Lifestyle
Tradwife life isn't as good as it looks on TikTok – just ask former tradwives
Sharon Johnson, a mom of six in Utah, now identifies as an “ex-tradwife.”
Lindsey Stewart
hide caption
toggle caption
Lindsey Stewart
Jennie Gage still remembers an assignment she was given in kindergarten: What did she want to be when she grew up? She wrote that she wanted to be president.
“I brought it home, and instead of my mom being proud, she cried,” Gage said. “She said, ‘Jennie, you’re not gonna be the president when you grow up. You’re going to be a mommy, like me. Heavenly Father made you to be a mommy.’”
Gage grew up in the Mormon church. She got married while she was a student at Brigham Young University-Idaho. She said her husband discouraged her from finishing her degree; instead, they started a business together. When church leaders found out, she said they asked her to step down from the business and to focus on her family. So Gage agreed, and she raised her five children.
“I did all of the housekeeping, all of the decorating, all of the furnishing, all of the cooking, the shopping, taking care of kids, getting them to all their different sports and practices and school and homework,” she said.
Gage said her relationship was also abusive. She left the church and then left her husband. At the time, she was living in her car and feeling isolated, so she started posting on social media about what she was going through. Then, she saw tradwives trending on TikTok.
“The first time I ever saw Ballerina Farm, I didn’t realize she was Mormon. I didn’t realize she was rich,” said Gage. “She just came up in my algorithm, and I had a visceral response. I was furious.”
Ballerina Farm, the account run by content creator Hannah Neeleman, boasts nearly 10 million followers. In her videos, Neeleman posts about raising her eight children on a farm with her husband, Daniel Neeleman, whose father founded JetBlue and several other commercial airlines. Hannah Neeleman is widely considered to be one of the faces of the tradwife movement, which embraces a return to traditional gender roles. (Neeleman, in a controversial profile by The Times, said she is not sure she “necessarily identifies” with the label.)
So Gage posted her own video in response, saying: “I’m an ex-tradwife. I work three minimum wage jobs just to pay my rent.” She said it’s part of the financial reality of being a single mom without a college degree. Her TikTok video, which has now racked up over 1 million views, is one example of a growing phenomenon: ex-tradwives who try to de-influence the lifestyle by sharing why it didn’t work for them. Editor’s note: this video contains language that may be offensive.
Tradwives … and girlbosses
Since 2020, tradwives have become wildly popular on social media. Creators like Neeleman, Nara Smith and Estee Williams post videos of their day-to-day routines, often cooking elaborate meals or doing chores in beautiful outfits.
Several experts say tradwives and their renewed focus on family values are the direct aftermath of decades of “lean in” feminism, which eventually lead to a do-it-all mentality. Cinzia Solari, a sociologist at the University of Massachusetts Boston and co-author of the book The Gender Order of Neoliberalism, says the result of that mindset is a deep disillusionment with gender disparity in the workplace, paired with a growing sense of burnout from trying to do it all. “It doesn’t turn out to be sustainable,” she said. “Folks are exhausted.”
So what we’re left with, she said, are two identities that appear to be on polar ends of a spectrum: “girlbosses” who prioritize their careers over marriage and kids, and tradwives who do the opposite. But Smitha Radhakrishnan, a sociologist at Wellesley College and Solari’s co-author, said they’re actually not so different. “Tradwives and girlbosses end up in the same quadrant,” she said. “They are actually both trying to cut their work in half.”
Although tradwives are making an appeal for a return to gender roles from the 1950s – or in Ballerina Farm’s case, a return to the Laura Ingalls Wilder/homesteader pioneering era – Radhakrishnan and Solari say a key aspect of the lifestyle is the element of choice. Women are choosing to opt out of the professional world and prioritize domestic life, and for many tradwife creators, that choice carries an element of empowerment. Radhakrishnan said this is especially true for Black women who’ve been historically forced to work in the United States.
Jacqueline Beatty, who teaches history at York College of Pennsylvania and wrote about tradwives for TIME Magazine, said the rise of tradwives also coalesces with renewed interest in the role of men as protectors. She points to comments made by President-elect Donald Trump on the campaign trail, in which he vowed to protect women “whether they like it or not.” She said these attitudes, reflected by tradlife roles for both men and women, are reminiscent of 18th-century legal customs that placed married women under the protection and authority of their husbands. It left women unable to own property or have any legal independence from men, and set a precedent of social and political inequality.
“It’s a way to also keep their agitation for political rights at bay,” said Beatty. “You have this very special and even more important role of being a wife and mother. The vote compared to that is negligible.”
‘I wasn’t oppressed’
Sharon Johnson, another ex-tradwife with a following of more than 600,000 on TikTok, said that’s part of the reason she originally didn’t identify with the trad label. “I didn’t think that I fit into that narrative at all,” she said. “That wasn’t my life. I wasn’t oppressed. I chose this life.” Editor’s note: this video contains language that may be offensive.
But Johnson said that all started to change when she and her husband left the Mormon church three years ago. Not long after, her husband got laid off from his job — and she said it broke their family dynamic wide open. He started taking on more responsibility at home and with their six kids, while she started monetizing her social media and co-hosting a podcast to make ends meet.
“Both of us stopped having this pressure of these roles we had to play,” she said. “We are learning to have more healthy relationships with not only each other, but with our kids.”
She acknowledged that it’s not an easy transition to make; she said it’s taken a lot of therapy and teamwork to rebuild their life together. Johnson still has many friends and family members who are tradwives — and the biggest trad creators have not openly addressed the ex-trad phenomenon. But Johnson said she’s found a lot of healing and catharsis in a growing community of women on social media who are looking for a new kind of middle ground.
