Tradwives – from the Shtetl to Your TikTok Feed

The woman on my Instagram screen is talking about gender. Her dark brown hair is almost the same color as mine, but pin-straight where mine is curly. She’s wearing an elaborate confection of eyeshadow, the most colorful point in an otherwise neutral ensemble, and lamenting the state of masculinity, femininity, the male gaze—and, for some reason, the market for summer sundresses.

In the comments, her followers don’t seem happy. Some are accusing her of being “a secret liberal,” while others, who it would appear identify as liberal themselves, are making jokes about her brother.

The woman on the screen is Abby Roth, better known as Classically Abby, sister of the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, and she has been trying to brand herself as the internet’s Jewish “tradwife.” She’s been attempting this for years, without much success, but it’s not entirely surprising.

Tradwife mania still holds sway, but not for Abby.

Over the past few years, the “tradwife” (traditional wife, in internet lingo) movement has inspired a lot of spilled ink online. It consists of married women, often but not always with children, who take on a domestic role, eschewing paid labor (except, of course, for online content creation, as many of them have brand deals, capitalizing on their followings). They describe themselves as returning to an allegedly “older” way of life, with vintage clothing, homestead-style farming, and a distrust of modern science and medicine, particularly vaccines and pasteurized milk. Many gentile figures in the “movement,” like Hannah Neeleman, whose brand Ballerina Farm has used the tradwife aesthetic to sell everything from baking tools to sides of expensive grass-fed beef, claim to be largely apolitical. But, there is a right-wing lean, often of the MAGA variety, in tradwife spaces.

My own interest in tradwives came as a feminist, a historian and a Jewish woman myself. The openly reactionary nature of much tradwife content, often tinged with digs at working women, women without children, and the wide swath of women who don’t want to marry a man, is obviously disturbing. And to me, the tradwife movement isn’t merely reactionary or troubling—it doesn’t make sense.

Self-styled tradwives online often deliberately invoke specific eras. The 1950s are far and away the most popular, with tradwife influencers sporting the A-line skirts and frilled aprons of that decade, but others, particularly adherents to the homesteading arm of tradwife content, hearken back to the nineteenth century. Their flowing, ankle-length dresses and ruched sleeves are hyperfeminine, can be very attractive, and are highly social media-friendly, so it should come as no surprise that the look is popular.

But women of the past actually lived and worked in ways that would appall modern tradwives. Women living on farms in the nineteenth (and well into the twentieth) century wouldn’t have baked cookies in enchanting dresses—they would have been doing backbreaking farm labor from dawn until dusk in uncomfortable clothes. In the cities, women would have worked in crowded, stifling factories, in industrial laundries where death by scalding was always a risk, in shops and cafes and grocery stores, or cleaning other people’s houses.

The concept of the stay-at-home mother, let alone stay-at-home wife (a tradwife concept), was a historical rarity. While wealthy women may have had the luxury of being full-time homemakers, the vast majority of women have always worked.

Records of entrepreneurial Jewish women, and Jewish women breadwinners, go back as far as biblical times. The “Woman of Valor” of Proverbs is, if anything, the inverse of a tradwife—she’s a “rise and grind” woman who manages multiple employees and commercial real estate holdings, enabling her husband to spend his time in non-commercial pursuits, like religious study.

The idea of Jewish womanhood being linked to real work isn’t confined to scriptures. History is filled with examples of Jewish women who saw no conflict between their Jewishness, their womanliness, and their careers. As far back as the thirteenth century, we have records of Licoricia of Winchester, a Jewish woman who worked in finance, and through a network of strategic marriages for herself and her children, as well as her personal business acumen, built a financial empire that granted her connections to King Henry III of England—as well as fruitful collaborations with other Anglo-Jewish women in finance.

Centuries later, the diaries of Glückel of Hameln would tell the story of her life as a German-Jewish wife, mother, daughter, and businesswoman. Her diaries, which have been translated into an array of languages from their original Yiddish, are not only an important historical source on pre-modern European Jewish life; they’re also the recollections and thoughts of one educated, accomplished woman.

Glückel of Hameln was a respected community member, married twice and the mother of 15 children, two of whom she lost in infancy or early childhood (her diary was intended to serve as a form of will for her surviving children), but she was also in the jewelry business. While she was in some ways unusual for a Jewish woman in conducting solo international business travel, she also faced no obstacles in taking over and successfully running a business after the death of her first husband.

