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    "original_url": "https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/09\/24\/style\/ex-tradwife-influencer-bernadine-bluntly.html?emc=edit_na_20260925&nl=breaking-news&segment_id=227042",
    "parsed_content": "Bernadine Bluntly once argued the tradwife\u2019s cause with passionate intensity. Yet privately, she said, she was considering leaving her marriage \u2014 a step she took last year.Credit...Michael B. 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Now She\u2019s Divorced.What happens when a trad influencer leaves her husband, questions her beliefs, stops selling anti-feminism T-shirts \u2014 and still needs to make a living online?Bernadine Bluntly once argued the tradwife\u2019s cause with passionate intensity. Yet privately, she said, she was considering leaving her marriage \u2014 a step she took last year.Credit...Michael B. Thomas for The New York TimesSupported bySKIP ADVERTISEMENTListen \u00b7 19:47 min Share full articleBy Amanda HessReporting from St. LouisSept. 24, 2026Leer en espa\u00f1olThe first time Bernadine Barber saw the word \u201ctradwife,\u201d it was being used to describe her. She was not yet 30, she had three children, and her Instagram content promoting traditional gender roles was gaining a following. She had started going by Bernadine Bluntly online, a name to reflect how plainly she spoke her truth. Now she\u2019d been drafted to represent the tradwife at a 2019 right-wing event in Miami. The digital flier drew her in an anime style, in a modest dress with an infant pressed to her chest.\u201cI don\u2019t care if I ever go onstage again,\u201d Bluntly announced after speaking against women\u2019s suffrage and promoting wifely submission. \u201cMy kids are my first priority! My husband is my first priority!\u201dOnstage and online, Bluntly argued the tradwife\u2019s cause with passionate intensity. But privately, \u201cI was already going back and forth about leaving my marriage,\u201d she told me recently. Soon she would have six children, 141,000 YouTube subscribers, friends at Evie Magazine and Turning Point USA, and a commitment to an ideology that she now says made her suffer. \u201cYou\u2019re told that if you really love God, then you submit to your husband, you fight for your marriage, you forgive no matter what, and you stay for the kids,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s honestly a miracle of God that I woke up and got out.\u201dAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTLast year, Bluntly left her husband and got a restraining order against him. A Missouri court found that she had proved allegations of domestic violence, and forbade him to come within 300 feet of her. (In a court filing, he denied committing \u201cany act or pattern of domestic violence.\u201d) After their divorce was finalized this past spring, she posted a video titled \u201cWhat I Got Wrong About the Trad Movement.\u201d It signaled a new life for her, and a new job: as an ex-tradwife influencer, warning women away from what she now describes as a program of spiritual manipulation and covert marital abuse.ImageIn April, Bluntly posted a video she called \u201cWhat I Got Wrong About the Trad Movement.\u201d Since then, she has been letting her followers in as she creates a new life, away from her ex-husband.Credit...Michael B. Thomas for The New York Times\u201cI no longer believe in extreme gender roles, especially when they\u2019re wrapped in spiritual language,\u201d she says in the video.\u201cIf any belief system creates a power imbalance that puts women or anyone in a position of fear, isolation or total dependence, I reject it,\u201d she says, adding, \u201cIf my past content contributed to that, I am so genuinely sorry.\u201dThe \u201ctradwife,\u201d cutesy internet shorthand for \u201ctraditional wife,\u201d is a new word for an old archetype. Her modern icon is Hannah Neeleman, the Mormon homesteader who has nine children, 10.3 million Instagram followers and ultrarich in-laws, and who sells protein powders under the name Ballerina Farm. Her posts swept onto our feeds alongside a pronatalist administration and a reactionary social front, announcing the rebranding of a fundamentalist feminine role.But social media trends don\u2019t last forever, and the trad trend is showing its cracks. Nara Smith, the 24-year-old home cook known for her purred voice-overs and high-femme look (4.8 million followers on Instagram), recently went on the \u201cCall Her Daddy\u201d podcast in jeans, described her marriage as equal and denied that \u201ctradwife\u201d had ever described her. Neeleman told New York Magazine, \u201cIf there\u2019s things that I\u2019m sharing that people think are actually doing harm to our sex, then OK, let me take the feedback.