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Lowe's. We help, you save. We begin this week's episode in reporter Jessica Glazer's kitchen.
Let's go, crew. Mama, what about chicken nuggets?
I want to share with you a dinner innovation I came up with for my family.
It's called charcuterie dinner, and I'm a little bit proud of it.
Charcuterie dinner is dinner with pigs, avocados, and sometimes chicken nuggets.
All right, go wash your hands, please. Hey, Mom.
Dinner times are chaotic in my house, and this is an easy way to get dinner on the table.
It starts with cheese and crackers and dried fruit and usually chicken nuggets, and then I also do leftovers.
So whatever's in the fridge, I throw it on the cutting board.
I try to make it look nice, not for the kids, who are one and four, but for me.
I like to tinker with a little artistry if I can manage it.
But to be honest, I usually can't manage it.
Cooking with little kids around is no easy thing.
One of them likes to wrap herself around my leg, which makes it hard to walk.
And the other is always saying, mama, look.
And if I wanted to cook before they got home, I only have like 12 minutes between when work ends and they come home.
It's not enough time. Okay. But then last year, Jessica was laid off from her job.
All of a sudden, she went from having just 12 minutes of quiet before the kids came home to a lot more time to menu plan, to prep, to dream.
And it was right around this time when Tradwives entered her life.
You've probably heard of them. Tradwives are a bit of a cultural lightning rod.
They're a bit controversial in their portrayal of women in the kitchen.
The vibes can get a little barefoot and pregnant, to be honest.
And yet, there was something about them that called out to me.
Today on Proof from America's Test Kitchen, Jessica examines women's complex relationship to trad wives and what we can learn from homemaker influencers from a century before who used their kitchen work to connect with other women.
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Hey, Proof listeners, it's Morgan Bulling.
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Reporter Jessica If you've ever been laid off before, then you know the sudden crush of downtime that follows.
I fill that time with more Netflix and more scrolling on my phone.
And sometimes both at the same time. The daytime hours for me started to blur until one day I'm on TikTok and a video snags my attention.
I stop scrolling and I start to watch as an idyllic scene unfolds.
Today was a beautiful but very rainy day on the farm.
You can see a rustic kitchen on a farm in northern Utah.
Outside, the hills rise up and a herd of cows graze nearby.
Inside, there's a blonde woman gently laying a baby down to sleep.
Then we see her in the kitchen, measuring out milk and flour into a bowl.
And I was craving homemade bread, homemade jam.
So we got started on einkorn sandwich bread.
That's Hannah Neelaman. Her account is called Ballerina Farm because she's a Juilliard-trained ballerina turned homesteader.
Hannah has eight kids. The oldest is 13, and the youngest is still in diapers.
Plus, she's got over 22 million followers across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.
She's been profiled in The New York Times, The Times of London, and mentioned in countless other articles, often with a pretty healthy dose of hand-wringing.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. I want to linger at this hillside farm, where Hannah, if her videos are to be believed, spends a lot of time elbow-deep in a bowl of dough or making homemade butter.
She's usually barefoot or in socks, and she speaks in this calm, soothing, almost monotone voice.
Her kitchen is stocked with items you'd see in a glossy magazine spread.
A yellow enamel bowl the color of butter.
A cutting board with these lovely scalloped edges.
And in the corner, a happy little baby in a high chair, gnawing on an apple.
I ached for some semblance of this scene.
The leisure of it. The space to cook something lovely.
The absence of whining children. I dream.
If you want a piece of this rustic life, you can actually buy a lot of these items on her website.
The enamel bowl costs $74. The cutting board, which was sold out the last time I looked, costs $240.
And you can buy beef and pork grown on her farm.
She's offering you a slice of the fantasy she's creating.
It's a fantasy, but it's also her business.
Some content creators with an audience of her size can earn hundreds of thousands of dollars per month.
So Ballerina Farm is clearly doing something right.
And for me, there was one particular video that really got me.
My gateway video. At church on Sunday, we started talking about how we can be better neighbors to each other.
It starts with Hannah and three of her kids putting on aprons in the hallway and then heading outside, where her daughter does a cartwheel set against these rolling hills.
And someone chimed in and said that whenever she's sick, She knows that her one neighbor is going to bring over her famous cabbage soup.
