There is something about traditional values, especially when women choose to embrace them, that certain liberal women simply cannot leave alone. It does not matter how harmless the content is or how straightforward the message is. The moment a woman presents a life built around home, family, and a slower pace, the analysis begins.

Not curiosity, not even disagreement, but a need to step in and explain why it is all misleading, problematic, or part of something bigger that needs to be taken apart.

A Life Liberal Women Don’t Want—But Can’t Stop Talking About

That is exactly what you see in the latest piece from Amanda Marcotte over at Salon, where she takes on tradwives through the lens of Hannah Neeleman and Ballerina Farm. Before the conversation even really gets going, there is already a qualifier tucked in about controversy and raw milk, just to make sure nobody is too impressed. In reality, it amounted to failed test samples that were never sold and a decision to stop offering the product, with no reported illnesses or recall. Nothing is allowed to stand on its own anymore. It has to be adjusted first, especially by Amanda and her type.

Then, you see the same instinct dressed up a little differently over at The Cut. The one is softer, a little more polished, but the conclusion lands the same. The tradwife image is not real, you see. There must be something off underneath it. If we cannot see it, we can at least imagine it. Maybe she is exhausted. Or she has regrets. Could be that the whole thing is a performance hiding something else. That must be it. Because no woman can be a real woman wanting a traditional life. My God! The horror!

We know too much about tradwives, and yet we know nothing at all. We know that Hannah Neeleman — the tradwife of Ballerina Farm fame — has a perfect life in Utah with her perfect husband and perfect children on their perfect ranch, where she bakes all her own bread, free of plebeian afflictions like microplastics and preservatives. She sells her audience on the “right” way to live because, we’re supposed to believe, she’s living it herself. Which is why I was legitimately surprised when she halted the sale of her raw milk amid bacteria concerns earlier this year. She didn’t make a spectacle of it; there wasn’t so much as a Notes-app apology. And yet we found out that Hannah Neeleman had done something wrong. Just for a moment, for one brief internet cycle, a crack appeared in the perfect life Neeleman peddles online.

That crack is the exception. The glossy surface is the rule. Online, tradwives show us exactly what they want us to see: the symmetrical sourdough, the candlelit births, the children who play outside all day and yet still have clean hands. Just enough to make us feel as if we’re intimates. But we’re not. There are tradwives whose cows I could name from memory, but I still don’t know how they actually feel about their husbands. – The Cut

The snark is heavy with this one at The Cut. Granted, this was a snippet from a book review over there and written by Ginny Hogan. But still, you clearly get a hard stance against the tradwife life from them.

See It. Question It. Tear It Down. Repeat.

These women, like Ginny Hogan and Amanda Marcotte, go way past observance and directly into projection with their rantings. You can almost predict the rhythm of it. Introduce something people like, then immediately follow it with a qualifier so nobody gets the wrong idea. One piece questions it directly. Another reframes it. Another piles on. Different tone, same outcome.

You know the type, they like to bring a rain cloud to a picnic nobody invited them to.

What makes this especially overdone is how much is being loaded onto something that is, at its core, pretty simple. If you actually look at Hannah Neeleman’s own description of her life, there is nothing hidden or coded about it. She is married, has eight children, trained as a ballerina at Juilliard, and chose to step away from that path to focus on family, now living on a ranch and running a business. That is the whole picture. She doesn’t list a manifesto with a list of instructions telling other women what they should or should not do.

She Chose Family—and That’s the Problem

And that is what chaps the asses of women like Amanda Marcotte. That a woman decided to prioritize her life and start a family instead of climbing the same career ladder she’s expected to want.

So Amanda can’t stand it, and instead of leaving it alone, she turns it into a carefully constructed ideological operation that needs to be unpacked and exposed.

Feminist critics like Sara Petersen, Anne Helen Petersen (no relation) and Anna North have built an impressive body of social criticism unveiling the cynical blend of capitalism, gender politics and plain old dishonesty of the “momfluencer” enterprise. (Neeleman’s feed, for example, never shows us her farm workers, her kids’ full-time teacher, her babysitters or her personal assistant.) What is less often discussed in these critiques is the ways many of these online influencers also function as propaganda outlets for the Christian right. – Salon

Because nothing says “Christian propaganda machine” quite like sourdough and a farmhouse kitchen.

An Old Idea With New Critics

The real issue seems to be that people are drawn to it in the first place.

And that is not new either. Women have been looking at idealized versions of life for decades. As much grief as Instagram has been getting lately, from lawsuits to constant criticism about what it does to people, the basic idea behind it is not new.

In the 1980s it was glossy fashion magazines filled with perfect hair, perfect homes, and polished lives that were never meant to be taken as a full picture. Everyone understood it was styled and selective. That was the point. It gave people something to admire, something to borrow from, something to aspire to in their own way.

Instagram is just the modern version of that same instinct. The difference is not the curation. The difference is that now certain lifestyles are not allowed to be aspirational without being picked apart.

This Isn’t New—Just Suddenly a Problem

If you want to see where this thinking comes from, it is not hard to find. There are entire frameworks built on the idea that traditional roles are limiting or harmful. This video breaks that down, tying modern tradwives to older feminist critiques that argue women in the home are not really choosing that life.

This whole video is a joke and the argument is easily dismantled.  It only works if you assume women are not capable of choosing this life for themselves.

Men and women are not the same, and they never have been. Different roles have always existed, and for many people, those roles still bring purpose and stability. Not every woman is unhappy, and not every traditional life needs to be picked apart.

At the end of the day, nobody is forcing anyone to live like this. You do not have to bake bread, raise kids, or live on a ranch. But the constant effort to tear it down makes you wonder if it is less about concern and more about the fact that it looks like a life a lot of people would find fulfilling.

Feature Image: AI-generated and edited in Canva Pro