The Rest Is Entertainment - Have Tradwives Killed Feminism?

Episode Date: May 19, 2026

Marina Hyde and her guest James Kanagasooriam dive into the world of influencer Tradwives, the trend of women that have rejected modernity and instead are embracing a bygone age of homemaking and misogyny. Welcome to the VIBE SHIFT - a new bonus series exploring the drastic changes in culture we've experienced in the last decade. If you enjoyed this episode - join our club at therestisentertainment.com The Rest is Entertainment is brought to you by Octopus Energy, Britain's most awarded energy supplier. Lloyds. 250 years on and still backing the nation's aspirations. Join The Rest Is Entertainment Club: Unlock the full experience of the show – with exclusive bonus content, ad-free listening, early access to Q&A episodes, access to our newsletter archive, discounted book prices with our partners at Coles Books, early ticket access to live events, and access to our chat community. Sign up directly at therestisentertainment.com For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com Video Editor: Imee Marriott Assistant Producer: Imee Marriott Senior Producer: Joey McCarthy Social Producer: Bex Tyrrell Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hello and welcome to this special bonus series of The Resters Entertainment with me, Marina Hyde. And James Kanagosurio. Well, this is a turnout for the books. I am so happy to be joined by you today, James. For any of our listeners, an audience who don't know, James is an absolutely brilliant pollster, an all-around great guy. He is the chief polling officer of focal data.

He's worked on how many election campaigns here and around the world? have you worked on a lot. Double digits. Double digits. Unbelievable. He coined the term the Red Wall, which turned out to be quite a consequential piece of our political language. Three weeks before Kirstarmer was elected, he talked about his Sandcastle coalition. This was the idea that despite the likelihood that Kistama would win a huge landslide, it was like a sandcastle, his victory built on nothing stable and liable to be washed away extremely fast. I guess everybody makes mistakes. You know, it's solid, solid as a medieval fort, his castle. But enough of politics because as that brilliant pollster,

James is plugged into all the currents and trends in public opinion that shape our world. And in this series, we are going to look at some aspects of entertainment and culture with that brilliant analytical eye. James, hello. Hello, Marina. I'm looking forward to this one in an advised way. We're talking about tradwives, the whole culture. content. Now, I will have to begin because what are tradwives? Tadwives, it became a thing as a sort of internet trend, so we can immediately be suspicious of it. But it's a sort of submission to your

husband in traditional gender roles. It promotes financial dependence on men. He's the breadwinner. He makes all the key financial decisions. It's different from stay-at-home mothers. We should say that because there's lots of stay-at-home mothers who wouldn't describe themselves as Tad-Wise. What does it involve? If you're online and you're one, it involves a lot of breadmaking, homeschool lesson plans. The Christian elements are often very strong. In terms of content, which is watched, by the way, by a lot of people who are not tradwives. So I don't know how we hate watching is always an interesting thing, but we can talk about that.

Baking bread, like I said, homeschooling, cleaning by candlelight, really elaborate school lunches that you could never. flower ranging. It's all sort of aesthetically appealing. There's a kind of prairie wife homesteading thing to it all. Some of the big ones in terms of content are, there's Nara Smith and she's got modelling and sponsorship, and she's got a massive social audience. There's Hannah Nealman.

She's like a business and media brand called Ballerina Farm. She used to be a Julia Ballerina, but sadly had to give that up after her husband insisted on her getting married immediately, and she's now got, I want to say, eight children. She's also got a multi-million dollar media brand and millions of followers. I guess what I'd say to you first, James, is, is tradwife culture big, or do we just think it is?

I found myself in a conference last year about culture, and it was fine, it was quite good. And a guy called Adam Alexic, who calls himself the etymologist nerd, gave a talk, and it was on tradwifes. And I think he's one of the world's experts on tradwives. And I remember at the time being like, what am I doing? Why am I here?

