Tradwife vs. Tradwife: Even Christians Have Had Enough of Ballerina Farm

[Celerity]

A new wave of online personalities are pushing back against the unrealistic ideals pushed by the likes of Hannah Neeleman: “If you are a stay-at-home mom who makes the sourdough and only homeschools, you feel like you’re better than everybody else.”

https://www.vanityfair.com/style/story/tradwife-vs-tradwife-even-christians-have-had-enough-of-ballerina-farm

https://archive.ph/t2IZD


Hannah Neeleman rolling out dough at Ballerina Farm, in Kamas, Utah, November 7, 2024. Kim Raff/The New York Times/Redux.

For most of this year, Kyrie Luke has been telling her more than 72,000 YouTube subscribers that it’s time for Christian moms to renegotiate their relationship to the internet. She didn’t realize how important that advice would be until this September, when videos of Charlie Kirk’s killing rapidly began circulating online. Last month, Luke told Vanity Fair that while she never sought out footage of Kirk bleeding out, it appeared on her feeds anyway. “I was shocked, and I couldn’t sleep for days,” she says. “I was not meant to see that. I should not have seen that.”

Luke doesn’t post about the topics that would obviously put her in the Turning Point USA orbit, but Kirk and his organization’s characteristic melding of politics and faith have been so influential on the Christian internet that she was hearing commentary from her audience immediately. She films videos for the Transformed Homemakers Society, her channel and blog, from her home in Idaho, where she lives with her husband and three kids. Over the last five years, Luke has built a strong relationship with audience members, who come to her for domestic advice using principles gleaned from the Bible.

Luke is part of a wave of conservative Christian influencers whose content attempts to present a more realistic alternative to the pastoral ideal of TikTok tradwives. They’re building smaller but perhaps more engaged audiences across social media platforms, blogs, and alternative forums like Substack and Patreon. If the first tradwife era was about making the conservative lifestyle seem attractive, this new wave of influencers is trying to make it seem sustainable for women who have already chosen that path—even if retaining that audience means turning away from right-wing rage bait.

Luke started out as a basic domestic content creator, writing a recipe blog and decorating tips. “It was very surface level, talking about aesthetics and things like that,” she says. Eventually she started feeling overwhelmed by the demands of an unsustainable ideal and decided she needed to heal. “And I’m like, Is this our calling? Is this actually what God wants for us? Should women be doing this? Is this even healthy for us? This seems totally unsustainable.”

snip

[NewHendoLib]

1. We are in a time when absolutely nothing is real.

[keep_left]

3. Wow...you said it. That's what the kids call a "mic drop"!

Reminds me of a line from a movie.

(See 0:52-1:29).

?si=k-lKNU2QTsZf87SM

[NotHardly]

2. Discovering 1825 was a horror story for the 2025 life must be unnervingly uncomfortable for them.

Good

[tanyev]

4. So it's tradwifes who cook in normal clothes vs tradwifes who cook in low cut dresses?

The latter are selling something alright, but it ain’t their cooking. 🤨

[617Blue]

9. Just the right amount of cleavage...with a cross in the middle. *

[drmeow]

5. "But as time went on, she decided to get a postgraduate seminary degree."

Even the more "reasonable" tradwives have NO IDEA how much feminism changed their lives for the better. I just love the way they claim to get to go back to "a more traditional time" without defining when that time was, what the laws vs norms were of the time, and how all technology (from cars to TV to medicine to the internet) makes their "traditional time" nothing more than "picking and choosing the level of modernization I want to fit my preferred narrative." I'm sure Jesus will be SO IMPRESSED with their hypocrisy!

[jfz9580m]

6. Lots of freeloaders on feminism and democracy

Last edited Thu Dec 4, 2025, 06:33 AM - Edit history (1)

After looking at that, I can’t really see that I care about either kind.

[drmeow]

12. Anti-feminist grift

Get rich off telling *other* women that they belong in the kitchen.

travel the country
run a well-fueled nonprofit
run a blog
get paid for public speaking
run for public office
ignore their own children
etc

[allegorical oracle]

8. To your point, and disregarding the religious aspect of "the wifely role," I've spoken with

several women who've told me that they regretted opting to be stay-at-home moms. They were all about 20 years older than I was, and they appreciated our efforts to broaden womens' lifestyle choices. One neighbor, sitting in my living room, burst into tears as she said she will always wonder what she could have become had she made different decisions.

Attempted to reassure her that she reared two beautiful daughters and that her decisions were likely the right ones at the time she made them. But it is clear to me that women must be free to choose the course of their lives.

[yardwork]

10. Entitled.

They are entitled. You are exactly on point. The rights we and our mothers fought for allow young women in the U.S. to choose from options.

My mother loved her job and hated traditional women's work. She would have been miserable. And she grew up in the 1950s when women were expected to be domestic goddesses. She rejected that.

[milestogo]

11. It sounds like the fifties all over again. Betty Friedan wrote about it:

In 1963 Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique:

The Feminine Mystique begins with an introduction describing what Friedan called "the problem that has no name"—the widespread unhappiness of women in the 1950s and early 1960s. She discusses the lives of several housewives from around the United States who were unhappy despite living in material comfort and being married with children. Friedan also questions the women's magazine, women's education system, and advertisers for creating this widespread image of women. The detrimental effects induced by this image were that it cornered women into the domestic sphere, and that it led many women to lose their own identities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feminine_Mystique