Edible Women
I am not a good baker. But for three generations in my family, a little baking book has been passed down between mothers and daughters. My childhood is serrated with memories of its recipes, used to measure the time from milestone to milestone. Whatever it is that makes someone good at baking, all of the women in my family have it, me excepted. Having that book gives me a story, though. Provenance. I come from a family of people who can bake. So I persevere, fishing eggshells out of dough, determined to get good. The only recipe I can make by heart is Rich Scones, out of the first page of our little book. When I was invited to a viewing party for Over the Garden Wall, a cartoon for children, I decided to test my scones on a new audience.
Over the course of an afternoon and ten episodes, my attention wandered from the screen to the cake tower at the front of the room. As it happened, people had been trying my scones (some had even gone back again for more!). The whole thing was a success, and at the end of it, I offered to help the host in the kitchen while the men who were left played Mario Kart. She washed trays as I stacked her dishwasher; I thought of a quote from Joan Didion. “It is possible”, she wrote, “for people to be the unconscious instruments of values they would strenuously reject on a conscious level”. It was true, at least, that I would have preferred playing Mario Kart to scraping food off other people’s plates.
“We’re such tradwives right now,” my friend said. We both laughed.
Tradwives — or ‘traditional wives’ — are women who pass their days homemaking, all while documenting it on social media. Creators like Nara Smith, Hannah Neeleman, and even Emily Mariko have been put into the category, but what do they have in common other than the fact that they film themselves cooking? Pondering this question in my friend’s kitchen, one word came to me: performance. In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler argues that gender is not something we are, but something we do — something we construct and maintain through continual action. Femininity requires rehearsal, repetition, reaction; “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”, as Simone de Beauvoir said. Nara Smith, while moulding dough with perfectly manicured nails, is playing a role. But who is she playing for?
For viewers who have been on TikTok long enough to have witnessed the clean girl, the girl dinner, the ‘dark feminine’ girl, That Girl, and girl-on-and-girl-forth, the tradwife trend is just another iteration of harmful, infantalising, anti-feminist rhetoric packaged as empowerment. “Who needs personal growth when you can cultivate a lovely herb garden and simmer in silent resentment?” reads a post on Threads. With her seismic rise to popularity, it’s no surprise that Smith has been the subject of much of this criticism. As well as being a 22-year-old mother-of-three, she is a member of the controversial Mormon church, bringing into question her reasoning for portraying a lifestyle where she lives to serve her husband. But strangers aren’t the only ones to scrutinise her content. The presence of multiple camera angles, deliberate cuts, voiceovers, and extravagant outfits in Smith’s content alludes to a sense of self-surveillance. On a video where she makes dinner for her parents in a white dress with oversized ruffles (reminiscent of a loofah or a certain IKEA lamp, as her viewers pointed out), commenters were quick to proclaim that they were in on her joke: ‘that is the most appropriate cooking attire I’ve ever seen’, ‘Now I know she’s pranking us’. Smith responded to one viewer likening her outfit to something off a red carpet (“wdym you’re making dinner in a MET gala outfit”), saying: “I’m just a girl”. Aware of herself as both observer and observed, Smith inhabits a dual role.
By casting herself, her husband, and her children in her content, Smith is able to navigate and subvert traditional norms by placing herself in control of her own narrative. By introducing the camera, Smith controls what the audience can see, actively redirecting their gaze to harness its power and control her own visual narrative. “My husband doesn’t cook…,” Nara starts in most videos which feature her husband, model Lucky Blue Smith, cooking. Or, sometimes Nara will start a video by saying “My husband was craving…”. Before he is Lucky, he is her husband. “Lately I’ve just been violently craving cookie dough, so [my husband] made me his famous recipe,” she says in one video. “He gets very, very specific with his measurements, so he always has to make sure everything is level and perfectly measured out,” she continues. Lucky is a man who has a famous recipe for cookie dough, and who likes things to be perfect. With Nara constructing this character through her narration, it’s no wonder her life looks so put-together from the other side of a screen. Her clean kitchen, docile children, and doting husband are not just artefacts of her life, they are signifiers of Smith’s power to shape and represent her own reality. This world — both natural and crafted — emphasises the power of digital technologies in reshaping patriarchal narratives and rewriting what it can mean to be feminist in the age of TikTok.
