Nara Smith Is NOT a TradWife—She Just Profits Off Pretending to Be One

Over the past few years, with the help of Trump 2.0 and America’s favorite pastime (sexism), what was once a phrase defining the small gaggle of women romanticizing the traditional housewife life—of tradwifery—has now entered the modern lexicon and unfortunately has grown into a larger movement, not just on social media, but IRL too. Enter Nara Smith, the top tradwife in the game, who now claims she was never really a traditional housewife to begin with, but rather just “playing” one. 

Smith has over 12 million followers on TikTok and almost 5 million on Instagram, and has drawn a following for her relentless effort to make everything from scratch with organic ingredients—from goldfish to bubblegum to homemade Coca-Cola. Over the years, as Smith’s popularity grew, her videos became increasingly extreme. These days, it’s normal to see Smith on TikTok wearing an extravagant gown and making homemade organic Doritos for her children. In a new interview with Vanity Fair, they asked if she thought “playing dress up” would be a better description of her work, as opposed to tradwife—she said yes. 

“Yeah, I love playing dress up! I’ve never quite understood where that title [tradwife] comes from because I don’t know what is traditional about our life,” she said. “I am a full-time working mom. I work; so does Lucky. It’s a modern relationship. I think it might’ve been because I love cooking, but cooking is my love language. It’s a hobby of mine, and it’s my job. It’s not something that I’m condemned to do.” So, Smith is a working mom, which makes it extra ironic that she is profiting from selling the opposite story to young women in her videos.

“It’s really odd, but I feel like I play a character and I get to be whatever I want to be for the day. And it depends on what I put on. If I want to put on a princess gown, I’ll feel like a princess. If I want to put on something sleeker, I’ll feel elegant,” she continued. “I love coordinating my outfits with the food I cook, whether that’s a color scheme or a time era or a texture, and I love when people catch on to little references.” Lord, I hope that pretending to be a housewife on the internet to achieve financial independence wasn’t the future of feminism that our foremothers dreamt for us.

Smith is married to model Lucky Blue Smith and has four children, Rumble Honey, Whimsy Lou, Fawnie Golden, and Slim Easy, which we don’t have time to unpack right now, but I’m sure you’ll be very shocked to hear that she’s also Mormon!

If I’m at your home and you offer me some homemade Diet Coke, I’m gonna lose my shit. So let’s stop that, and while we’re at it, let’s go back to a time when “tradwifery” wasn’t in the Cambridge dictionary. 

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