Why am I not at home? He's basically, he's an American-based guy. He's very, very clever. He basically has analysed where trad wives have come from, why they're important, what it says about America's culture, kind of over my whole world. And I was pretty skeptical at first because I was like, what is this? This sounds pretty weird.

As you say, it's a name. Can I just say it is weird? It is weird. It's an internet meme that he thinks came from, 4chan, very well-trusted source of information in 2019. But I hadn't quite understood how embedded it is basically in meme culture. Yeah. So it comes from, he thinks, where he calls the Wojack character.

Have you come across the Wojack character? You've probably seen the cartoon. It's the cartoon that's like of a guy that's kind of drawn where he's kind of grimacing. That's apparently called the Wojack character, which is a big meme. And he described this as basically Tradwife came about for as a... meme from 4chan where you basically

had Chad who's the idealised attractive man and then trad wife is his wife and they are part of what a dialectic

I know this sounds completely ridiculous with Duma Girl and Duma Boy who are memes themselves and this became like a thing in 2019 because I tell you

when they're out there making their sad though you're not thinking about any of this no but the provenance I think is really kind of important and basically it just

took a life of its own People saw that. It became a thing. It took a life of its own. The reason why I thought it was really interesting, a couple of things. First of all, Adam saw it in a much larger context, TradWire. So if you go on Instagram and you look at Ballerino Farm and then these other things, the other thing is the colour palette, kind of slightly sepia, sepia coloured, lots of pinks, lots of golds, lots of rose.

It's a completely different lifestyle. And it's obviously not that trad because these people are making millions and it's literally being filmed all day. But it has millions of followers. I was talking to someone at the Times who was saying their articles on Tradwife went off a scale in terms of traffic. So people are fascinated by this. Is it part of like burnout culture and things like that? You know, I went to Versailles of my daughter about two weekends ago. If you really walk a long way you get to Marie Antoinette's hallow, you know, which is, you know, when you can't really deal with the hecticness and the burnout of the actual palace and the court, you want your getaway fake place where you dye your sheet pink and you play it.

some kind of shepherdess. And we know that the pastoral idol has been going for genuinely, like, hundreds of years, millennia, millennia. Yeah. I mean, I'm not going to say that, you know, those people were quite quitting. But were they? Well, luckily. Well, the romantics quite quitting.

I think there are two very different things basically going on. King's College London looked at this. So Julia Gillard, the ex-prime minister of Australia, has led a research project onto Tradwife with King's College London and we've run some research on it as well we've been looking at it. So since I met Adam, I was slightly,

I just couldn't believe I'd miss this whole kind of vector of humanity that I had no idea what was going on. So I was like, I better take a look at this. So we did some polling and King's College London have also done some work.

The first thing to kind of note is that people are quite ambivalent about it. It's not as hated as I think you would expect it. No, some people, there's a yearning and we're definitely going to be using that word a lot in this series, but there is a yearning

for that simplicity. I think so we poll both the US and the UK because we had a hypothesis that people in the UK might be slightly different and in the UK about a third of the public we described it pretty neutrally. It's this particular life, you take on a certain role, the man does X, the woman does Y, it happens to this kind of cultural and aesthetic context,

fine, without judgment. And about a third of people in the UK thought that sounded quite nice. 44% of people went, uh, didn't really know, didn't have the view, 22% of people. So basically just above one and five. In the US, slightly more positive, 42% more positive.

40% said, don't know, 70% were negative. But again, it's not that the cultural penetration of Tradwife isn't that high. In the UK, only one in seven people. I actually knew what it was and could explain it. So I'm interested in what they think. And it's not how people live. It's not at all. Because people live in households where both people work.