First of all, I love the idea of being known for your famous cabbage soup.
And I also love that this neighbor was taking over her soup to anyone that was sick around her.
And so when I got home, I knew what we were going to have for lunch.
It was going to be cabbage soup. So we went to the garden and we yanked out all of our cabbages.
The cabbages are the size of basketballs.
One of her sons cuts a handful of herbs, and they head inside.
Then we see Hannah making the meal, chopping shallots and garlic, making pork meatballs, simmering in bone broth.
And it turned out amazing. We had it for lunch.
We had it for dinner. The family loved it, she says.
To serve, I put some sharp cheese and a hefty squeeze of lemon.
And as far as I can tell, I'm not sure who else ate the soup besides the family.
But it all looked so lovely. She got an idea that morning for a meal, she said.
And for lunch that same day, they made it.
No meltdowns, no rushing, at least that I could see.
And a delicious meal. Meanwhile, I'm sitting in my kitchen.
I'd recently had a baby. Then a month after returning to work, I was laid off.
I now had the time to cook something nice, but definitely not the capacity.
And to be honest, I was in a bit of a daze.
Ballerina Farm's videos let me forget that for a moment.
But I'm no dummy. I know that her videos create a well-crafted fantasy, one that millions of others also either enjoy or hate watch or mix of the two.
Hannah might be the most popular trad wife, but she doesn't use that term.
The basic definition is a married woman who embraces, quote, traditional gender roles like cooking and homemaking and shares that lifestyle online.
The tradwife ecosystem is pretty large, and not all tradwives are the same.
But the trend overall is viewed as pretty conservative.
Ballerina Farm is quieter about her views, but not everyone is.
Number one, embracing ultra-traditional gender roles into your marriage.
Estee Williams is a tradwife who has almost 200,000 followers on TikTok.
She definitely leans into the term. The man, he is the provider, the main breadwinner.
He goes out of the house and works. The woman, the wife, she is the homemaker.
She takes care of the home. Esty fashions herself after a 1950s housewife, at least as they were portrayed in advertisements in the era.
Vacuuming in high heels, an A-line dress, and a smile.
And a lot of people believe the tradwife movement is an overcorrection to modern feminism.
I do not believe that. I believe the tradwife movement is bringing balance back to families.
I shied away from accounts like Estee Williams, who seemed to focus mostly on being a tradwife and serving your husband.
Ballerina Farm, on the other hand, focuses mostly on her food.
You can kind of get lost in her enamel bowls and rustic kitchen.
I felt uneasy getting too lost, though. The pretty setting felt like a seemingly safe delivery method for sharing conservative values that I just didn't share.
So why was I drawn to something that also repelled me?
I suspected the answer had to do with this image of domestic labor as almost leisurely and the kitchen as the setting for it all.
Oh, I think the kitchen is just so powerful forever and always.
That's Catherine Jezzer Morton. She writes a column for The Cut and New York Magazine, and she has a Ph.D. in sociology.
I think, you know, it's an alchemical space where we transform things into other things.
I think that a lot of love is performed in and through food.
And so, I mean, this is something that I think we all have a certain degree of relationship with.
Catherine started studying momfluencers around the time she became a new parent herself.
And she helped me examine these videos to understand what it was that drew me in.
I mean, in the case of Ballerina Farm, not all trad wives are like this, but there is a sense that everything is made of really high quality, durable, beautiful, natural materials that, you know, we're not living in a world where waste and garbage is kind of accumulating all around us all the time.
It all kind of fits together together. to create just this perfect image of what domesticity could be.
Not, I should add, what domesticity has ever been.
The ballerina farm world, as Hannah Nieleman presents it, is beautiful and seemingly aspirational, even though it's completely out of reach for most families.
Consider that in 2021, about 30% of homes with kids under 18 were single-parent homes.
And in 2024, just about half of families with kids had both parents working, which doesn't leave a lot of time and space to focus on the kitchen or cooking at a fancy stove.
Everyone made a big deal about Hannah Nealman's AGA stove, this English company that makes these special stoves.
Hannah's is forest green and takes almost two days to get up to temp.
That's why she keeps it running 24-7. The stove is huge.
It's like a member of the family. I think it has a name.
