In this blog, Lauren Samuelsson explores the colour white and its links with the tradwife movement and white supremacy.

In mid-2024, the #tradwife hashtag was trending on social media platforms. At the end of July, The Times of London had published journalist Megan Agnew’s critical profile of Hannah Neeleman, also known as @ballerinafarms, a social media influencer who, with her good looks and cooking skills, had become the face of the ‘tradwife’ movement.

Shortly after, Neeleman appeared on the cover of Evie magazine, a ‘conservative Cosmopolitan’, clad in a white ‘raw milkmaid’ dress, milking a cow under an expansive Utahan sky. The cover line claimed she was living ‘the New American Dream’.

The ‘tradwife’ phenomenon (short for traditional wife) arose around a decade ago, primarily on social media platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, before hitting peak virality within the last year. At its most basic, the tradwife lifestyle is an adherence to ‘traditional’ gender roles, with the wife working in the home while her husband is the breadwinner.

This lifestyle has been aestheticised for social media. On screen, tradwives perform their mediated feminine personas, selling a romanticised version of domestic life to their followers. They have become the faces of the far-right: the soft power of anti-feminist, anti-diversity, and ultimately misogynistic messaging.

The tradwife movement embodies an anti-feminist response to #girlboss ‘do-it-all’ millennial feminism. It often draws heavily on nostalgia, its proponents hearkening back to a mythical time before feminism ‘sold a lie’ to women by promising them empowerment and delivering discontent.

While Neeleman sells the far-right’s ‘New American Dream’ in a white peasant dress, other ‘tradwife’ influencers draw on 1950s styling: perfectly styled hair, full-skirted dresses, white frilly aprons. Whatever mythology they draw on, much of the tradwife’s content focuses on food.

Today, the bulk of the tradwife’s proselytising takes place in the kitchen, where the colour white infuses their representations of domestic bliss.

The Colour White

White is a symbol of innocence, purity and cleanliness. It speaks of morality and virtue.

Amongst other colours, white has long been a symbol of feminist solidarity – used by suffragettes to denote their own feminine purity, and more recently by delegates to the 2024 US Democratic National Convention.

Yet tradwives, too, have adopted white as a visual throughline in their aestheticisation of domesticity. Tradwives construct themselves as virtuous, pure, and morally superior. White is, like other colours, an adaptable symbol.

The Heart of the Home

Both critics and proponents of the tradwife movement depict the kitchen as the central, unifying location of the tradwife. Articles dissecting the movement are inevitably illustrated with nostalgic images of be-aproned housewives gleefully smiling beside their white kitchen appliances – often an oven or refrigerator – just waiting to serve their husbands dinner.

Tradwives themselves post images and videos on social media of family meals made with home-grown, organic, from-scratch ingredients, cooked up in their spotless kitchens, white marble benchtops gleaming.

The focus on the kitchen is unsurprising. Cooking has long been considered a  ‘feminine’ art. The link between femininity and domestic food production was reinforced from the late nineteenth century, with the rise of the domestic science movement. Domestic science, which wanted to reform the home along moral and scientific lines, glorified white women’s work in the home. Like other scientific social reform at the time, domestic science was inextricably linked with eugenics and race motherhood.

So, too, is the tradwife movement, which both implicitly and explicitly promotes white supremacy and misogyny. Through their performative content, tradwives not only reify the kitchen as a purely feminine space but make it a central space to construct and communicate far-right nationalism.

What’s Cooking? Sourdough and Shame

To be an internet tradwife is to be privileged. These women are usually young, conventionally attractive, middle- to upper- class, and overwhelmingly white. They depict themselves as financially able to ‘stay-at-home’, a rare ability in neoliberal economies where families are often unable to indefinitely subsist on a single income. They also have time, a rare commodity for the modern working woman.

Within tradwife social media content, there is often a focus on preparing food that runs contrary to the kitchen concerns of working women. Tradwives buck the mainstream trend of showing ‘quick’ and ‘easy’ meals, instead promoting cooking techniques that are time consuming: baking sourdough bread and making pop tarts from scratch. This reinforces the idea that ‘home-cooked’ is better than ‘store bought’, that the food that they make, like themselves, is morally superior.

Women who don’t have time to cook due to work outside the home (or other, equally worthy, priorities) are shamed for ‘choosing’ not to provide for their families in a similar manner. This is yet another facet that forwards the whiteness of the tradwife, as Black people, Indigenous people, people of color, and other marginalised women often cannot afford to stay home even if they would like to.

The tradwife’s kitchen politics don’t stop at promoting that ‘a woman belongs in the kitchen’, as their food choices also draw on discourses of purity and cleanliness though defining what is ‘real food’.

The Purity of White Sauce and Rise of Raw Milk

At the turn of the twentieth century, there was cause for housewives to be concerned about cleanliness and purity. Germ theory had made its way from labs to common knowledge and science had an ‘aura of divinity’. In response to Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel, The Jungle, there was an outcry about the safety of manufactured food. The broader public was concerned about adulterants in their consumables – whether food, drink, or medicine – and around the world, governments enacted a bevy of Pure Food legislation.

Domestic scientists, clad in their starched white aprons, were keen to instil purity into the home. They did it, visually, through food. White sauce, a mix of flour, butter and milk, was seen as a civilising and purifying condiment in the kitchen. As historian Laura Shapiro has pointed out in her book, Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century (1995), ‘virtually no cooked food’ escaped being ‘purified, enriched, or ennobled’ by white sauce. It covered all manner of food: from sausages to sweetbreads.

Today, tradwives are also obsessed with purity, although many of them distrust the science that earlier generations relied upon to create a healthier food supply. Instead, many tradwives actively encourage their followers to eat or drink dangerous ingredients by couching their consumption within the rhetoric of ‘clean’, ‘real’ and ‘natural’ food.

Perhaps the clearest example is in the recent uptick in the consumption of raw milk. Milk has been pasteurised (a heating process which kills harmful bacteria, viruses and parasites, including Listeria and E.coli) for over a century.

Hannah Neeleman often shares videos of her milking her own cows and Ballerina Farm has just started selling raw milk (though not without the customer signing a waiver). Proponents of raw milk (including the Trump administration’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr.) claim that it is ‘clean’, ‘healthy’ and ‘pure’. The processes for actually purifying milk have been recast by tradwives as being ‘impure’, while raw milk has been made ‘pure’ often through hyper-spiritual language. Raw milk is ‘the way God intended’ milk to be consumed – it is virtuous.

Not all tradwives adhere to extreme right-wing ideologies; however, they all commodify conservatism and create an oppositional discourse surrounding ‘feminism vs femininity’. Many of them centre their content in the kitchen, relying on recipes and other food content to entice viewers and, paradoxically for those adhering to ‘traditional gender roles’, make an income. Not only have they reinscribed the kitchen as a feminine space, they are also politicising food creation and consumption through their focus on ‘purity’, ‘cleanliness’, and whiteness.

Dr Lauren Samuelsson holds a PhD in history from the University of Wollongong, Australia, where she is an Associate Lecturer. Lauren’s research interests include cultural history, the history of food and drink, the history of popular culture and gender history. Her first book, A Matter of Taste: The Australian Women’s Weekly and Its Influence on Australian Food Culture (2024), was published with Monash University Publishing in 2024. Alongside her award-winning academic work, she has also published in The Conversation and is a regular guest on Australian radio, where she shares her love of food history with people nationwide.

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