On January 12th, 2024, Nara Smith posted a TikTok video
making her children peanut butter and jam sandwiches.
Like many mom fluencers on the app, Nara primarily shares
lifestyle vlogs and aesthetic home making content cooking
barefoot in her white marble kitchen, wearing a red lip while
tending to her children, showcasing her loving
relationship with her husband, and narrating all of this in a
soft voice that conveys that she has found the ultimate happiness
and peace from her domestic life.
But unlike most other mom fluencers on TikTok, Nara is
making the peanut butter and jam sandwiches from scratch.
Like scratch scratch. This morning my toddler stumbled
into my room and her first words were PB and J.
So that's exactly what I got Started on.
Growing up, I loved having fresh bread.
It was one of my favorite things, so I get it started by
making a really simple sandwich Bread with some yeast, water,
salt, sugar and flour. Kneaded that until the dough
formed and then let that dough rise for about two hours until
it doubled in size. I started on my Raspberry jam.
I used some lemon monk fruit sweetener, but you can also use
sugar and some cornstarch to thicken it.
While that was going, I started on my peanut butter.
I roasted all my peanuts in the oven and then ground them up
with some sea salt until a paste formed.
You can definitely add honey to this if you want to.
I didn't today because the Jelly would be quite sweet, but by
this time my bread was doubled in size so I punched it to
release all the air and then split it in two, rolled that out
and then folded that over to fit in my loaf pans.
I let that rest for another 30 minutes to about an hour until
it looked like a decent size in my loaf pan and then I popped
that in the oven and it came out so perfectly brown, soft in the
middle. I was so excited I couldn't
wait, so I definitely sliced it a little too early.
My daughter requested a mini PB and J so I cut the bread down
and spread it with my peanut butter and Jelly, cut it
diagonally and this was really good.
She ended up having a few of them and wanted more.
It's Nara's commitment to making her family homemade meals from
scratch while looking gorgeous and calm that has built her a
loyal following of over 3 million who have branded her a
very loaded label trad wife. And though Nara, a woman of
color, has not openly peddled trad wife ideology, nor has she
been clear about her political or religious beliefs, she is
just one of many young mothers on TikTok who have found
themselves accused of taking women's progress back in time to
the 1950s, an accusation that is not always justified.
From Centennial World, I'm Lauren Meissner and this is
Infinite Scroll, a podcast about Internet culture at the creator
economy and how social media is shaping.
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Love you guys. Nara Smith, born Nara Pelman, is
a model influencer and the wife of popular Tumblr model Lucky
Blue Smith. They have two children, Rumble
Honey and Slim Easy, and are currently expecting their third.
Nara has gone viral for posting Stay at Home mom fluencer
content. While there is nothing
inherently wrong with these types of videos, users have
criticized her for promoting trad wife ideology, Mormon
propaganda, and anti feminist beliefs.
Nara's most viral moments have all been centered around her
commitment to making food for her family completely from
scratch. Aside from questions about how
Nara possibly has the time, her content has led to accusations
that she is creating trad wife propaganda, an accusation that
more and more creators in that momosphere space are facing in
recent months Now I have explored the definition of trad
wife before, specifically when we investigated the career
trajectory of Gwen Swinnerton, a once bisexual ASMR YouTube and
only fans creator who has seemingly transitioned to a trad
wife, TikTok creator. Yes, that is a real sentence
that I just said. A portmanteau trad wife is a
descriptor combining traditional and wife.
While the term originated in 2015, it has gained increasing
popularity in the twenty 20s, particularly thanks to TikTok.
In January of 2020, the BBC released a documentary called
#trad Wife submitting to my husband like it's 1959,
featuring a popular creator named Alina Kate Petit.
This soon led to coverage from other mainstream outlets like
the New York Times and the Guardian.
The Trad Wife niche has grown exponentially since then,
especially with the COVID-19 pandemic and the advent of
TikTok. At the time of recording #trad
Wife has 433 million views. TikTok creator Ali Rooker
outlines some of the reasons why Trad Wife content is on the
rise. First, she notes that as Gen.