Glückel’s spiritual fellows were found all over the shtetls of Eastern Europe, into the twentieth century. The nineteenth-century ideal for Ashkenazi womanhood was a woman who was not only entrepreneurial, but so financially successful that she could enable her husband to study Torah full time. The Ashkenazi families who immigrated to the United States in large numbers at the turn of the twentieth century embraced the
woman-as-homemaker model not out of sexism so much as a desire to assimilate to what they saw as American gender norms.

Which brings us back to Classically Abby, the internet’s Jewish-tradwife-in-waiting. Abby Roth, may actually be hearkening back to the immigrant women of the early twentieth century in her desire to assimilate to an American, Christian ideal. Where Roth stumbles in her quest to join them is twofold. One, many of the internet’s tradwives are sympathetic to, if not outright affiliated with, a white supremacist ideology that excludes Jewish women by its nature. All of them. In fact, Roth has received antisemitic abuse from commenters who generally approve of “tradwife” content.

This is not to say there aren’t modern Jewish women who work as influencers in the homemaking space. There are lots! Lifestyle influencers come in all shapes and sizes and religious backgrounds, as the rise of Orthodox women’s content on Instagram shows us. But the Orthodox influencers of Instagram, despite their love of modest fashion and homemade challah, don’t style themselves as tradwives, exactly. They’re Orthodox Jewish women, and they are living in today’s world. Their content isn’t about lamenting the state of the wider world and trying to retreat; often, they’re attempting to impact women who are already part of their community, and according to a Tablet profile on Orthodox influencers, many have built followings by “speaking openly about issues that have held some degree of taboo in the community, including topics like infertility struggles, pregnancy loss, mental health, women’s sexuality, and sexual health.”

There are also some accounts in the extended Jewish algorithm in which users with big followings beckon those of us who are just scrolling with the more attractive trappings of a wholesome looking coded-frum lifestyle: headscarves, kids running in the backyard, prepping for holidays. These include Iola Kostrzewski (@thatkindofhomesteader) and Simcha Sher (@gentle_jew). These women are often talking about a mix of topics such as Israel, Zionism, antisemitism and Jewish continuity—as well as feminism and antiracism—but in a cheeky, soundbite way. The headscarves and babies might indicate an aspirational Jewish mother ideal, but these influencers are not tradwives either. Tradwives are explicitly, and by definition, antifeminist—it’s a pretty major part of Williams, Roth, and even Neelman’s accounts and the broader movement. My take? You can’t use feminism to attract people to your tradwife account any more than you can use steak recipes to attract people to your vegan blog.

Despite all the negativity from Abby’s gentile counterparts about women working, being an online tradwife is a business, and in fact can be highly profitable. Content that’s created to be seen can lead to sponsorships and brand deals—even the launch of an offline business, as the Neelemans, whose Ballerina Farm website features the opportunity to buy an “enamel sourdough bowl” for seventy-five dollars, have shown. Meanwhile, on Australian tradwife Jasmine Darke’s Instagram, you’ll find a link to her affiliate brands—which range from clothing to nutritional supplements. The market for Jewish tradwife content is small to non-existent; the virality doesn’t catch. For a wannabe Jewish tradwife like Roth, I suspect there’s just no built-in audience to match that of her gentile, and particularly explicitly Christian, counterparts.

On Instagram, I know a few people who follow and engage with Classically Abby and her content. Many say they are doing so ironically, or because they research cultural phenomena. But one of these women seems to genuinely enjoy some of Abby’s videos about fashion or holiday prep. This woman is an observant Jew, and has a career in public service. Other women I know, whose engagement has been critical or ironic, have
careers in the arts, in media, as entrepreneurs. Many of them are happily married or partnered; many have children. They each have their own political views, ways of working, and of living their Jewishness and loving their families.

Maybe, as Lilith consistently shows, because so many Jewish women are living lives that are already explicitly in dialogue with the traditions of their families, culture and ancestors—whether secular or religious—there isn’t that appetite for fake nostalgia that tradwives tap into.

We’re in the real world, negotiating tradition and change all the time.

Ellery Weil is an American in London, who holds a Ph.D. from University College London, where she studied turn-of-the-century Jewish women’s activism.