Agnes. She talks about it all the time. The AGA stove, new, cost $35,000.
Although Hannah got hers on Craigslist. But the fact of this rarefied specialty stove helps you go deeper into the fantasy.
I should mention, too, that Hannah's father-in-law founded JetBlue, the airline.
So there's family money there. But that's not a part of her image that she talks about.
Instead, she focuses pretty tightly on the food she makes by hand. parody of itself in that they start everything from scratch.
Like first I made the cheese, then I made the sourdough dough, and then I baked the bread and then I sliced it.
And then I, you know, it's every single ingredient and it takes a really long time.
Yeah. No one wants to watch me slap some Kraft singles on a piece of sliced supermarket bread and like throw it in the George Foreman.
And I really think that the process is the cheat code of most of this viral content.
When Hannah makes a grilled cheese sandwich, for example, it's with sourdough bread she makes herself.
And mozzarella she also makes from scratch.
And she makes her own butter, too. What Hannah doesn't do is give us a full picture of all the work she's doing behind the scenes.
She's head cook, bread baker, business owner of a retail hub with 50 employees, plus content creator, shepherd, gardener, and mom of eight, don't forget, Also, she sometimes competes in beauty pageants.
Notably, she did one just two weeks after giving birth to her eighth child.
Her husband once told a reporter that Hannah sometimes stays in bed for a week she's so exhausted.
Who can blame her? I'd be crushed on my way to doing just a fraction of what she does.
But you don't get a whiff of that labor from her videos.
Not at all. Instead, it's all about these gorgeous home-cooked meals, presented in this very relaxed way.
And she's not the only account to go all out making things from scratch.
Some of the best examples of how extreme Tradwife food has gotten come from another famous account, Nara Smith.
Her stats are, three kids, with a fourth on the way at the time I'm recording this, over 16 million followers across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, She lives in Connecticut and is a working model.
Nara Smith really makes this trend her own.
She replaces the floral dresses with high-end couture, like Chanel and Miu Miu.
In one video, she makes Jollof Rice while wearing this white feather jacket.
I mean, actually, it's hard to tell whether it's a jacket because it's just this explosion of delicate feathers.
And it's completely spotless. while my shirt has peanut butter smeared on it.
And to be honest, I couldn't even tell you if the peanut butter is from today.
As for the food, she makes everything from scratch.
Last night, my husband told me that he hasn't had a root beer float in a while, and that's all he's been thinking about.
For a root beer float, she makes the ice cream herself.
That's easy. But she also makes the soda, brewing a tea with root bark, ginger, and other spices.
And then she adds sparkling water. When she goes to make an ice cream sundae, she makes each individual sprinkle by hand.
Those take four hours to set, by the way.
And actually, there's an interesting thing with time going on here.
A lot of Nara Smith's videos start with the same framing.
My husband or kids wanted something, so instead of going to the store, I decided to make it.
The distance between wanting something and making it is very short.
There's no figuring out the logistics like, OK, I can try to go to the store after work on Wednesday and like maybe we can make it over the weekend.
So there's a luxury in that time she has.
And these things really take time. After lunch, my husband was craving something sweet and was about to head out the door to grab himself some Rice Krispie treats.
I told him not to hassle. That's the framing.
I started by blooming my gelatin. This is almost too sensual for me, but keep listening.
After about 10 minutes when I was light and fluffy, I transferred it over to my dishwasher. that was dusted with arrowroot powder and let my marshmallow rest for five hours while I started parboiling my rice.
After six minutes, I strained it and spread it on my baking sheet and popped it in the oven for about five hours just to dry out completely.
That's another five-hour task. That poor husband waiting for his Rice Krispie treats.
Nara takes the Tradwife tropes and elevates them.
Like a high-wire act, she puffs rice from scratch with the greatest of ease.
She's turned domestic labor into a commodity.
And she's got an estimated net worth of $400 million to show for it.
Not entirely from her TikToks, but they certainly play a role.
And there's some tension in that, because many trad wives make it clear that they left the workforce to stay home, basically as a response to the unfulfilled promises of girl boss feminism from the 20 teens.
Which I get. It was this idea that if you worked hard enough in the corporate world, you could be a boss.
But the funny thing is, being a homemaker influencer is a lot of work, too.
