When I heard that Netflix was rebooting “Little House on the Prairie,” I was hopeful, if a little wary. Though I’d never watched the original TV show, I’d grown up so besotted by Laura Ingalls Wilder’s novels that not only had I read them all but I even owned the supplemental “The Little House Cookbook,” by Barbara M. Walker. I paged through frontier recipes for fried salt pork and gravy with the same longing I experienced when reading Wilder’s prose: the wish to be transported. Tuning in to the new Netflix offering a few weeks after giving birth to my second son, I suppose I once again had that hope.
The new “Little House” isn’t exactly transporting, and that’s why I feel a little disappointed. To the contrary, it seems all too familiar, like cosplay for a fantasy frontier. It’s a visual feast of chemises, bonnets and limpid-eyed girls with flower crowns haloing their pre-Raphaelite coifs. The show also appears, perhaps inevitably, like an infomercial for the tradwife lifestyle, set to a soundtrack of whinnying horses and chirring bugs. The Ingalls girls wash their clothes in pristine streams, stoke fires while sucking peppermint sticks and slumber under patchwork quilts. Who wouldn’t yearn for this life?
The “Little House” reboot arrives in the midst of a tradwife moment. Caro Claire Burke’s best-selling novel “Yesteryear” (soon to be a feature film starring Anne Hathaway) imagines a modern-day tradwife transported back to the real-life deprivations of 1855. One of the ur-tradwife influencers, Hannah Neeleman, who has nine children, has opened the Ballerina Farm Store in Midway, Utah, transforming that town into a trad tourist trap. Part of the reasoning, no doubt, for Netflix’s series is that the original, which debuted in 1974, was, according to Nielsen, the most streamed legacy title as recently as 2024, racking up 13.3 billion minutes of viewing time that year, which is roughly 40 minutes for every person living in America.
My first exposure to the world of tradwives came while I was teaching a food writing workshop and a grad student wrote an admiring essay about a young mother from Texas whom she followed on Instagram. This young mother, Nara Smith, 24, makes homemade nut butter, cares for five children and, according to my student’s essay, shares “the joys of serving those she loves while still fulfilling her career as a model.” Ms. Smith also has 12.5 million followers on TikTok and 4.8 million followers on Instagram.
As a woman who’s always believed that my life purpose is synonymous not with my fecundity or my homemaking prowess but with my artistic ambitions, I’m decidedly not the audience for this kind of content. The tradwife performs wholesome homesteading for online public consumption — milking cows with apple-cheeked little ones trailing her long, organic cotton skirts — while I’ve always approached my maternal duties with a little more ambivalence, scribbling drafts of poems from my seat on a concrete bench in the muggy YMCA pool balcony as my 6-year-old shows off his cannonballs.
But maybe it was the moment when I was slicing strawberries from the farm share and scooping homemade coconut-almond granola into my son’s Greek yogurt when a startling revelation dawned on me. Or maybe it happened while I was watching “Little House” and its liberally tendered tropes of hardscrabble fairy tales. I’m definitely not a tradwife — but maybe I’m a little tradwife curious? Maybe I have a few latent tradwife tendencies?
Maybe more than a few. Maybe more than tendencies.
I’m not suggesting I’m suited for raising a brood of children or for living on a 19th-century homestead like the influencer in “Yesteryear,” who wakes up having been whisked from her performance of 19th-century hardship to the real thing. I have no desire to cosplay as a milkmaid or shepherdess, and I can’t abide the overt tradwife staging of conservative social values, religious doctrine, traditional gender roles and pronatalism. I also don’t subscribe to the idea that the female spirit is best channeled into servitude and sustenance-providing at home sweet heteronormative home.
But I have realized that my blanket aversion to the performance of domestic life as a source of fulfillment may be a little misguided. I was raised by a stay-at-home mom, herself raised by a mom who attended culinary school, and my mother always modeled to me the practice of finding purpose in the kitchen, punching down dough, laying a towel over the bowl, letting it rise. In my home today, cooking isn’t for show; it’s an expression of the beauty of making something tangible and nourishing.
How can I renounce the regressive side of tradwives while also blissfully kneading my own milk bread dough? How can I deny the appeal of the Hannah Neelemans and Nara Smiths of the world when my own household habits help balance my workaholism, keep me present and mindful in my body? Anchored to a professional life that’s increasingly screen-bound, I find that taking 20 minutes to, say, arrange stalks of scarlet rhubarb by height in a caramel-coated cast-iron pan really grounds me. Makes me happy, even. Many of my most tradwife-like proclivities — cooking and baking and taking what may be an above-average pleasure in polishing copper pots — are the very habits that help keep me sane.
So, like many others, I’m learning to reassess the value of so-called “grandma hobbies,” those frontier-adjacent activities that — surprise, surprise — don’t also require you to be a religious zealot or an anti-suffragist. Of course, for women like my mother and her mother, these kinds of hobbies were acts of domestic generosity but also of necessity. All those hours of kitchen-bound chores weren’t performed for legions of online followers but were simply required by the demands of family life.
Toward the end of the first episode of “Little House,” titled “Independence,” Ma Ingalls lies in an ivory tent, bathed in a romantic shadow play of lamplight and the big Kansas night sky. She’s pregnant and has sustained a foot injury in her first days on the frontier, and, ever the stalwart spouse, she tells her husband that, even though she’s frightened by their new circumstances, she believes in him. She counters her own fear with hope of what this new way of life might offer. “What if this is where we finally become who we were meant to be?” she says.
I guess the tradwife life may be just another waypost on a person’s journey to figuring out who they’re meant to be. And maybe I’m less a tradwife than someone who’s come to accept that she needs a regular infusion of domestic ephemerality. I love my kitchen pursuits for how invisible I become while doing them — how the practice even allows for a little psychological and philosophical space.
I imagine other people find this same kind of contemplation in sewing, or knitting, or mending, or, yes, even milking a cow. So even if I don’t live the full tradwife lifestyle — for anyone else’s consumption, or my own — I can still venerate those tasks that remind me that who I am meant to be is fluid and multitudinous. It can be expressed in how I stir a wooden spoon through water and flour to make the tangzhong that is the starter for my son’s favorite milk bread, and also in a poem I might write, born of my fascination with the same word.
JoAnna Novak is the author of, most recently, “Domestirexia: Poems,” and she writes How to Watch TV With Your Kid, a newsletter about culture and parenting.
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