\u201dEditors\u2019 PicksPrada Says All You Really Need Is a Knee-Length SkirtThe Lucas Museum\u2019s Architect Wants to Help You Escape From RealityIn the Private Jet Age, the Quiet Allure of Private RailAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTImageHannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm in her kitchen in Utah.Credit...Kim Raff for The New York TimesImageNara Smith has pushed back on the term \u201ctradwife.\u201dCredit...Hiroko Masuike\/The New York TimesAs support for President Trump wanes, so does his movement\u2019s user-generated content. \u201cBetween MAGA cracking and the tradwife trend coming to an end, we\u2019re going to start seeing women come out of these marriages,\u201d said Tia Levings, the author of the 2024 memoir \u201cA Well-Trained Wife,\u201d who once maintained a homemaking blog and now identifies as an \u201cex-evangelical trad cult survivor.\u201d Leaving tradlife is not as easy as Smith might make it seem. The typical tradwife may be \u201cfour, five, six babies in,\u201d Levings said, and yoked to a doctrine of constant childbearing and subservience to men. \u201cAnd oh, by the way, their husbands bought in, and they\u2019re not going to let them out,\u201d she said.I met Bluntly in July in St. Louis, where she had moved from her marital home, which she described as an off-grid tiny house in rural Missouri. Her children, who range in age from 1 to 14, were away with her ex-husband under a shared custody arrangement, so we had a long lunch at a sidewalk cafe near her new house. She ordered an Italian soda and wore a plaid pleated skirt and a scoop-neck tank under a white oxford shirt, thrift-store finds she said she would not have been allowed to wear before: the skirt cut too high, the tank top too low. She looked as if she could have been an Instagram baddie in another life.\u201cIs it OK if I pray for you real quick?\u201d Bluntly asked. I told her I\u2019d just come from visiting a relative in the hospital, and she asked the Lord to bless me with a peace that passes understanding. When she talked about her former tradwife content, she grimaced at her own lines. When she spoke about her actual tradwife life, she cried.A year ago, \u201cI was just trying to fight for my own mind,\u201d she said. Now her independent city life \u201cfeels like it\u2019s a dream.\u201d She had just posted a video of herself on Instagram, a slapstick number where she struggles to hang a boxing bag she\u2019d snagged secondhand on Facebook. I asked to see the algorithmic suggestions Instagram was serving to her, and she showed me a grid of women engaged in martial arts.\u201cI\u2019ve been using this time to strengthen myself,\u201d she said \u2014 boxing, tennis, target practice, articles, studies, books. She changed her Instagram bio to \u201cDV survivor and mama of 6.\u201d She joined a club for women in business, started attending a Presbyterian church and met her new best friend at the DMV. \u201cI read two books this month, cover to cover. I don\u2019t remember the last time that happened,\u201d she said. Since the divorce, she added, \u201cI\u2019ve been slowly shifting what I believe, and finally having the space and the freedom to do that.\u201dAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT\u201cI\u2019ve been using this time to strengthen myself,\u201d Bluntly said about her new life in St. Louis. It includes boxing, tennis, target practice, articles, studies, books.Credit...Michael B. Thomas for The New York TimesI had begun following Bluntly on Instagram a few years earlier, fascinated by the niche she occupied in the right-wing ecosystem. You would not find her posting idealized cooking or farmwork videos. Instead, she positioned herself as one of the trad movement\u2019s ideological foot soldiers, knitting the down-home feminine aesthetic to a political project, one she expressed through commentary designed to pop off online. She had a modest but notable audience, somewhere on the continuum between influencer and influenced.As she preached submission, her presence was so confident, her affect so wryly disobedient, that cognitive dissonance was built into her brand. God had given her a face made for reaction videos. \u201cMy lips are full, my eyes are big, my eyebrows are thick \u2014 you can read every emotion on my face,\u201d she said. \u201cI used to get in trouble for that as a kid.