And for some of these women, their trad wife content ends up bringing in girl boss money.
And you know what? Nara seems to be having a ton of fun doing it, bending the trad wife trend to her will.
Here's the perfect example. Nara Smith's Hot Dog.
We just landed after a 10-hour flight, and the first thing my husband requests is a hot dog.
So instead of running to the store, I just decided to make it myself.
And it's a bit like she's joking with us.
Catherine Jezra Morton again. She made the bun from scratch.
She made the sausage from scratch. In the meantime, I washed my casing and let it soak for about 30 minutes before stuffing that with my meat and twisting it into little links.
And then she made the mustard from scratch, and she, like, carefully assembles it.
I mean, it looks really tasty. But does anyone believe that she really made this after a 10-hour flight?
Where are the kids? How long did this take?
The math just doesn't add up. And she didn't respond to a request for comment before publishing, so I can't know for sure.
Not to mention that she's wearing a red strapless gown while grinding the meat for the hot dog.
It's a stunt. I mean, it's just an absolute stunt to show us how this is done.
It's almost like theater of the absurd. And do you think she's actually making all of that stuff herself?
I do. I think she probably takes time to develop her recipes.
I'm sure she goes in knowing what she's going to do.
When you are making content for the Internet and you have millions of people scrutinizing you, people are looking for ways to find that you're fake.
And I think it would be too costly and people would call you out on it.
And also a lot of the stuff that she's making as a home cook, it's not that hard.
Like these are basic recipes that anyone can make.
You know, she's not doing like molecular gastronomy.
It's just that she does it beautifully and slowly and with like impeccable ingredients.
And with plenty of time. Time is everything as a working parent.
And this luxuriating in the time and the capacity to make these things from scratch, it started to feel like flaunting to me.
Without acknowledging the realities of the labor behind the scenes or of the wealth that makes it all possible.
I may have started watching these videos for the escape, but I was starting to need something more honest.
So I wanted to know, if Tradwise claimed to be traditional, then what did that even mean or look like?
So I went back in time. After the break.
How do you do, folks? Have a seat, won't you?
And relax for three minutes while we tell you about the Homemakers Radio Program.
Jessica looks to content creators from the 1920s and talks to an historian who challenges our understanding of domesticity and the traditional part of the trad wife lifestyle.
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Yeah, Film Vault. We are one of the original film podcasts.
That can't be true. There was like two other film podcasts when we began, Brian.
How long have we been doing this show? You and I first sat down and did a version of this show over 20 years ago.
My God. There is shtick, but it's very little shtick.
We finish each other's Sandwiches? Close enough.
Was that a joke on a movie? That's from Frozen.
Oh, it is. Pretty bad. Oh, look at you. I don't want to be, like, quoting Frozen on this promo.
Okay, peek behind the curtain. Anderson's, like, the Frozen guy.
Like, he'll constantly reference animated films, family films, and I'm more the edgy indie guy.
We do have the trophy thing going on where Brian does, like, the big Hollywood sexy summer movies.
I'm always looking for, like, the hidden gems.
Two episodes each week. One. We review movies in the first episode.
The second one, top five time. top five different top five every week movies that made you cry worst movie accents most disturbing movies all right the film ball check it out wherever you find a fine podcast that's right the film vaults going on 20 plus years and now back to our story the facade of trad wife videos for me was starting to slip And as it did, I wanted to understand more about where modern trad wives came from.
I found the beginnings of an answer in a book called The Secret History of Home Economics by Danielle Dreilinger.
In it, I learned about a group of women who predate trad wives by about 100 years.
They were different in some pretty significant ways, but there were also similarities.
Both are homemaker influencers who use the cutting-edge technology of their time.
Today, it's TikTok. But in the 1920s, it was good old-fashioned terrestrial radio.
It's 3.30, and that's Kitchen Platter time on KMA Today.
We now visit the home of Leanna Driftmeyer.
Good afternoon, Leanna. Good afternoon. This is Leanna coming to you with our Kitchen Clatter broadcast over station KMA Shenandoah, Iowa.
Leanna Driftmeyer was the host of Kitchen Clatter, which became the longest-running radio homemaker show and one of the most popular of that era.
Leanna was one of a dozen rural radio homemakers, many of whom were in Iowa.
