No Trad Wives Welcome Here: The Identity Crisis of Massachusetts’ Stay-at-Home Moms

That’s why she wants to remain anonymous—she doesn’t want people dissecting her former company or her choices. And over the past couple of months, I’ve talked to many women, some willing to go on record and others not so much, all wrestling with what it means to be a stay-at-home mom in a place where your job title might as well be your whole identity.

It’s a mindset that feels especially potent here, even as the concept of “tradwives” and “stay-at-home girlfriends” is catching fire on the social media feeds of young women across the country, though primarily in more conservative regions. You know the type: dewy twenty­somethings in adorable aprons and full faces of makeup, flooding TikTok in a gauzy mythos of pristine domesticity. They peddle a throwback 1950s lifestyle where she’s all about the home, serving her family with a smile, while he goes off to work. You’ll often find them painstakingly chronicling their bread-baking or gardening routines; less is said about how much their spouse actually earns to bankroll this blissful life, adding to the myth. Watching it is weirdly addictive—like ogling gingham-clad tigers in a gilded cage.

These domestic influencers have everybody from Vogue to the New Yorker writing stories, and it makes sense—their wholehearted embrace of a dynamic that many Gen X and Millennial women fought so hard against is provocative and, for some, even alluring. So much so that even the most hard-core, Lean In corporate lioness might wonder if it’d be simpler just to chuck it all in and go make sourdough.

Leading this domestic revival is the Mormon ballerina turned influencer Hannah Neeleman, holding court from her Utah homestead, Ballerina Farm, with her eight kids and 10 million Instagram followers. She’s selling the whole fantasy—from farmer protein powder to twee aprons to artisanal soaps—as is homemaker celeb Ree Drummond (you might know her as the Pioneer Woman), who’s still dominating the domesticity landscape with soothing cinnamon-roll videos while hawking flower-festooned mixers. Both women, and many who’ve followed their tradwife blueprint, also happen to have married into wealthy families. Unlike their homemaking routines, this isn’t meticulously disclosed.

Here in Massachusetts, though, the tradwife wave is crashing up against the harsh wall of reality: Who can even afford to be one? Just look at the numbers: More than 80 percent of women in Massachusetts aged 25 to 54 were in the labor force as of early last year. If you don’t work, it’s easy to feel like a minority—because you are. Housing and the overall cost of living are also among the most expensive in the country. Dual incomes are often essential, and if you don’t absolutely need one, it’s tempting to draw assumptions: Either you’re rolling in money or lacking ambition—or maybe both. “I feel like people look at me and think, ‘Oh, that’s sad,’” confesses one Wellesley mom who spends her days among the nanny brigade at local playgrounds. “I feel very judged.” Try selling that on TikTok.

Here in Massachusetts, though, the tradwife wave is crashing up against the harsh wall of reality: Who can even afford to be one?

When Ashley Reilly’s seven-year-old son recently stumbled across an old bobblehead doll—a relic from her marketing and PR days—he looked up at her and innocently asked: “Oh, you worked?”

It hit her like a slap. But the truth is, ever since Reilly moved to East Greenwich, Rhode Island, in 2018, she’s felt it: that subtle stigma that never existed back in Tennessee, where most of her friends were stay-at-home moms. Now, she catches herself hesitating over the most straightforward of tasks. “Sometimes, you have to fill out school forms. I always leave my job blank,” she says. “Or I put ‘marketing’ because that’s what I used to do. I can’t bring myself to write ‘stay-at-home parent.’”

Her husband, Kevin, logs marathon 70-hour weeks at a Boston-based management consulting firm while she juggles three kids between five and nine. The math just didn’t work for Reilly to maintain her own career. These days, she manages home renovations and PTO committees, ferrying her part-time preschooler back and forth to class—all while grappling with the thorny question of identity. “I have come around to it now, but for the longest time, when I’d meet people and say, ‘I stay at home with my kids,’ I’d mumble and turn bright red. There’s almost a guilt that comes with the privilege of choice: I don’t want to bother anyone, because I have friends with big jobs,” Reilly says, thinking back to countless social interactions where she’d launch into a rambling defense of her husband’s demanding schedule, as if she had something to apologize for.

Like Allison, mom of three Liz Burdett stands out in her Andover enclave, where dual incomes can feel like the norm. Though she now feels confident in her family’s decision, she says she struggled with feeling “embarrassed” and “ashamed” and found herself shrinking from the inevitable what-do-you-do conversations with neighbors. “It’s a privilege if you choose to stay at home, but you can’t call it luxurious or glamorous,” she says, dismissing the ­polished veneer splashed across social media. “There’s a certain glamour with a tradwife persona, and I totally don’t see that. I don’t see that in my real, everyday life.”

