claire Burke
Published by: Knopf
on April 7, 2026
Genres: Adult
Bookshop, Audiobook Libro.FM
Goodreads

A traditional American woman, a “tradwife” influencer, suddenly awakens in the brutal reality of 1855—where she must unravel whether this living nightmare is an elaborate hoax, a twisted reality show, or something far more sinister in this sensational debut novel.

My name was Natalie Heller Mills, and I was perfect at being alive.
Natalie lives a traditional lifestyle. Her charming farmhouse is rustic, her husband a handsome cowboy, her six children each more delightful than the last. So what if there are nannies and producers behind the scenes, her kitchen hiding industrial-grade fridges and ovens, her husband the heir to a political dynasty? What Natalie’s followers—all 8 million of them—don’t know won’t hurt them. And The Angry Women? The privileged, Ivy League, coastal elite haters who call her an antifeminist iconoclast? They’re sick with jealousy. Because Natalie isn’t simply living the good life, she’s living the ideal—and just so happens to be building an empire from it.

Until one morning she wakes up in a life that isn’t hers. Her home, her husband, her children—they’re all familiar, but something’s off. Her kitchen is warmed by a sputtering fire rather than electricity, her children are dirty and strange, and her soft-handed husband is suddenly a competent farmer. Just yesterday Natalie was curating photos of homemade jam for her Instagram, and now she’s expected to haul firewood and handwash clothes until her fingers bleed. Has she become the unwitting star of a ruthless reality show? Could it really be time travel? Is she being tested by God? By Satan? When Natalie suffers a brutal injury in the woods, she realizes two things: This is not her beautiful life, and she must escape by any means possible.

A gripping, electrifying novel that is as darkly funny as it is frightening, Yesteryear is a gimlet-eyed look at tradition, fame, faith, and the grand performance of womanhood.