And listeners went crazy for them. At one point, there were 14 radio homemaker programs broadcasting out of Shenandoah, Iowa alone.
They had names like Homemakers Visit, Kitchen Club, and Down a Country Lane.
And many of them broadcast straight out of their rural Midwestern kitchens.
Which is remarkable, since at this time, in the 1920s and early 30s, there were a lot of farmhomes that didn't even have electricity yet, but they did have radios.
The story starts in the early 20s because this is the dawn of a new era thanks to a hot new technology called radio.
That's Darcy Malsby. She's going to help me tell this part of the story.
She's an agricultural journalist and a fifth-generation Iowa farmer.
Malsby explained that in the 1920s, America was right on the tipping point of moving from a rural nation to an urban one.
A lot of families were still living on farms where the roads largely weren't paved.
Cars and trucks just could not handle those tough conditions.
So you basically were stuck at home on the farm for a good chunk of the year.
And that can be very lonely and it can be isolating.
The days were full of hard labor. And for those without electricity, that meant no electric fridge, no electric washing machine, and you had to heat up water on a cookstove. by corn cobs and chunks of wood, maybe coal, and you'd have to feed that stove those fuel supplies consistently because if your fire went out, then you're screwed and you have to start all over again.
Everything was difficult. There was nothing easy there.
And then don't forget, a lot of these farm women, in addition to gardening, cooking, baking, raising the kids, cleaning the house, having to do all this work by hand, then they a lot of times had to pinch hit and help their husband milk cows, help in the field.
It was never ending. One woman, who worked for the Rural Electrification Administration, which brought electrification to rural parts of the U.S., said that if you went to a country cemetery, you'd see two women for every man because they just wore themselves out with the physical labor.
They'd die young, and then the man would marry again.
You can see why, then, women welcomed a friendly voice over the radio as they worked.
Someone just like them, who understood their troubles.
The first radio homemaker programs were started by a seed nursery owner named Henry Field, who was out in the extreme southwest corner of Iowa.
He put a radio transmission tower over his seed house, but he didn't do it out of the goodness of his heart.
He saw an opportunity. Let's face it, they wanted to sell more product.
And so they thought if we could be on those airwaves as much as possible, we've got a captive audience, essentially, because we've got all these rural and small town families that would be perfect customers for what we supply.
But Henry Field needed ways to fill the airtime.
So he tapped his sisters to host these radio programs.
One of his sisters was Leanna Driftmeyer.
And at first, she was pretty hesitant to go on the mic.
In 1926, Leanna had just moved back to Iowa with her seven children, aged 3 to 16, as her husband started a new job in New York.
Their house barely had a kitchen at first.
In a family biography that her daughter wrote, she said the kitchen had exactly one built-in convenience when they moved in.
A sink in the corner. No counter, no cabinets or anything else.
But two years later, Leanna was broadcasting live from this kitchen.
Day after tomorrow is Christmas, and I imagine most of you have all your Christmas baking done.
Talking about her life and sharing recipes as other women listened while snapping peas or doing the laundry.
They were listening for the sense of community, but also the recipes, even though radio wasn't exactly the easiest method for sharing them.
I wondered if you would like to copy down this recipe for Yuletide bread that came in my radio mail.
I haven't tried it, but I can just... You had to have a pencil and paper ready, and you definitely couldn't rewind.
A half cake of quick yeast dissolved in two tablespoons of warm water and one half teaspoon of sugar.
Add this to one half cup of thick, warm potato water.
One radio homemaker likened recipes to booby traps because they could trip you up too easily.
Never relax, she said. Recipes will clobber you if you do.
But Leanna Driftmeyer leaned heavily on sharing recipes over the air, despite the potential for disaster.
She even occasionally did live cooking demonstrations, like the time she tried to make angel food cake with her daughter, Dorothy.
But I tried once. I was going to imitate the big-time people, and I was going to do the cooking and stirring, and I had Dorothy helping me.
Leanna later recounted what happened in an interview with another radio homemaker, Evelyn Berkby.
Leanna remembers her daughter Dorothy standing with a crock by the sink.
Dorothy cracks the eggs, one at a time. She gets to the last one and goes to put it in the bowl with the others.
