In the first episode of With Love, Meghan, Meghan Markle (or Sussex, or Windsor-Mountbatten), makes a honey almond cake from scratch with honey that she has freshly harvested from a nearby bee colony. She will later steep tea—not some loose-leaf blend, but her own recipe, riffed on the fly. This is a step further than domesticity, which is usually associated with activities like child-rearing, baking, and hosting. It’s archetypical ‘traditional wife’ behavior—beautiful women with beautiful clothes in beautiful lighting, making very complicated things look effortless.

Like Meghan herself, 'trad wives' are as captivating as they are controversial. When 23-year-old Nara Smith, a mother of three, and Hannah Neeleman (known as Ballerina Farm), 34 with eight children, first rose to fame for preparing elaborate meals from homegrown ingredients while tending to their young families, many women were unsure how to react. Third-wave feminists fought fiercely against the gender expectations that had kept women in the kitchen—balancing gender demographics at colleges and in the workplace. The fourth wave, marked by movements like #MeToo, aimed to challenge norms further, unpacking consent and exclusionary body image standards that had long favored a singular ideal—the hyper-feminine, very thin, woman of the early 2000s.

To understand this history is to realize the trigger points of ‘trad wives.’ What they represent to critics is twofold—a return to the mold from which women sought to break free, and a reminder that if we aren’t harvesting our own honey, we simply aren’t doing enough. But that’s not the whole story. 

For decades, housekeeping has been closely tied to a lack of autonomy—when women couldn’t open a bank account or obtain a credit card without a man's approval (that restriction wasn’t lifted in the U.S. until 1974). With few career opportunities beyond secretarial work and financial independence out of reach, many women found that excelling in domestic life was their only avenue for fulfillment. Confined to the kitchen, they served everyone but themselves.

In 1982, Martha Stewart’s first book, Entertaining, began to change that. Profiting off her premier homemaking skills, Martha became the first lifestyle influencer—turning trad wife-ism into a billion-dollar business by leveraging growing media industries. Her trajectory is not unlike what we’re seeing now. From brand deals and partnerships, Nara Smith has also whipped up her net worth from scratch—surpassing her famous model husband Lucky Blue. Harry and Meghan are now supporting themselves without the help of the British royals and With Love, Meghan is the product of their reported $100 million Netflix contract. That makes her the bread-baking breadwinner of the family. 

Monetization aside, there’s a radicalism in women returning to the home on their terms. Feminism, for as much as it’s been reinterpreted by hot-button discourse, is the belief in gender equality—a philosophy that designates women the same freedom as men to choose their own path. While trad wives may not be climbing the corporate ladder, they’re shattering a different kind of glass ceiling. Women who’ve chosen to stay home and rear children are rarely seen or heard, and while Nara Smith and Meghan might be cooking, baking, decorating, and entertaining at a level unattainable for most mothers, it’s a relief to see maternal effort acknowledged at all. 

The impact of modern feminism—along with the rise of misandry (or men-hate, if you’re unfamiliar)—has led many women to view embracing traditional roles as a step backward.  Over the past three years, the birth rate has reached another record low—falling another three percent after a steady two percent decline from 2014 until 2020. Women who do enjoy traditional homemaking activities, or cooking, cleaning, and caring for their significant others, are facing a moral quandary—are they failing their female comrades-in-arms?

If you’re reversing the roles, then the answer is simply no. Homemaking influencer William Conrad, who devises elaborate meals for his fiancée, Levi, and Joe Ando, who rose to fame sewing his girlfriend's clothes, are just as popular as their female counterparts. 

Perhaps the real appeal of watching someone labor over a stove or sewing machine for their loved ones is just witnessing genuine care in action. In an era of shrinking attention spans and ‘sex recessions,’ the idea of growing one’s vegetables to make the perfect soup from scratch, or crafting chewing gum to satisfy your children’s cravings is unexpectedly thrilling. And while we envy them—the time they have seemed to find for these activities, their perfectly made-up faces and gorgeous clothes, their beautiful families—we’re still watching.

@beatricehazlehurst