Z enters the workforce, they are realizing that basically work
sucks, leading them to potentially follow the Trad Wife
path. Though trad wife life involves
significant domestic labor, this lifestyle might be appealing to
young people because they are not working in a professional
setting. The 2nd is that there is a
general malaise about capitalism at the moment, with many young
people feeling unfulfilled in their career.
Quote at least being a trad wife serving someone that you love
maybe feels like there is a little more of a point, Ali
says. Additionally, Ali explains that
many women today tend to do a significant amount of domestic
labor while also having a full time job, so it may be enticing
to leave the professional world if you have to do everything in
the home anyway. Lastly, trad wife is a very
lucrative niche for creators. This is something that we as
viewers should keep in mind when consuming trad wife content.
More on that later. The trad wife belongs to Tik
Tok's Momosphere, the corner of the app where mothers and wives
post content related to cooking, relationships, and parenting.
The trad wife will post content centered around domestic life,
sharing aesthetic vlogs, preparing a meal for her
children with the ingredients often made from scratch or
cleaning the house, sometimes with homemade cleaning supplies.
But there is an important distinction to be made here.
Trad wife is not an online aesthetic, it is not a type of
content creator, and it is not a stay at home mom who likes to
cook for her family. Trad wife is an ideology rooted
in white supremacy. It is Nazi propaganda, and
though Trad wives claim to be empowered by this lifestyle, its
core values are deeply anti. Feminist.
Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Elon University
Devin Proctor notes quote Triad wives promote traditional gender
roles in family life, wherein the man provides for and
protects the family and the woman has children and takes
care of the family's needs. Triad wives believe that the
place of the woman is in the home, justifying this
perspective through various political, religious, and
personal beliefs. By embracing traditional
principles, trad wives claim that opting for a more
conventional path in marriage does not diminish their rights.
The recent popularity of tik tokers like Nara Smith has
created both increased interest in the trad lifestyle and a
misunderstanding of what a trad wife actually is.
The most obvious critique of trad wives is that their
lifestyle is inherently sexist and heteronormative.
Trad wives, often entrusting their husbands with complete
control over the family's finances, find themselves
confined to domestic responsibilities, and are
expected to wholeheartedly submit to their spouses.
While this may be the goal, the trad wife lifestyle
fundamentally contradicts the objectives of feminism dating
back to the first wave in the early 20th century.
As Proctor writes, quote, trad wifery stands firmly against
many feminist struggles over the past half century.
The right to work, the right to maintain one's own finances, the
right to bodily autonomy, the right to freedom from
harassment. So many trad wives are proud to
be, quote, anti feminist. Proctor explores how some trad
wives maintain that their chosen lifestyle is a way of expressing
feminism. This comes down to the concept
of choice feminism, the idea that the individual choices of a
woman are inherently feminist. But Proctor goes on to debunk
this argument, noting that the majority of women don't have the
luxury to make this choice quote for racial, geographic,
cultural, and many other reasons.
Many women are unable to work even if they would choose to,
and for economic and systemic reasons.
Many women who have to work would choose not to.
The choice itself reflects privilege.
Proctor also explains that domestic labor is inseparable
from the demands of a capitalist society.
While trad wives may opt for this lifestyle, their choice
also responds to the significant challenges of balancing
caregiving and the seemingly ever rising cost of living.
The trad wise lifestyle is driven by patriarchal norms and
the notion of an idealized woman undermining the perception of
genuine choice among these women.
As Bella Kellogg for the Michigan Daily writes quote, the
patriarchal oppression doesn't discriminate between the
traditionalists who embrace it and the feminists who defy it.
Under the patriarchy, inferiority is an inescapable
condition of the female psyche. Traditional women cope with this
patriarchal oppression by framing their subordination as
self sacrifice. This includes the denial of
basic emotional communication between themselves and their
husbands. Having said that, it is not
inherently anti feminist for a woman to value and pursue their
role as a mother and a wife, and this false conflation has
created a lot of tension online as the trad wife aesthetic has
become increasingly trendy. The real issue arises when these
roles are weaponized to platform the alt right, an ideology
shrouded in racism and white supremacy.
While many trad wives do not personally identify with the alt
Right, it has been well documented that embracing the
trad life can lead women down this path.