Dorothy freezes. She starts gesturing to her mom silently as the broadcast crackles over the air.
The last one she went to put in, she put it right in the bowl with the others.
It was rotten. And oh, she turned around and looked at me.
Leanna tells her to dump the rotten egg into the sink and keep going like everything's normal.
So she does. I had to go right on as if we were making the cake and pretend then the rest of the way that everything was okay.
Dorothy ends up clinging around making the noises like she's baking, but all with an empty bowl.
They finish the recipe and it's over. That was enough for me.
Leanna later came clean to her listeners, but they didn't need her to be making things perfectly at home.
What they wanted, I think, was a feeling of being seen.
A sense that they weren't alone as they toiled in their kitchens.
Which is a very different feeling than the one I get while watching Ballerina Farm, Nara Smith, or others.
That feels more like being on the outside, peering in.
Leanna Driftmeyer feels much more relatable to me and less performative.
You can hear where the edges are fraying, and there's some comfort in that.
And the food reflected that comfort. Here's Darcy Malsby again about Leanna.
She is sharing not fancy recipes, but just things like a good chicken and noodles recipe, perhaps, or a dessert recipe that maybe is just a little bit different than what you would have done.
And it was all very accessible. Most of the actual broadcasts were lost to history, so we don't know which recipes Leanna shared over the air, but tons of kitchen clutter magazines survived.
I'm looking at recipes right now, and we've got date roll cookies.
We've got sour cream cookies. We've got homemade summer sausage, so still encouraging people to do their own meat processing on the farm.
We've got banana bread. We've got a basic sweet dough here.
It was inspiration. Leanna Driftmeyer and many other radio homemakers projected this sense that they were your neighbor down the street, sharing some favorite recipes with their friends.
They called what they did neighboring on the air.
Sometimes, while they were on the air from their kitchens, a house phone would ring in the background, or a family member would wander in.
But they were businesswomen, too. Leanna carried her own brand of kitchen clatter artificial flavorings in these little glass bottles that had her face on them.
She also sold the magazine. Circulation reached as high as 150,000 at its peak.
And really, she's not that different from modern trad wives who commodified domestic labor, too, and turned it into a business.
Leanna Driftmeyer was just a regular person, though, sharing her recipes and tips.
But it turns out there was a whole movement at the time that was formalizing what she and other homemakers were doing.
In 1923, the federal government created the Bureau of Home Economics in order to study women in the kitchen and invest time and resources in them.
The Bureau's first head was a home economist named Louise Stanley who had a doctorate in chemistry from Yale.
She wore wire-rimmed glasses over a stern face, and she had a penchant for scientific studies.
Louise wanted to increase the American standard of living and show the value of household work.
So her team studied the vitamin C content of green tea, how we process the calcium in spinach, and how rats responded to thiamine deficiency.
Recipe testers at the Bureau also roasted 2,400 cuts of meat to find the best cooking methods.
They learned that cold-stored potatoes did not make a good potato chip.
And they asked 288 rural homemakers to keep track of what they did in a day to better understand how they spent their time.
Why? Because, as one federal time-use study put it, homemakers made up the largest occupational group in the country.
And their labor amounted to most of a day's work for at least one adult.
And this research spanned decades. There was a lot to study.
During this time, there was also a lot happening in the country.
The Great Depression hit. Food was incredibly scarce.
Unemployment reached 25 percent. Then the country joined World War II.
And as many men went off to war, many women flowed into the workforce, filling vacancies and needs.
When soldiers returned, however, a lot of them wanted their jobs back.
Two years after the war ended, more than three million women were laid off from their wartime work.
And a lot of those women became homemakers.
It was around this time, in 1949, that the Bureau released its Step Saver Kitchen.
These plans were developed for people just like you. people who are interested in having the very latest ideas in design that will help them cut down on the time and the effort that must be spent in doing kitchen work.
To design this kitchen, researchers put pedometers on the aprons of rural housewives and counted their steps as they worked.
That's how they learned that one woman in Montana walked a quarter of a mile while making a lemon pie.
In this kitchen that has made her task of food preparation so much lighter, the housewife can share her family's enjoyment at mealtime.
This was just on the cusp of a new decade, the so-called golden era of the 1950s housewife, an era that some trad wives idealize.
