Ellen Coyne

Good afternoon.

So Tradwife is like a new trend in social media influencers.

The most popular one is Hannah Nealman.

She runs Ballerina Farm.

She has 10 million followers and she espouses this lifestyle where women are kind of working within the home, following traditional, in her case, Mormon beliefs of being fruitful.

She just welcomed her ninth child in March of this year.

You know, she's kind of staying at home, working on her farm, creating food from scratch.

And it's an entire fantasy version of traditional gender roles where the woman stays at home, has loads and loads of kids and is cooking all day.

And the man is the provider who goes out and earns a lot of money to sustain the farm by keeping his hands dirty.

Yes, in two very different ways.

So on the one side in America, obviously, this is part of a big culture war.

We know that the Trump administration is really big on pro-natalism, which is trying to raise the birth rate by encouraging women to have more children.

And obviously, some of that is tied up to conservative Republican ideas about gender roles and modern feminism.

On the other side of things, I think the appeal to the majority of women, certainly women in Ireland who would have no truck with the politics of the tradwife movement, is that in 2026, to be able to work within the home, to have loads and loads of kids kind of seems like a subversive idea because for so many of us, that is just out of reach.

But I think just to burst the bubble slightly, a lot of these women, including Hannah Nealman, are multimillionaires.

Her husband happens to be the heir

to the dynasty of an airline tycoon.

The farm is worth 2.75 million and they have a staff of 30 people, including a homeschooler and some housekeepers.

So all is not really as it seems online, but obviously this has become like a big, it's really captured the zeitgeist because it seems to capture something with women.

Yep, I mean, I'd be very candid, I think I've said this to my colleagues in the Irish Times, that if I had a choice, there is no way that I would be working outside of the home, certainly until my child or any other children I might have reach school age.