Christie Champion and Kirioli ignam right for the conversation
quote Trad wives believe contemporary society is beset by
decadence and consumerism, sexual depravity and promiscuity
and unnatural ways of living. This is all supposedly
engineered to weaken the white race.
Becoming a trad wife is one way far right women push back
against the supposed threats. Evian Ledig explains in the book
The Women of the Far right that the idea that society is in
moral decay is very common in these circles.
This has led many people who subscribe to this ideology to
homeschool their children quote to circumvent mainstream social
and cultural norms. This conspiratorial mindset has
become prevalent in trad wife circles, where many of these
women adopt A crunchy lifestyle. For those unfamiliar with the
term crunchy, it refers to a subculture defined by the
pursuit of slow living, Wellness, independence, and
traditional aesthetics. As Kathleen Belew writes for The
Atlantic quote, crunchy, coined as a pop culture reference to
granola, has come to refer to a wide variety of cultural
practices, including avoiding additives in food dyes,
declining or spacing out childhood vaccinations beyond
what pediatricians recommend, and more extreme actions in
pursuit of health, independence and purity.
Ballou further outlines the Crunchy to Alt Right pipeline,
observing that this subculture serves as a channel for direct
recruitment into the white power movement.
Essentially individuals who embrace the crunchy lifestyle
become more susceptible to fear mongering and conspiracy
theories fueled by their pre-existing distrust in
government, medicine and other institutions.
For an in depth analysis on how this crunchy to alt right
pipeline happened before our very eyes with popular YouTube
Gwen Swinnarton check the show notes for episode on Gwen in
season four. Considering Baloo's crunchy to
alt right pipeline Trad Wifery often has a strong association
with the far right through domesticity and white
nationalism. Trad wife memes are a good
example of this. Author Casey Davis reflects on
her experience with trad wife culture online in a recent
TikTok series. Trad wives are Nazi propaganda.
I'm not being hyperbolic. They literally are.
I've talked about this on my page before, but I recently
discovered something that I first saw 15 years ago that I
think will finally cement this for people that don't believe
me. People think that trad wife is
like this new TikTok trend because it's videos of these
beautiful women being like domestic goddesses and having
these aesthetically pleasing videos of them like baking bread
and having babies. But the term trad wife like the
things that that those people are doing when they #trad wife.
It originated long time ago. This is one of the first trad
wife memes. I first saw it 15 years ago and
it's this, you know, liberal feminist versus trad wife.
Trad wife stands for traditional wife and I want to draw your
attention to things on this chart.
The trad wife, bottom left, loves her family, race and
country in that order. Knowledgeable about her European
roots, homeschools her kids so they aren't taught progress BS
in school. If we look over here at the
Liberal Feminist, you can see second from the bottom right
she's only attracted to black men on the left.
She aborted her black baby last year.
By the way. The liberated Feminist is chubby
when you see that chubby and sleeps around, whereas the trad
wife has a natural tan, natural hair highlighted from the sun
and a slim figure from her homemade meals.
The far right sees the woman's role as one of service, meaning
that a woman's purpose is to bear children for her husband
and subsequently spend her time raising them.
Through these efforts, trad wives quote serve their imagined
racial and cultural heritage. Champion and ignam right Trad
wives draw upon a very specific period of history, the 1950s.
Throughout this era, women were largely denied access to the
workforce or any sense of independence.
While this was vastly different from previous decades where
women participated in activities such as textile production,
agricultural management, industrial work, and even
military service, trad wives view domestic life as the
epitome of womanhood. While a trad wife's definition
of true womanhood is oversimplified and inaccurate,
it aligns perfectly with the messaging with an alt Right
circles beyond the synergy Championing 1950s ideals of
womanhood inherently favors white women, as Proctor writes
quote. By framing these particular
formations of gender roles and identities seen in the white
middle class United States of the 1950s as traditional, the
trad wife personifies them into natural fact for all humans.
This certainly makes for a powerful breeding ground for
white supremacy and nationalism. And though many creators making
aesthetic trad wife content would argue that they are not
white supremacists, and they see no correlation between their
lifestyle and Nazi propaganda, some creators in this space do.