Or you have kind of more traditional setups that you would never describe as Tradwife. And it wouldn't. It's not a stay-at-home mother. And it wouldn't be people having eight kids and a secret Instagram. account that wasn't secret at all, that earned them hundreds of thousands of pounds a month. But the awareness is quite low. 64% of people in the UK had literally never heard of what a trad wife was. But when we kind of looked into it, around half the public said they found aspects of it

admirable and people should be free to choose. 20% of people felt conflicted. They were like, I don't know. 16% of people just thought it was backwards. And one in seven, which is where I put myself, were pretty suspicious of it and thought it was kind of a social media performance. But if you go underneath the surface and you talk... I'm with you.

Is this about burnout? The answer is partially. Part of its appeal comes from people who feel burnt out and see something simpler and a hundred percent. So we asked people who said, oh, that sounds okay without much context, right? They've never really known about it. We asked them one question about it. The top reason that people thought that it sounded appealing was the ability to focus on children

without feeling guilty about not working. In other words, working and having kids is quite tough. This seems like kind of basically an exit route out of that kind of tension. The second top reason was it was a slower, simpler pace of life compared to modern work culture. So people are saying something about the modern way of working. And then the third, so the top three reasons basically are about stress, freedom of stress and pressure of a professional career. When you look at the people who are doing it, and I think that Hannah Nealman is a case in point,

I mean, she is a massive brand. As I said, she was a ballerina. She's now a farm wife. There have been various interviews with her and the husband, and he never lets her off or on her own. The comments underneath, there are people saying, this is reproductive abuse. This is like an episode of Law and Order Special Victims Unit.

She's exhausted. She's doing a beauty pageant 11 days after she's given birth and she's only to stop bleeding. It's all really intense. It's equally even those with fewer than 100,000 followers can earn several thousand dollars a month. Some who've got 300,000 followers, they're earning $40,000 a month.

These women are earning much, much more than our husbands. Some of them say, I don't even know how much I am. He deals with all of that for me. But it's like, but you are a mogul. The trad wives, a lot of the trad wives, are moguls or want to be moguls. And why do you think it is that people are, who don't agree with it?

Why is it of such interest, right? It's gone seriously viral. It's an easy way for a newspaper to get traffic. Well, I tell you why, there's a lot of that stuff. What I now have to feel I have to call like social media like Ocent, which is people who just want to find flaws in influences stories, like they're doing detective work to expose them and say you're not who you say you are. And actually these people, more than anyone, offer the most simple way to do that.

It's like you're presenting yourself as this kind of prelapse area and pastoral beauty thing. And yet there must be, there's probably two cameras. on you at any one time. This is a massive business. You are earning money via platforms that we don't think of as having anything to do with farming. People love to see through it. And also, I'm sorry to say, people love to see plot lines in families that they follow. And they love to say, oh, my God, can you believe they're doing that to that child?

And there's been lots of exposos of YouTube families where people say, oh, my God, the mother gets them up every morning and they have to do this. It's really bad. Look how sad she's looking in this. Obviously, there's things like Tattle Life in this country, but across Reddit, across everywhere, there are people dissecting this stuff and saying, this is not what we're being sold. We're watching, they're almost doing those kind of Netflix documentaries, true life documentaries

about stories of abuse. I'm not suggesting that anyone particularly that I mentioned here at all is involved in one those, but that people want to say there's such a gap between the image and the thing. And that's what people want to think about what they're shown for whatever reason, maybe because they're just shown so much these days. And they hate influences as a class, really, generally, that people don't like influencers. Or they say they don't.

They spend a lot of time with them for people who don't like them. To me, it feeds into lots of conspiracy theories, which is the thing you're being told is not true. And it fits in with that conspiracist sight, guys. So on that, on the topic of conspiracy mindsets, I mentioned this guy called the etymology nerd. Yeah. Real name, Adam Alexic,

this kind of American young 25-year-old. who's a bit of a kind of sage about Mahar where it's come from. He's tracked. That's Make America healthy again. Make America healthy again. But also, trad wipes. Yeah.