Instead, after being laid off from her full-time job following the birth of her first child, and welcoming two more while taking on intermittent freelance jobs, Burdett examined the household’s P  &  L: With crushing childcare costs and her scientist husband logging 12-hour days at work, staying home wasn’t just a choice—it was financial triage. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that others saw her as some sort of leisure-class princess. “One of the stereotypes that was often frustrating for our family was that I just didn’t want to work, or I didn’t feel the need to work when, at that point, it was a very financial decision,” she says. “Our budget supports a one-parent-earning household. There is no judgment and there’s no jealousy over [families] who maybe have two-income-earning parents but are able to do things that we financially are not able to do, and that’s a choice that we’ve made, and we fully embrace that choice right now. We are not going on a crazy vacation right now, because that’s not where we can spend our money.”

The realities of staying home look different for everyone, even if they’re not vocalized enough. Take Nicole Cohen in Belmont, who stays busy managing the lives of her six—yes, six—kids. (“People ask, ‘Are you religious? Is this a divine thing?’ No, we’re just nuts,” she says with a laugh.) She’s the chaperone, room parent, and the one the school calls for forgotten lunches or backpacks. But she’s not mopping floors or baking bread like the tradwives on TikTok. What frustrates her is how these social media stereotypes flatten the complex reality of why moms choose to stay home. There isn’t enough transparency about who makes these choices, how, and why, she says. Instead, we get social media slogans.

So if the tradwife label is anathema to Massachusetts’ stay-at-home moms, where does that leave them? Today’s women find themselves in a peculiar bind, hunting for role models who can show them how to dial back their careers both financially and psychologically without sacrificing their identity. Men face the same vacuum, actually—they’re doing more childcare than ever. But until there are “tradhusband” TikTok influencers or the Real Househusbands of Weston, we’ll focus on the fact that women are the ones who are relentlessly judged and stereotyped for their choices. Moms just can’t catch a break. According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, 41 percent of moms feels judged by fellow parents in their community, while only 27 percent of dads report the same type of scrutiny.

Some women, however, are crafting a new narrative. Take Neha Ruch—a Stanford MBA and former Zola brand strategist who grew up in Massachusetts and is now running the digital platform Mother Untitled from Manhattan. With more than 206,000 followers, she’s become a sort of role model for high achievers choosing family life. Even though she left the corporate world, she’s still branding: Her new book, The Power Pause, frames stepping back from work as both purposeful and ambitious. “The phrase ‘stay-at-home’ is flawed. It is not a verb, and it implies stagnancy…. We are due for a new narrative about the time focused on family life over career,” reads one of her more popular Instagram posts. Another reads: “Imagine if pausing your career to enjoy motherhood was not depicted as contrary to ambition, success, and feminism but rather an empowered choice to shift focus of time and attention for a chapter.”

The tradwife narrative of nonworking motherhood rattles the legions of local women who left high-octane careers but don’t want to be pigeonholed in the process.

Ruch is trying to harness that idea into a blueprint. In January, I moderated an event with her at Harvard Book Store before a standing-room-only crowd of women seeking to legitimize and reframe their choices. When I asked their opinions on the “tradwife” trend, a tense ripple went through the room. As I’d already learned, the domestic-bliss narrative of non­working motherhood rattles the legions of local women who left high-octane careers but don’t want to be pigeonholed in the process. “There’s a larger perception of…‘What do they do all day? How nice and lucky it must be.’ There’s just a lack of understanding,” says Burdett, who was at the talk.

Another woman transforming the way we think about stay-at-home motherhood is Sara Petersen, a mom-fluencer scholar based in New Hampshire. Her Substack, In Pursuit of Clean Countertops, which she describes as unpacking her “obsession with mom-fluencer
culture to destroy the myth of the perfect mama,” analyzes the many ways women are still minimized by one-dimensional caricatures—and why we still lap it up. “I recently listened to a [podcast that] really illuminated the fact that motherhood and domestic labor have always been difficult, and we’ve always been gaslit into viewing these endeavors as labors of love,” she says. “I think it’s totally natural to look for models of how to be, online or elsewhere, because our cultural and structural expectations of mothers and caregivers are so vast and all-encompassing,” she says—even if we find ourselves disillusioned by the portrayals.

Burdett, for her part, is deepening the dialogue by taking a page from Ruch’s and Petersen’s playbook: She just launched a newsletter with a stay-at-home friend that aims to demystify the journey of motherhood. That includes, in many cases, feelings of ambivalence. Because while some social media scrollers might envy the pastoral perfection of Ballerina Farm, Burdett often finds herself dreaming of the opposite: those quiet commutes and childfree moments at the office that working moms might take for granted. “Sometimes I’m jealous of that. It sounds lovely, like they could listen to a podcast in a car by themselves,” she says. “I just wish there was more acceptance for every mom’s arrangement. We’re all doing the best we can.”