\u201dWhat she concealed \u2014 from her online audience, and often from herself \u2014 was her own misery.\u2018Being Erased\u2019Before Bluntly was a wife, she was a girl. She was born in the Philippines in 1990, the fourth of five children. Her mother died when Bluntly was 4 years old, and her father \u2014 the son of a U.S. serviceman \u2014 relocated the family to the United States when she was 7. \u201cBetween my mom dying and moving to America, the culture shock and the language barrier, I was very shy,\u201d she said. \u201cI kept to myself.\u201d Her father, she said, was volatile and absent. She moved frequently, following her eldest sister\u2019s naval postings before settling in Texas. At 16, she read the evangelical pastor Rick Warren\u2019s \u201cThe Purpose Driven Life,\u201d and then, she said, \u201cI gave my life to Jesus.\u201dAt 17, she met a boy at a church housed in a local movie theater. When he left for a charismatic Pentecostal church, where he would become a youth pastor, she followed. And when her father became physically abusive, she said, she moved in with the youth pastor\u2019s family. The church preached against premarital cohabitation, and its pressure mounted. One day, a visitor calling himself a prophet announced that he foresaw her becoming the youth pastor\u2019s wife, and an exultant congregation praised God. By 20 she was engaged, and by 21 married. \u201cI didn\u2019t have time to process it,\u201d she said. \u201cIt was like, God said.\u201dBluntly got an associate degree in early childhood education, hoping to move abroad to do missionary work and teach English to children. She enrolled in Texas A&M but dropped out after a semester. \u201cI got married and had my first baby instead,\u201d she said. She began writing and recording Christian spoken-word poetry, and soon she was getting gigs at cafes and banquets that brought a glint of national attention. But as her marriage progressed, \u201cmy dreams, my passions, my talents were absolutely secondary.\u201dAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTImageBluntly on her wedding day. She was engaged at 20 and married at 21. Looking back at that decision, she said, \u201cI didn\u2019t have time to process it.\u201dCredit...via Bernadine Barber\u201cAnd then, increasingly, they were framed as an obstacle,\u201d she continued. \u201cI felt like I was being erased.\u201dIn 2017, two babies in, she read \u201cLies Women Believe: And the Truth that Sets Them Free\u201d by the Christian author Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth. It promotes an ideology of \u201cbiblical womanhood\u201d as the key to a life of abundance and bliss. The cover features a red apple nipped by a sinful bite. Bluntly came to believe that any problem in a marriage was a woman\u2019s to fix.\u201cI thought, Oh, maybe that\u2019s what I\u2019m doing wrong,\u201d Bluntly said. \u201cMaybe me pursuing my dreams and trying to use my talents outside the home is what\u2019s causing the problems.\u201d Even as she resigned herself to domesticity, she \u201cstill needed a creative outlet,\u201d she said. Digital content presented \u201ca happy medium,\u201d a way to work from home and a social outlet for her increasingly isolated life; after a series of arguments over where they ought to attend church, she and her husband had stopped going. For a time, she posted family vlogs, but \u201csomewhere along the way I started talking about politics, too,\u201d she said, \u201cand it was the political content that really took off.\u201dHer breakout post was in support of Brett Kavanaugh\u2019s nomination to the Supreme Court. \u201cIt\u2019s so ironic now,\u201d she said ruefully. \u201cThat was my introduction to actually having a voice, or influence.\u201d She branded herself Bernadine Bluntly and opened an online storefront selling $25 shirts that read \u201cR.I.P. Feminism.\u201d Though she rarely shared details of her family online, \u201cmy lifestyle \u2014 of having had so many kids \u2014 was speaking for itself,\u201d she said. As tradwife influencers were fruitful and multiplied, she created a digital course for young women, Simply Smitten, in which she dangled the keys to courting godly men. Her husband posted his own content, advising men on how to become a \u201cstrong patriarch\u201d who can mold a \u201csweet tradwife who happily \u2018fills your gut and empties your balls,\u2019 as the saying goes.