I’ve got this dress. You would recognize it; you’ve seen it everywhere, gracing storefronts and magazines and banner ads. Perhaps you own a version, too. Serenely patterned in the spirit of a picnic, it has soft, floaty fabric; sometimes it’s pin-tucked with bell sleeves, other times fitted with a sweetheart neckline, waist-cinching cotton voile, crochet detailing. You might imagine wearing the dress while trundling through fields of waist-tall wildflowers, homemade biscuits and lovely fruits in a basket slung over your elbowbet86, a Lassie look-alike nipping happily at your heels.

This whole pastoral-bucolic daydream — time travel through attire — has been called many things: cottagecore, sexy milkmaid, vintage maximalism, hygge, nap dressing. The more chaotic our world, the greater the appeal of clothing that yearns toward some rosy, candlelit Arcadian past. But the yearning is only yearning: When I don this milkmaid attire, I am not actually preparing to churn butter or weave blankets. I am merely borrowing iconography that I find charming, costuming myself in a specific visual fantasy, a style, a “vibe.”

There is a woman in Utah who also has this dress, and, in it, has whipped up a frothy moral panic. Her name is Hannah Neeleman, and she posts under the nom de internet Ballerina Farm. Most recently profiled in The Times of London, she is a 34-year-old, beauty-pageant-winning mother of eight, a self-styled Betty Crocker homemaker and a leading archetype of the “traditional wife” or “tradwife”: a contemporary woman who hews to the kind of old-school gender norms you might find in Victorian etiquette books or 1950s propaganda. The word “tradwife” sprouted up on the internet years ago, but it’s in this fraught, post-Dobbs election year that the level of ire directed at this phenomenon has rocketed. So-called tradwives — Neeleman is one of many, though none of her peers have achieved 10 million followers on Instagram — eschew careers, voluntarily devoting themselves to household chores and the needs of family, often deferring decision-making to their husbands. Sometimes all their joyful cooking and cleaning and child-rearing is based in religious faith or far-right zealotry. But tradwives seem to rile people up the most when their ideology appears rooted in nothing but earnest ardor for a hyperdomestic, heteronormatively subservient, anti-girlboss lifestyle.

It is a fact universally acknowledged that if you go online and brag about your life, you will encounter some amount of blowback and derision. But these joyful housewives seem to enthrall and repel us, nauseate and fascinate us, to a lunatic degree. Women like Neeleman and the 22-year-old Nara Smith — who boasts some nine million TikTok followers and now appears in GQ with red stilettos, ringed by halcyon toddlers — present their lives as fairy tales. At the same time, appalled onlookers deride them as thorns in the side of feminist progress: chauvinism incarnate, sexism made glamorous, proselytizers of a harmful fantasy.

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Sure: All that may be true. But chiding tradwives for their domestic peacocking also tumbles the rest of us into a trap.

Here we are, stuck in a proxy war over a gingham apron.

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