And he said, look, it is about how people work and burnout and a sense that it's hard to have a career and to bring up kids and about tradeoffs and economic tradeoffs. But he was far more interested in the cultural atmospherics around what he calls returnism versus futurism. And I remember being like, what's this guy talking about?

And I think what Adam was saying is that basically there is a growing orb of people in America, and I would say across the West, whose primary atmospherics are about nature, about analog, about nostalgia, about being anti-tech. It was very interesting. And that is related to other kind of aesthetics, like he mentioned something called Cottage Corps. I was like, what's... Oh, yeah. Well, I was going to talk about this when we talked about trends, but yes. Neoloddism. Yeah.

And anti-AI. I read a survey last week, America, big, big survey, which found that something like 47% of Gen Zda's want to live in the past. Right. And he was saying, look, there's this kind of axis of American culture where, you know, some of it is returnism versus the futurism, which is about tech, this abundance kind of theory that's come out of Silicon Valley and accelerationism, which is people who believe that the way is forward to embrace change, to go more, to go higher. is like avowedly kind of capitalist. And he was saying, right, you can talk about left-right, you can talk about Republican-Democrat. If you really want to understand Tradwives, yes, it has kind of Republican versus Democrat coding. We've got some kind of polling on that, both in the US, but also how that transfers over to the UK.

But he talks about this new axis of returnism versus futurism. And he was just like the aesthetics of Tradwife are absolutely critical, as you were saying, to Cottage Corps in this survey of 47% of people who want to live in a cottage, which is somewhere along the lines, urbanism, futurism, a kind of culture that steers towards the future, is not quite there. Now, we're going to be talking in later episodes about music and Taylor Swift and music tastes. Yeah. And genericism. Genericism and the role of the past.

But this is actually quite a similar theme, which is that Tradwife is a kind of window into an alternative and other future that is far more rural. It's not just about gender roles and the polling around that and how people feel about. that. It's about saying actually maybe there's a different way of living, attracts people maybe potentially hear a bit more conspiracy-minded as well. It does strike me as well when I think of all the type of content that they produce. And, you know, I listed all those things like cleaning by candlelight and making these incredibly detailed school lunches, things like this. All of these are things which 100% you would not imagine AI will ever do. Right. And all of the things that are happening there,

you think people feel like this is something that I could hang on to. And actually the things that they are watching, are very, very human, even though it's kind of ridiculous because they're being done on the platforms and they're being done for money and they're making huge amounts of money and what have you. But the things that you are watching in that slightly weird way that, you know, sort of King Charles kind of fetishizes those Romanian peasants. He thinks Romania is this kind of amazing idyll. And I read a very interesting article shortly before he was crowned and he sort of went

and thought it was absolutely wonderful. And it's like, but actually the people don't have any shoes and what they really, really want a satellite television and they want to, they want the world. And that's the axis. Well, that actually comes out from the polling. So we asked people in the UK, who do you think supports tradwives as a movement? The top one was nobody, because this is a very American phenomenon. It's not an American, it's not a British one.

First was Trump. Second was Farage. So that's political coding. The third one was the Princess of Wales at 18%. Fourth was Andrew Tate. The fifth was Nigella Lawson. God, that's, isn't that interesting? And then King Charles was also in the top ten.

Isn't that interesting? Because actually, think of the content the Princess of Wales makes as an influencer, all the kind of I've survived cancer and I've done it via going back to nature and these incredibly weird, I mean, I think odd, sepia, controlled versions of a form of influencing, really. But it taps into something that I think is actually super mainstream, which is the changes that we see in the world. People are largely beginning to think actually this change. in this kind of future

accelerationism isn't benefiting me. Whether that's technology. And it may discard me entirely. Yeah, whether that's housing, whether that's how people live, whether that's what you do, whether that's how you bring up your kids. There is a strong mainstream seem of public opinion

across both the US and the UK that maybe there is a way of looking back that is nostalgic, that actually is a better way to live. The reason why I think you get a huge numbers of people who are like, no, I'm not tribal wife. I wouldn't want to do that. I'm suspicious of it.

but actually there are parts of it that I understand, that I like. I think it sits on that bed of maybe backwards is better. And I think we haven't talked about the role of AI and the polling that came out of this, but Adam was very, very clear. He's a really, really interesting guy. I was in America recently, and I was like, let's meet up. And he was like, sorry, I can't answer my phone. And I was like, why?