But I knew it wasn't all golden. I wanted to know what life was actually like for 1950s homemakers.
So I called up a historian, Stephanie Kuntz.
She's the Director of Research and Public Education at the Council on Contemporary Families.
It's a role she's held for 30 years. I asked Stephanie what kept her interest in this topic for so long.
Well, there's so much territory and it's changing so fast when it comes to marriage and families that I never get really bored with it.
I mean, for example, there are some things I have to continually correct, like the idea that the male breadwinner family was the most traditional family in history, when in fact it was the least and shortest lasting family in history.
For almost all of history, women were full breadwinners with their husbands.
And so women were always involved in producing the economic and political things and the social exchanges that made marriage work.
Stephanie is talking about the 19th century here, way back.
The household was the center of production for most families who ran farms or small businesses.
Women were canning preserves, curing bacon, making beer.
Beer, which was a very saleable item, was something that women were in charge of, not men.
So yes, men did a lot of the household outside work.
Women did a lot of the household inside work.
But it's not the kind of division of female tasks and male tasks that we think of today.
And in fact, in that era, the early 1800s, A man had to know how to change diapers.
He had to know how to fix food. A woman had to know how to repair the fences.
So there was a lot of overlap, even though there was a division of labor.
And nobody in their right mind would have thought that a woman was dependent on a man any more than a man was dependent on her work.
It turns out that the male breadwinner family didn't start to become the norm until the 1920s.
It wasn't until then that a bare majority of kids grew up in a home where the father earned the wages, the mother wasn't a co-partner in the farm or business, and she stayed at home, and the kids were not out working.
The country was industrializing, and the middle class grew as the economy also grew.
Now that family form receded in the 1930s and 40s.
Because of the Great Depression. And while the male breadwinner family had been gaining, it now stalled out.
It wasn't until the 1950s when this family structure started to make a comeback.
Between the 1950s and 1969 or 70, we had the highest number of children being raised in families where the man earned the full income and the woman stayed home than ever before in history.
But by the 1970s, this family unit was in rapid decline as women continued to flood into the workforce.
So that was a pretty short-lived family form.
I have to say, this stunned me. I had no idea that the male breadwinner family with a homemaker at home was so briefly the norm in history.
Just about two or three decades. And even then, it was just barely the norm for American families.
A lot of tradwives talk about how they're simply returning to the natural order of things, and why is this all so controversial?
But it's just not true that this paradigm was the norm for most of history.
The traditional wife image, though, holds a deep nostalgic power in our public consciousness, now and back then, too.
It had movie stars, Bette Davis, mopping the floor and making statements about what tremendous fulfillment it gave her.
Remember, a lot of women were forced out of the workforce after World War II.
And it involved not only pushing them out of jobs they'd had, taking away the support systems that women had been given when they had kids and were working in the war industry, but it involved this new idealization of homemaking as a way to fulfill your identity.
It became a status symbol. to have a woman in the home who didn't have to do the hard labor.
You'd see this message in all kinds of media, TV, advertising.
That's what helped give life to this myth of the happy housewife vacuuming at home in pearls.
But that was just a story, Stephanie Kuntz says.
The actual experience of many 1950s housewives was much more complicated.
I wrote a book called A Strange Stirring about women in the 50s.
I interviewed more than 100 women who were housewives in those days.
And they said that the boredom was just driving them mad in between the sudden demands for attention and time when the husband got home.
But the husband did not want them working outside the home.
Many trad wives idealize the 1950s. But they're nostalgic for a version of it that was crafted by advertisers and played out in the media.
I wasn't even alive at the time, and I can easily picture a woman in an A-line skirt, hair set just so, holding out a tray of hors d'oeuvres with a smile.
Not the reality of many women who lived at the time.
I had reached out to a dozen trad wives, including Hannah Nielman at Ballerina Farm, Nara Smith, and Estee Williams. because I wanted to understand why they chose to live this lifestyle and share it online.
They all either didn't respond or declined to be interviewed, except for one.
Yeah, I don't know why. I think the term is annoying, trad wife.
But I would definitely say, yes, I'm a traditional wife in a traditional home.
Katie Carrico posts online as Lost Oak Sheep Farm.
She has three boys under the age of four.