As it turns out, TikTok is a powerful vehicle for subverting the traditional values and expectations that Smith ostensibly plays into. Smith is a tradwife, but she is not ‘traditional’ – the very presence of her camera allows her to broadcast her life, attracting viewers and sponsorships which give her power as a breadwinner in her own right. In A Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway positions technology as a tool for women to challenge patriarchal structures of power and redefine their own identities, on their terms. Tradwives, inhabiting a liminal space between the traditional and the digital, the modern and the outdated, are carving their own spaces in which they can redefine what it means to be a woman who finds purpose in domestic duties. They may be seen as subservient Fembots or Stepford Wives, but Haraway’s argument positions TikTok tradwives as another type of synthetic human form: cyborgs. Cyborgs, she argues, occupy the space between the realms of imagination and material reality. Challenging the dichotomy between woman and machine brings other binaries into question, too. Smith’s content could be seen as a resistance against oppressive structures of power, if we consider her digital presence evidence of her inhabiting two worlds. By yielding TikTok as a tool to mediate and redefine her relationship with traditionally feminine labour, Smith asserts her own sense of agency by making the private sphere public. As she transforms her home into a marketable domain, Smith transcends the traditional role of homemaker to establish herself as a personal brand. The nails, the couture, the gentle speaking voice? Each of these elements are curated and deployed by Smith in her content to appeal to her audience and indicate her marketability to brands – and it’s working. With posts sponsored by Dyson, Laneige, Aritzia, and a host of other A-list brands, it seems as though Smith is as much an expert in personal branding as she is in cooking.
Unlike the subservient housewives of the 1960s, who in most cases were financially dependent on their husbands and socially isolated, Smith has been able to use her digital persona to create her own income and source of community. She is a hybrid of authentic feminine expression and patriarchal gender performance, walking between two ways of being. By utilising digital technology to control the audience’s gaze, hybrids like Smith enter into an active discourse with the viewer, where – as Haraway suggests – historical transformation can take place. Inviting her audience to view and respond to historically invisible labour means that Smith is actively creating a space where patriarchal norms can be questioned, which in turn allows for rigid binaries to dissolve. I’m not suggesting tradwife content is dismantling the patriarchy by any means, but it could be said that her resistance to categorisation makes Smith at least a little feminist.
While kneading dough for my party scones, I realised something: all women are edible. Through the act of looking, women’s bodies are commodified; to be displayed, and to be looked at. Held within the male gaze and patriarchal expectations, our lives are consumed. As objects of visual pleasure for men, women are positioned as the bearers (rather than makers) of meaning about gender. Nara Smith’s videos seem, in a way, kind of brave: while she makes cereal from scratch, she also asserts her own power as creator of her reality. By controlling what her audience can see, Smith reclaims the power to represent herself, and to define what being a woman means to her. Femininity is a performance for Smith, but she is both the mask and its wearer. In a way, her videos showcasing domestic homemaking are a strange celebration of womanhood as Smith sees it. And who would say that was anti-feminist?
Scone recipe:
This recipe for Rich Scones comes from the Centenary Edition of the Be-Ro home recipes cookbook. “Where housewives have the choice, they prefer Be-Ro to any other flour!” one of the opening pages claims, but you can use any flour and these are certain to turn out light and fluffy with the perfect amount of crisp on the outside, even if you’re not a naturally-talented baker.
Ingredients:
200g self-raising flour
Pinch of salt
50g butter (slightly melted)
50g currants or sultanas (optional)
1 egg (beaten) with 75ml milk (mixture)
Equipment:
Big glass bowl
Scales
Measuring cup
Baking tray
Method:
Mix flour and salt, rub in butter.
Stir in sugar and fruit.
Add egg and milk, reserving a bit for brushing the tops.
Knead lightly on a floured surface and roll out just over 1cm in thickness
Cut into rounds, re-roll trimmings and cut more rounds.
Place on greased baking tray and brush the tops with egg and milk.
Bake in a hot oven (220°C, or 200° fan-forced) for about 12 minutes.