And he was like, well, I'm hanging out with the Neo-Loddite no phone community in New York. And he's spending time with them. And I found that super interesting because he's true. tracking what atmospherics are linked to what, and the fact that he's already made that jump from Tradwife to basically no phone usage, which is obviously one of the key things that we're all now talking about, right, which is like people going back to Nokia 3210, that's not Tradwife, but that's, you know, that's somewhere halfway in between. No, all of this is friction maxing or what everyone says, you know, or whatever it is, just making it

harder. The dopamine hits coming less vast, basically. And yet what is obviously the big contradiction is that every single person is, you know, looking at this on their phone. Not that he's the total Jedi on the subject. But Adam was saying that the online aesthetics are now shaping offline behavior. But basically there's now this paradoxical loop where you've got all of these people who are doing lots of offline stuff.

And then they simply come back online to say what they have done. So there's like a call and response feedback loop. So there's a huge amount of social media content of people being like, right, I'll see you in a day. I'm going to go and do all of these different things like grounding and making this and doing this and cutting wood and doing this. and X, Y, Z, and then I'm going to return and talk about it. Dutifully talk about it. I want to talk about this on another one of our episodes, I have to say, because I, yeah,

I think a lot of people work for the platforms. This episode is brought to you by Lloyd's. Now, I love it when characters are part of the club. You wouldn't know anything about that. Would you, Richard? The Thursday Murder Club in some ways reminds me of the A-team. I would now like to map each of those characters onto the A-team and feel I probably could. I mean, Elizabeth is Hannibal and it's not even close.

That's exactly right. is Howling Mad Murdoch. Well, there are definite perks to being in a club. Just ask the members of Club Lloyds, because with Club Lloyds, you can bank on Lloyds to give you more wherever you are. If you join Club Lloyds, there's all sorts of benefits you can choose between. There's, for example, six free cinema tickets. They've got an annual coffee club and Gourmet Society membership, which would be mine.

And also something that the Thursday Murder Club would enjoy very, very much indeed. To top it all off, you have fee-free spending abroad, which means wherever you are, you won't be charged by Lloyd's to use your debit card when you're. you're travelling. Now joining this club costs £5 per month, but that is refunded in any month that you pay £2,000 into your account. Now that is a club that's worth being part of. Check out clubloids today. You'll need to be a UK resident and aged 18 or over to apply. I mean, the other thing about the link between Make America Healthy again. So you've given the kind of background to that. It's kind of forefronted by RFK. This idea that modern technology and modern science

is only truth adjacent, right? And there are other wider truths that you can kind of tap into. It's very, very deep. And that was the kind of the secret cohort of people that kind of Trump, particularly in 2024, was really picking up on. And I think it was absolutely critical

to his election victory and actually his brand and how he comes across is this maha adjacency. And actually when we polled the US, we asked the same question of Americans, like, who do you think supports trad wives? Same people you'd expect come up top three. Trump, J.D. Vance, and then the fourth is RFK.

Yeah. So he's a, I think we can really underplay the cultural impact of RFK, you know, eating roadkill, right? Yeah. As well as being a secretary. Because it's sort of adjacent to that, I'm just a girl thing online where people kind of fetishize some form of female incapabilities. You can imagine I hate this. Is it the end of feminism? No, I mean, feminism and polling is a whole book.