One trad wife creator known as Wife With a Purpose, whose real
name is Elias Stewart, epitomizes these racist beliefs.
In 2017, Elias started the quote White Baby Challenge,
encouraging white people to match or beat her number of
offspring, Annie Kelly writes for the New York Times quote
Wife With a Purpose might be the most prominent and certainly
most openly white supremacist of the women who call themselves
trad wives, but she is not an anomaly.
These accounts veered dizzyingly from Cosmo style tips on
pleasing your husband to racist musings about ghetto music to,
on some occasions, calls to reassert their vision of the
white race. Considering the ideals that
underpin the trad wife lifestyle.
Ali Rooker on TikTok outlines why trad wife propaganda is
problematic. You are working this framing
that there are women who work and there are women who don't
work because men have gifted them the opportunity to stay
home and cook and clean for them.
You're both working. It is fine to want to stay home
and do those things, but that is not a gift of no labor.
You are both working, and when you're doing it exclusively in
the home, you're working with no rights, no protection, no safety
net. You're providing services that
if you weren't around, that man would have to pay multiple
professionals to get because it's work, It's valuable work.
But your job security and doing that is entirely contingent on
that man deciding to keep you around as your youth and your
beauty, two things that are very protective of that job security
to a certain point, start to fail.
Just because it feels fulfilling and free to not go to work
everyday does not mean you are free.
So with these extremist beliefs in mind, what really constitutes
trad wife content? In a recent video, Casey Davis
explores this question in relation to TikTok, explaining
that trad wife content is defined by three concepts #1
women should be at home raising their children, and men should
be working outside the home. Number two, they must be
Christian religious. And #3 they must believe that
wives are called to submit to their husbands by God.
Davis then notes some trad wife red flags, which include
homeschooling, homesteading, and the importance of being
beautiful and feminine for their husband.
So while Trad Wife embodies a specific lifestyle with a set of
underlying beliefs, TikTok users have increasingly applied this
term to a wide range of creators in the momosphere, most of whom
are not actually Trad wives. Emily Mariko is 1 creator who
has been facing the Trad wife allegations as of late.
Emily gained viral fame on TikTok in 2021 for her cooking
and lifestyle content, most notably her salmon and rice
bowls. Before becoming an influencer,
she graduated with a neuroscience degree from
Columbia University and worked at L'Oreal and Facebook.
Last year, Emily married her longtime boyfriend Matt Rickard
and is currently expecting a child.
Her recent marriage and pregnancy, coupled with her
cooking and cleaning videos, have led TikTok users to jump to
conclusions and claim that Emily is a trad wife.
Look, I'm just going to say this.
Emily Mariko is the ultimate trad wife.
The performance of domestic labor on her account is
impeccable. In terms of the fine print of
patriarchy, she is a dream wife. The audience, AKA the people for
whom she curates this performance, only know her as a
woman who lives inside of a kitchen.
She is pregnant and she is silent, which means that you,
the viewer, get to project any of your own opinions or thoughts
or feelings on to her. She is a vessel.
This is literally the dream when it comes to patriarchy.
A smiling, silent woman who cooks meals and reproduces.
However, Shannon McNamara, the host of the Fluently Forward
podcast, recently made a TikTok questioning whether Trad Wife is
an accurate label for Emily. I've been seeing videos on here
of people calling Emily Mariko A trad wife, and I just feel like
the lingo is out of control. There is always a word that gets
popularized on TikTok, and then people start assigning that word
to everything, even when it shouldn't be.
This happened with nepo baby, right?
People were like, oh, anyone who's has rich parents is a nepo
baby. Not what the word means happened
with PR relationship. People were like, oh, everyone
is in a PR relationship. No, no, no.
And now that the phrase trad wife is getting popular now,
it's been around for like years, people are using it in a way
that doesn't mean anything. So I saw this video where this
girls like Emily Mariko is a perfect trad wife because she is
performing domestic labor while pregnant and she is silent while
she's doing it. Which number one?
Performing domestic labor. She's cooking like she's also
cleaning up around the house. But I just find it crazy that
there are so many male creators on here who all they do is cook.