“I am a completely different person than I was three years ago, and our marriage is completely different, everything for the better,” she said. “I feel like I am a person, and a wife and a mother second.”
Jennifer Vanasco edited the radio and digital versions of this story.
Students walk on the Stanford University campus on March 14, 2019, in Stanford, Calif.
Ben Margot/AP
hide caption
toggle caption
Ben Margot/AP
When Theo Baker arrived at Stanford University a few years ago, he joined the student newspaper, following the path of his journalist parents, Peter Baker, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, and Susan Glasser, a writer for The New Yorker.
Through his reporting as a student journalist, he eventually broke a story about manipulated data in Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s neuroscience research that helped lead to the university president’s resignation.
Theo Baker’s book, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University was released May 19. In it, Baker describes Stanford as a place where proximity to Silicon Valley gives rise to a parallel system of influence, recruitment and money, with investors looking to identify promising students almost as soon as they arrive on campus.
He told Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep there was “a sort of Stanford inside Stanford,” where elite students are drawn into an “alternate reality” of excess and access to cut corners.
In the interview, he discusses how Stanford is not just a university but also a pipeline where status and power can matter as much as ideas.
We reached out to Stanford University for comment and have not heard back.
Listen to the interview by clicking play on the blue box above.
The scoreboard shows the results of the women’s singles final match between Iga Swiatek of Poland and Amanda Anisimova of the U.S. at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, Saturday, July 12, 2025.
Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
hide caption
toggle caption
Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
Fifteen points in tennis? Nice. Thirty, 40 — even better. Advantage — that sounds good. “Love” — that also must be great, right? Well, not quite.
As the French Open rolls on and Serena Williams has announced her return to the sport, maybe you’ve been paying a little more attention to tennis. The sport’s scoring system is notably distinct, and can sometimes be hard to grasp for newcomers. But even tennis aficionados might not know why, or how, “love” became the unmistakable callout for zero points. For this installment of NPR’s Word of the Week, we’re exploring how a word that signifies trailing behind got such a sweet name.
“Love” comes from the heart — or an egg?
It’s hard to pinpoint when the first tennis ball went over the net. Tennis is a derivative of lots of other sports, such as “jeu de paume,” a handball game played in France, said JT Buzanga, the collections manager at the International Tennis Hall of Fame museum.
But tennis became a patented, official sport in 1874, said Steve Flink, a journalist whose tennis coverage got him inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. It has retained its unique, mysterious scoring system ever since.
“By and large, the original system has held up almost entirely,” Flink said.
The use of “love” goes back to the late 18th century, said Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer. But it was used earlier than that in card games such as whist and bridge. Before the term made its way to tennis, the sport favored plain old “nothing,” or “nil,” he said.
Why love in the first place, though? Historians don’t really know for sure, but there are a few theories.
The French could have something to do with it. Some historians believe “love” derives from “l’oeuf,” which means “the egg” in French. Because eggs are shaped like zeros, terms such as “goose egg” and “duck’s egg” have been used in other contexts to mean zero, Sheidlower said.
It’s also possible English speakers mispronounced l’oeuf as “love.” But Sheidlower isn’t convinced that’s the answer.
“It’s the French equivalent of an English expression. But since that expression doesn’t appear in French, the French word wouldn’t have been used,” he said.
To be sure, France has had a lot of influence on tennis culture, Buzanga said. For example, “deuce” or a game tied at 40 points, comes from the French word for “two”: “deux.” But he prefers another prominent theory: that “love” comes from the idiom “for the love of the game.” Even if a player hasn’t scored, it doesn’t matter, because their heart is in it. It’s the theory Sheidlower said is the most plausible, because the idiom was used by the English before tennis was popularized.
Another variation of the “love of the game” theory is that the word could have come from the Dutch “lof,” or “honor” — or the Latin “amare,” meaning “to love,” Flink said.
But if tennis’ “love” doesn’t come from a French word, the theory at least has a French sensibility.
“I think the ‘for the love of the game’ is kind of romantic,” Buzanga said.
“Love” probably isn’t going anywhere
Tennis used to be a sport of leisure. The style of play has changed a lot over the years; players are more athletic and competitive, for instance, Flink said. But the rules of the sport are more steadfast, he said.
“There’s this incredible, enduring respect for tradition in tennis,” he said. “Changes are not made easily.”
There has been one major change in modern history: the tie-break. Matches can go on and on because players have to score two consecutive points to break a deuce, or by two games to break a tied set. But the onset of television meant matches would have to get shorter if the sport wanted to capture a larger audience, Flink said.
Change even came for “love.” An alternative sprouted up in the 1970s, and is still used today: “bagel,” named for its zero shape, Sheidlower said. Novices may say “zero,” and insiders will understand what they mean, but they “will needle them about it,” Flink said.
But “love” still prevails.
“People kind of like it,” Flink said. “It’s different. Why say zero when you can say love?”
-
Pittsburg, PA2 minutes agoPittsburgh promises its largest firework show yet for America’s 250th
-
Augusta, GA7 minutes agoGaines endorses Kendrick in Augusta mayoral runoff
-
Washington, D.C14 minutes agoJuvenile injured after gunfire reported in DC’s Michigan Park neighborhood
-
Cleveland, OH17 minutes agoCleveland readies for pre-World Cup soccer match
-
Austin, TX22 minutes agoTexas lawmakers discuss rural hospitals
-
Alabama29 minutes agoAlabama has one of college football’s toughest schedule stretches in 2026
-
Alaska32 minutes agoFormer Alaska corrections officer sentenced to 150 years in prison for killing wife and teen daughter
-
Arizona37 minutes agoDozens charged under Preston’s Law in Arizona