I should hope so. whole show. I think, again, our friends at King's College London, in looking at Tradwife, had a look at some of the polling on feminism. And actually, I have a colleague at another firm called Scarlett Maguire, who's recently done some polling on the role of young women for the new statesman. Very interesting. Broadly, if you ask people, are you positive or negative about feminism? In the UK, it's like 51% of men, say positive, 17% say negative. So big ratio positive to negative, but substantial minority. Women is 69%. and 8%. So broadly, people are not necessarily wanting to get rid of that paradigm. But what I would also say is that obviously there is a divergence occurring. And that female male difference, right, is even more accentuated if you ask not just someone's gender, but whether they're coupled up or not, whether they're single. So if you are a single man who's not in a relationship, only 42% feel positive about feminism and the same number is 20% negative. Whereas if you are a single man who is not in a relationship, only 42% feel positive about feminism. And the same number is 20% negative. Whereas if you,

you are a woman who is in a relationship, that's 71% to 9. So again, you're talking about a kind of two to one ratio being outstripped by a kind of almost eight to one ratio the other way. So things are more complicated. On balance, almost every group is kind of pro it. But you are starting to see far more conditionality, right, in the polling around it, which was like, I think there was one particular question that I thought was very interesting, which was like, have things gone too far?

And if you look at that polling, those polling numbers are much closer together. People have always said that. And they have always had said that. But you think about, when I think about polling and you think about cultural shifts that have occurred, you used to have this thesis that there's a great arc of liberalisation, right? Yeah. Just simply... I don't think that anymore.

And I reckon a lot fewer of us think it now. It's simply not the case. Things can unfold. I think it's far more interesting that kind of gap, I guess, between younger women. and younger men is it comes out far more in other questions not to do with feminism, but to do with other issues. So I found really curious in Scarlett's polling. Yeah. Which wasn't, it got a write up in the new statesman a little bit, but I thought it's far

more interesting that men, if you ask, is the UK a racist country? Which is interesting, right? We're talking about adjacencies here. We've got this whole kind of nostalgia adjacency of tradwives. You've then got, what's the link to feminism? And then I'm like, oh, you look at the polling. Isn't it interesting that 29% of men think that the UK is a racist country, but 57% don't. But the plurality of women do. 43% women think that Britain is a racist country, UK is, and 38% don't.

And that's super interesting, because you've got all these other questions of culture that actually are flip far more and a far more kind of culturally important and predictive. And so when I think about what is the Mahar, Tradwife, Cottage Corps, Neo-Loddy, returnism, or whatever. Maxim. Yeah, whatever you want to call it. I think it is slightly separate to a liberal conservative axis. I think it bakes in this sense that maybe the future holds more terrors than the past.

And also the fact that maybe accelerating fast towards the future of AI, urbanisation, of all of these different things, may not be the best thing. As I said, all of those things that you see them doing can't really be done or nor would they ever be done by AI. But rather in the same way that you see people are kind of wanting to have more live experiences. All of these things are, which again, they take more time to do and they're harder to get to and they're what have you. But all of these things are a form of flight from what they're being encouraged to do, which is to run joyfully towards their insinitative future. You look at the polling and it's just any of the research, right, and people are going to spend on average like anywhere between five and, you know, 15 to 20 years on their phone. So every family now has a new family, permanent family member, and it's called your phone.

I want to talk about this when we talk about trends and trend culture a lot and the spirit of the age. So I'm going to have to pause it there. But I loved talking about this subject with you in an advised way. Thank you, James. Thank you, Marina. See you next time. See you next time. Well, I hope you enjoyed that chat with James Kanagher story,

and we have got five more of those episodes to come. We are covering Gen Z's obsession with labeling everything, whether Timothy Shalame was right about opera and ballet. That's a huge question amongst many of you. How Martin Lewis could actually go about becoming the next prime minister, and if my beloved Taylor Swift is, in fact, just really basic and generic. Join the card now at the rest isentertainment.com for these bonus episodes, plus ad free listening, a brilliant weekly newsletter and early access to all our big interviews.

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