We mostly raise sheep. I'm a shepherd. But we also do a lot of homesteading, growing our own food and hunt our own food and live simply and love God.
Katie and her husband Daniel live on a 71-acre farm out in central Kentucky in a house they built themselves.
Plus, one guard dog, three goats, four pigs, and eight laying hens.
They also just harvested 30 chickens for meat and sold 85 lambs they had raised.
My husband and I, we have different chores normally that we take care of and that changes with the season.
And yes, I do a lot of the taking care of children.
I'll stay home with them every day. My husband goes out and he has an off the farm job.
He's doing a lot of the manual labor on the farm.
All that said, I do a lot of manual labor. work the sheep, I do the garden, I run the tiller, you know, and he is putting babies to bed at night.
Yes, we, I think, have a traditional marriage and he runs our home and he loves me the way God loves the church.
That's the way we have it set up. I talked to Katie after both our kids were in bed and she'd finished canning the carrots they'd just harvested.
She told me about how they'd been hit with heavy rains, illness, and a whole bunch of other challenges all at once.
At one point, she herself had to deliver two lambs who had died in the womb.
And she explained to me why sometimes these Tradwife videos only show the pretty parts.
When things are like this. crazy hard, I'm not getting my phone out to record.
Like, I'm sorry whenever I was trying to get those lambs out of that sheep because she couldn't deliver them.
Like, the last thing I was thinking is, let me wash off this afterbirth so that I can set my phone up.
You know what I mean? When I stumbled across my first Tried Wife video, things in my life had changed all at once.
New baby, lost my job. I was trying to find a sense of creative expression in cooking.
Instead, I found I could barely put dinner on the table.
These videos at first were an escape. Then it became harder to ignore the fictions in them about what was supposedly traditional and also about what daily life was actually like.
I hadn't expected then that talking to an actual trad wife would help me feel more settled in the stage that I'm in right now.
But it did. We all live different lives.
And we're all going to have the capacity for different things.
We all have different families to serve.
And that means that we all have different needs that we're trying to meet.
And so it wouldn't make sense for my homestead to look the same as your homestead.
I think the important thing is being able to look at what you do have and say, well, what can I do to get me closer to the desires that are on my heart?
And what is the next right thing that I can do to make that happen?
When I tell people that I have small children, they often say, oh, you're in the thick of it.
It's not untrue. You can get lost in the overwhelm and find yourself grinding in survival mode.
After I was laid off, I wanted to take just a step or two outside of survival mode.
I wanted to have the space for something else, something more expansive.
Eventually, I did find full-time work again.
And I also found myself getting excited about cooking.
I scoured the internet for focaccia recipes.
Maybe I'll even make my own mozzarella to go with it.
At least at some point I'll find the time.
All right, what would you like? So first I want some chicken nuggets.
Here's some chicken nuggets. Mama, mama.
Yes, Hattie, you get some chicken nuggets too.
For now, charcuterie dinner is on the menu.
It's become a little tradition in my home that we all look forward to.
It feels like the next right thing for me.
Thanks to Jessica Glazer for bringing us today's story.
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This episode was hosted by me, Jack Bishop, and the podcast is made by the following cast of characters.
I'm Yumi Araki. I'm senior producer Alex Curran-Cardarelli.
I'm associate producer Angelica Quintanilla.
I'm associate producer Louise Curran-Kensler.
And I'm Kyla Forman-Andrade, the TV and podcast intern.
Audio services are provided by Ultraviolet. and sound design by Matt Boynton.
Brian Campbell of Signal Sounds composed our theme music.
Additional music by Kyle Forrester and Jordan Pearson.
And Margolis is our director of post-production.
And our director of production is Diane Knox.
Fact-checking and additional research by Sarah D. Collins.
Special thanks to Danielle Dreilinger for her insights and research about the home economics movement and radio homemakers.
A million thanks also to Sam Story for her amazing editorial support.
Nina Gianelli is the Senior Vice President of Television, Video, and Podcasts.
Dan Souza is the Chief Content Officer, and Dan Surratt is America's Test Kitchen's CEO.
Proof is a production of America's Test Kitchen.
This podcast is part of the Airwave Media Podcast Network.
Visit airwavemedia.com to listen and subscribe to their other fine shows.
