Tradwives x Eugenics

Dust off your aprons and heat up your cast iron because it’s finally time for one of our most requested episodes yet! In this episode, Hannah and Marcelle dig deep into the tradwife phenomenon. Using the viral tradwife influencer Ballerina Farm as a case study, Hannah leads us through a discussion about eugenics, replacement theory, and clean living movements. They also get into influencer culture, the performance of farm life, and…milk. Whew! That’s a lot, and it’s ALL relevant. This episode is for those of you who love to hate tradwives, are curious about their meteoric rise in popularity over the last few years, or have never even heard of them! Related listening: 9 to 5 x Labour Feminism with Zena Sharman Get Out x Horrifying Whiteness Witch, Please: Book 7, Ep. 6 | Eugenics Works Cited: Agnew, Megan. “Meet the queen of the ‘trad wives’ (and her eight children.” The Times 20 July 2024: https://archive.ph/YHB08. “Clean living movement.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_living_movement. Accessed 14 May 2026. Elster, N., Parsi, K., & Caplan, A. Guest editorial. “Laundering Public Health: Using Autism to Revive Eugenics.” The American Journal of Bioethics (2026): 1–3. https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2026.2659519. “Eugenics and Scientific Racism.” National Human Genome Research Institute 18 May 2022. https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/Eugenics-and-Scientific-Racism. Accessed 14 May 2026. Luse, Brittany. “Mormon Moms: Unpacking a national obsession.” It’s Been A Minute (NPR) 12 November 2024: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1212541651. Moskin, Julia. “Tycoon or Tradwife? The Woman Behind Ballerina Farm Makes Her Own Path.” The New York Times 3 December 2024: https://archive.ph/Q9j2J#selection-489.0-489.70. Petersen, Anne Helen. “The Edenic Allure of Ballerina Farm.” Culture Study 10 February 2022: https://annehelen.substack.com/p/the-edenic-allure-of-ballerinafarm. Sykes, Sophia and Dr Veronica Hopner. “Tradwives: The Housewives Commodifying Right-Wing Ideology.” Global Network on Extremism & Technology 7 July 2023: https://gnet-research.org/2023/07/07/tradwives-the-housewives-commodifying-right-wing-ideology/. Valverde, Mariana. The Age of Light, Soap, and Water: Moral Reform in English Canada, 1885-1925. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1991. *** To learn more about Material Girls, head to our Instagram at instagram.com/ohwitchplease! Or check out our website ohwitchplease.ca. We'll be back next week with a Material Concerns episode, but until then, go check out all the other content we have on our Patreon at Patreon.com/ohwitchplease! Patreon is how we produce the show and pay our team! Material Girls is a show that makes sense of the zeitgeist through materialist critique* and critical theory! Each episode looks at a unique object of study (something popular now or from back in the day) and over the course of three distinct segments, Hannah and Marcelle apply their academic expertise to the topic at hand. *Materialist Critique is, at its simplest possible level, a form of cultural critique – that is, scholarly engagement with a cultural text of some kind – that is interested in modes of production, moments of reception, and the historical and ideological contexts for both. Music Credits: “Shopping Mall”: by Jay Arner and Jessica Delisle ©2020 Used by permission. All rights reserved. As recorded by Auto Syndicate on the album “Bongo Dance”. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.