One could say the late Phyllis Schlafly – a central figure in conservative family politics in the United States – was the original TradWife (traditional wife): a woman who believes in traditional gender roles in the home with the household structured with the male as the head and the female as submissive. Like Schlafly, TradWives hold a belief that women are better off with a gender hierarchy than in more equal arrangements (Stewart 2025). While Schlafly actively worked to successfully defeat the passing of the Equal Rights Amendment in the United States in the 1970s, these TradWives have shown up hawking goods on the ever-growing “momosphere” – a collection of blogs and social media posts that revolve around parenting, cooking, and crafting (Zappavigna & Zhao 2017; Mackenzie 2019; Mackenzie & Zhao 2021; Proctor 2022). With social media platforms such as Instagram showing #tradwives as thin, beautiful, white young women in vintage dresses and using terms such as “true calling,” and “old-fashioned values,” it has become a glorified identity. This new-yet-old role of women represents a family dynamic that completely counters any feminist progress made in recent decades and sets up a toxic example for young women to emulate. Our study aims to investigate a sample of multimodal texts extracted from the “ballerinafarm” Instagram account of Hannah Neeleman, the most prominent of all TradWives who with her seemingly effortless beauty runs a dairy farm and raises eight children without the help of her husband. “Her bucolic, old-fashioned lifestyle is both a masterclass in aesthetics and branding and an illiberal vision of traditional culture and lifestyle” (Shrewsbury 2025: 7). The fact that she has co-opted feminist rhetoric to defend herself by saying it is her choice (Bower 2024) continues to obscure how problematic this lifestyle is for women’s equality and in turn begins to normalize these illiberal ideas. A multimodal critical discourse analysis (Machin 2013; van Leeuwen 2013; Ledin & Machin 2018) approach will help to detect the most recurrent verbal and visual features in the data under investigation in order to verify to what extent discursive choices can reinforce anti-feminist attitudes and stereotypical gender roles.
#TradWives: Multimodal Discursive Constructions of a Backward Trend in Family Roles / Del Buono, Catherine; Zollo, Sole Alba. - (2025). (Intervento presentato al convegno Human, Humane, Humanities. Voices from the Anglosphere tenutosi a Università di Torino nel 11-13 September 2025).
#TradWives: Multimodal Discursive Constructions of a Backward Trend in Family Roles
Catherine Del Buono;Sole Alba Zollo
2025
Abstract
One could say the late Phyllis Schlafly – a central figure in conservative family politics in the United States – was the original TradWife (traditional wife): a woman who believes in traditional gender roles in the home with the household structured with the male as the head and the female as submissive. Like Schlafly, TradWives hold a belief that women are better off with a gender hierarchy than in more equal arrangements (Stewart 2025). While Schlafly actively worked to successfully defeat the passing of the Equal Rights Amendment in the United States in the 1970s, these TradWives have shown up hawking goods on the ever-growing “momosphere” – a collection of blogs and social media posts that revolve around parenting, cooking, and crafting (Zappavigna & Zhao 2017; Mackenzie 2019; Mackenzie & Zhao 2021; Proctor 2022). With social media platforms such as Instagram showing #tradwives as thin, beautiful, white young women in vintage dresses and using terms such as “true calling,” and “old-fashioned values,” it has become a glorified identity. This new-yet-old role of women represents a family dynamic that completely counters any feminist progress made in recent decades and sets up a toxic example for young women to emulate. Our study aims to investigate a sample of multimodal texts extracted from the “ballerinafarm” Instagram account of Hannah Neeleman, the most prominent of all TradWives who with her seemingly effortless beauty runs a dairy farm and raises eight children without the help of her husband. “Her bucolic, old-fashioned lifestyle is both a masterclass in aesthetics and branding and an illiberal vision of traditional culture and lifestyle” (Shrewsbury 2025: 7). The fact that she has co-opted feminist rhetoric to defend herself by saying it is her choice (Bower 2024) continues to obscure how problematic this lifestyle is for women’s equality and in turn begins to normalize these illiberal ideas. A multimodal critical discourse analysis (Machin 2013; van Leeuwen 2013; Ledin & Machin 2018) approach will help to detect the most recurrent verbal and visual features in the data under investigation in order to verify to what extent discursive choices can reinforce anti-feminist attitudes and stereotypical gender roles.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