You know, there's that guy, right?
Who? What's it?
He's like, what does Catherine want?
I'm going to make a meal for my wife every day.
No one calls him a trad husband. Nobody would because he's a man.
But if you are a woman and you're cooking for people in the
family, all of a sudden now it's sinister.
Trad wife like energy content. Trad Wife creators also espouse
their values, calling on their followers to make food from
scratch and uphold the traditional ideals of womanhood
that we have already discussed. Emily Mariko, on the other hand,
rarely shares anything with her followers.
On top of this, Emily clearly has financial independence.
She has had partnerships with different brands and most
recently launched $120.00 Tote Bag, a move that did generate
considerable criticism but I'm sure still made her a lot of
money. The idea that Emily has
financial independence and thus is not a trad wife is a point
worth exploring, however, because that is the hypocrisy of
trad wife content creators. They do have a job through
content creation, and they do have financial independence
through their influencing careers, A career built off
telling other women to submit to their husbands and let them
control their finances. Even if these popular trad wife
creators are not monetizing their videos through
sponsorships or through the TikTok Creator Fund, they have a
safety net of thousands if not millions of followers that they
can easily monetize if things go South in their marriage and they
find themselves needing to support themselves.
Another element of this discussion around trad wife
finances is the fact that so many of these really popular
trad wife influencers, like Ballerina Farms, have incredibly
wealthy husbands. That privilege enables them to
choose to stay at home and live a domestic life that is far more
glamorous than the average woman.
This financial privilege also appears to extend to Nara Smith,
who, as noted at the top of the episode, has blurred the lines
between trad wife creator and mommy Blogger.
Given her fame and influence at the moment, several journalists
have attempted to uncover who Nara is and if she is really a
Trad wife. First and foremost, Nara is
married to Lucky Blue Smith, who was raised in the Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
Trad Wifery is closely linked with Mormonism.
While not all Trad wives are Mormon, many Mormon mommy
vloggers fall into the Trad wife category.
This is arguably because Mormon beliefs around motherhood align
with Trad wife values. The LDS Church places a strong
emphasis on family values and motherhood is highly regarded.
Women are often encouraged to focus on their roles as wives
and mothers, with an emphasis on nurturing and raising children
in accordance with religious practices.
With this in mind, many Internet users have come to believe that
Nara's content is promoting this lifestyle.
Quote This couple is Mormon and making bank off of promoting
trad wife stay at home Mormon content.
But both she and him are successful models, him being one
of the most highly paid male models.
She is not a trad wife but is encouraging women to be and to
leave the workforce for men. Insidious wrote ex user at Give
receipts. While Mormon Mommy vloggers may
not actively prophetize or endorse their religion, many
leverage their influence to advocate for values
traditionally associated with the church, even when addressing
A secular audience. EJ Dixon for The Rolling Stone
points to Ballerina Farm, whose real name is Hannah Nealman.
As an example quote, the former ballerina and beauty pageant
winner has garnered 8 million followers by performing
traditional wife, Dim and Motherhood.
She bakes Brad barefoot, wears overalls and her rustic wood
paneled kitchen and cooks from scratch on her $30,000 Aga
stove. Although there is an apparent
link between Trad wives and Mormonism, Nora's affiliation
with the church beyond her connection to her husband
remains ambiguous. This complicates the claim that
Nara's content is Mormon propaganda, as many TikTok users
believe quote The specifics of Smith's relationship with
Mormonism are unclear, Dixon continues.
Though I was unable to verify online rumors that she had
converted upon marrying Smith, she has responded affirmatively
to comments asking if she self identifies as LDS, and she is
obliquely referred to studying scripture and the Book of Mormon
in her content. On top of this, Nara's content
isn't overtly religious. She rarely, if ever, discusses
her faith, Dixon claims. She only mentions her faith to
put a stop to rumors and speculations, pointing to a
December 2023 TikTok where Nara says quote, it's absolutely
crazy to me that people assume they know what I believe and
what my faith is and what they assume.
