AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
This year, tradwives seemed to take over TikTok.
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HANNAH NEELEMAN: I'm going to take you along on Saturday morning chores before the kids' games.
RASCOE: That's Hannah Neeleman. She's become the face of the tradwife (ph) movement. It's short for traditional wife. Nearly 10 million people follow her Ballerina Farm account, where she posts about raising her eight children on a farm with her husband. But now there is a wave of ex-tradwives on social media. NPR's Isabella Gomez Sarmiento reports.
ISABELLA GOMEZ SARMIENTO, BYLINE: Jennie Gage still remembers this assignment in kindergarten. What did she want to be when she grew up? She wrote she wanted to be president.
JENNIE GAGE: I brought it home. And instead of my mom being proud, she cried.
GOMEZ SARMIENTO: Gage says her mom was very traditional. She grew most of their food in their garden, stitched a lot of their clothes. And that day, she told her...
GAGE: Jennie, you're not going to be the president when you grow up. Your heavenly father made you to be a mommy.
GOMEZ SARMIENTO: Gage grew up in the Mormon church. She got married young, and she raised five kids.
GAGE: I did all of the housekeeping, all of the cooking, the shopping, taking care of kids, getting them to all of their different sports and practices and school and homework.
GOMEZ SARMIENTO: But Gage says her relationship was also abusive. She left the church, and then she left her husband. She felt really isolated, and then she saw tradwives trending on TikTok.
GAGE: The first time I ever saw Ballerina Farm, I didn't realize she was Mormon. I didn't realize she was rich. She just came up in my algorithm, and I had a visceral response. I was furious.
GOMEZ SARMIENTO: So Jennie Gage posted this.
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GAGE: I'm an ex-tradwife. I work three minimum-wage jobs to just pay my rent.
GOMEZ SARMIENTO: That video racked up over 1 million views, and Gage became one example of a new phenomenon - ex-tradwives who try to de-influence the trad lifestyle. Historian Jacqueline Beatty says tradwives are not new, but they've become massively popular as more and more people feel burnt out in the workplace.
JACQUELINE BEATTY: I think the pressure to do it all - to be this high-powered career woman but also have family - can be very exhausting.
GOMEZ SARMIENTO: So a lot of women see trad life as a way to opt out of the job market and embrace the home. But Beatty says, historically, the glorification of traditional gender roles can push age-old stereotypes, like...
BEATTY: Women require protection. And because they require protection, that puts them in an unequal status, whether that's legal, social, cultural, economic.
SHARON JOHNSON: I didn't think that I fit into that narrative at all. I wasn't oppressed. I chose this life.
GOMEZ SARMIENTO: That's Sharon Johnson, a mom of six. Like Jennie Gage, she's part of a growing community swimming against the current of traditional values. She started posting on TikTok as a way to cope with leaving the Mormon church. Then, her husband got laid off from his job, and she says it broke their family dynamic wide open.
JOHNSON: Both of us stopped having this pressure of these roles that we had to play.
GOMEZ SARMIENTO: He started taking on more responsibilities at home with the kids. She started working, monetizing her social media, cohosting a podcast and posting to her TikTok followers about how her life has changed for the better.
JOHNSON: I am a completely different person than I was three years ago.
GOMEZ SARMIENTO: She says social media has given her a community. It's given her financial independence, and it's totally changed her marriage.
JOHNSON: We are learning how to have more, like, healthy relationships with not only each other, but with our kids.
GOMEZ SARMIENTO: Now, she describes her content as good-enough parenting. They're not perfect, but they're trying their best.
Isabella Gomez Sarmiento, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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