My stance on other issues are. Nara's admittedly tenuous
association with Mormonism has prompted a discussion online
about whether Nara would be receiving the same criticism if
she were a white woman, as Internet users do not direct the
same amount of criticism towards white Mormon trad wife creators,
once again holding black women to a double standard.
On the flip side, many Internet users feel unsettled by the fact
that Nara is a woman of color and allegedly supports a church
that has long been discriminatory to minorities.
For example, until 1978, the Mormon Church avoided opening
missions in areas with large black populations, discouraged
people with black ancestry from investigating the church,
advised members to avoid social interaction with black people,
and instructed black members to segregate themselves when white
members complained about having to worship with them.
Some ex users have even gone on to praise Nara, applauding her
for excelling in a space dominated by white women.
Quote, people keep shitting on her because she's 22, Mormon,
two kids and pregnant. But I saw a whole TikTok about
how white women own this space and it's nice to see someone who
isn't white succeed in this space.
So that made me a Nara Smith fan, thank you very much.
So if Nara isn't promoting Mormonism, is she promoting Trad
wifery? Nara's content definitely
champions traditional stay at home motherhood, even though she
caters to an audience that may not necessarily have those
values or financial means to follow her lifestyle.
Having acknowledged this, it's worth noting that she hasn't
explicitly endorsed the trad wife lifestyle.
She doesn't espouse the racist or anti feminist beliefs
associated with Trad Wife Free. However, she does perform them
in some ways, seemingly prioritizing domestic labor and
acting like the idealized version of a woman.
But as Dixon notes, we don't know the true nature of her
relationship with her husband. She clearly values motherhood
and being a homemaker, but it doesn't seem like patriarchal
servitude is her only option, distinguishing her from many
other women who may live a similar lifestyle.
There is no indication on Smith's social media platform
that her husband, Lucky, harbors such expectations.
He appears to be a devoted partner to the degree that her
fans and followers regularly swoon over the affection that
they have for each other, expressing their desires to
similarly cater to their own husbands.
But it's hard not to notice that many of the meals his wife makes
from scratch are intended for him, and that he is rarely seen
performing any type of domestic labor whatsoever, Dixon writes.
TikTok user Ali Rooker makes a similar point.
While she doesn't speak on Nara specifically, she notes that
many trad wife or trad wife adjacent influencers are selling
a reality that doesn't truly exist.
This is the most insidious part of these trad wife influencers.
If they're not even trad wives, they are not dependent on their
husbands. They have their own money from
influencing us to want to be trad wives, but they've found a
way around the worst part of being a trad wife, The part that
made us rebel against being a trad wife and go get our own
jobs, which is trad wives are dependent on their husbands
because they make all the money and we do all of the unpaid
labor. They are getting paid for their
labor for selling you the aspirational life of being a
trad wife while other people do the labor behind the scenes that
make that aspirational, soft, easy life possible.
Nevertheless, considering the aspirational nature of Nara's
content, she is essentially portraying what a perfect life
could look like, potentially pushing her followers down the
trad wife path. But this is where we need to be
cautious. TikTok users incorrectly putting
the trad wife label onto women poses a threat impacting both
the creator and the audience. Not only are we imposing A
deeply problematic belief system on, to quote UN quote regular
influencers, but we are also downplaying the influence this
ideology wields. It is easy to get caught up in
the seemingly easy and fulfilling life of a trad wife
through her aesthetic vlogs and cooking videos, but it is only a
slippery slope to adopting the racist, anti feminist, and
conspiratorial beliefs that support the doctrine, a slippery
slope that has been well documented as we explored
earlier in the episode. As the trad wife aesthetic
continues to expand across TikTok, it is more important
than ever for us to understand the nature of this ideology and
which creators actually fall into the trad wife category.
Because while every trad wife is a stay at home mom, not every
stay at home mom is a trad wife. And it's imperative we
understand the difference between mommy vloggers sharing
their lives and trad wife creators peddling white
supremacist propaganda. Infinite Scroll is a podcast
written, produced, edited and presented by me, Lauren Meisner
for Centennial World. Additional research and
reporting is by Annabelle Ben David, thank you so much for
listening. I love you guys so much.
And I will talk to you next week.
Bye.