\u201dSoon, Bluntly\u2019s influence became the family business, and her modest and inconsistent online income \u2014 it brought in an average of $2,500 a month, she said \u2014 was stretched to meet the family\u2019s needs. \u201cEverything was configured to make it justifiable,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019m leading people, but I\u2019m doing it under my husband\u2019s approval and headship, so it\u2019s OK. I\u2019m making money, I\u2019m the breadwinner, but that\u2019s OK because he\u2019s acting as my C.E.O. I work for the family.\u201d Meanwhile, she said, \u201cI was constantly getting pregnant again.\u201dAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTImageBluntly at 22 in 2012 with her first of six children.Credit...via Bernadine BarberShe felt trapped, she said, in a psychological and spiritual cage. Traditional wives who try to leave \u201care not just feeling that they\u2019re disappointing their husbands,\u201d Bluntly said, adding: \u201cIt\u2019s worse than that. They are directly disobeying God.\u201d And the expectation to have as many children as possible keeps them physically in the home, and the movement. \u201cIf you get pregnant, you\u2019re less likely to leave, less likely to fight back,\u201d she said. \u201cYou\u2019re a lot more vulnerable.\u201dWhen I asked how that reproductive dynamic influenced her own marriage, she wiped away tears. \u201cI love my kids,\u201d she said. \u201cI would probably go through everything all over again just to have all six of them here.\u201dIn 2024, Bluntly tapped a rich vein of online attention by posting a series of reaction videos in which she pokes fun at a feminist perspective on gendered work. She imagines a feminist woman saying that \u201canything men can do, we can do better,\u201d and then superimposes her face over clips of men engaged in strenuous blue-collar labor. As they wield chain saws and drill oil, Bluntly performs shocked admiration. Then she delivers her tagline: \u201cReject delusions. Embrace gender differences.\u201dThe series racked up 20 million views. And yet Bluntly\u2019s sublimation of her ambition into a glorification of masculine work failed to produce the family harmony and personal fulfillment she had hoped it would. One day in May 2025, she found herself in that off-grid home with no church, no local support system and six children. She believed that she had done everything to try to make her marriage work, she said, but \u201cI felt like I was dying inside.\u201d Her youngest son was 4 months old. She was not permitted, she said, to walk down the gravel path leading to the highway on her own. But she had a phone.Bluntly remembers shutting herself into an office structure installed behind the house, a space where she often disappeared to film her videos. Instead, she called the police station, asked for a patrol car to be sent and sneaked down the path to meet it. At the precinct, she shakily filled out the paperwork to file an order of protection against her husband as he texted her phone, asking where she was. \u201cI just jumped, and I wasn\u2019t sure how I was going to land,\u201d she said. Her two older sisters drove through the night to pick up Bluntly and her children and brought them to a motel in Gainesville, Mo. That summer, they bounced around between hotels, a shelter, the house of a friend. One night, as she prepared to put her kids into a packed car, she paused to film another green-screen video in front of a hotel wall.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT\u201cI didn\u2019t have the mental bandwidth to be like, What do I believe?\u201d she said. \u201cI had to keep doing what works. I had to keep doing what pays. That was how I was going to feed my kids.\u201dBluntly now shares physical custody with her ex-husband. (Joan Meier, the director of the National Family Violence Law Center at the George Washington University Law School, said that family court judges often give little weight to allegations of domestic violence in custody decisions and have penalized mothers for moving away with the children.) Pursuant to their divorce arrangement, she pays him $235 a month in child support out of her influencer wages. \u201cIf I didn\u2019t have social media,\u201d she said, \u201cI would have nothing.\u201dMothers of ReinventionWhen a tradwife influencer divorces, she explodes the very basis of her content business. But she still has a platform, one that she can jump from into a new world of content where she\u2019ll find other women on a similar path. Like Jennie Gage, who calls herself \u201cEx MAGA, Ex Mormon, Ex Tradwife\u201d and now makes a living decoding the offerings of Neeleman and Smith for her 391,000 TikTok followers. And Alice Llani, who serves 855,000 TikTok followers winking instructional videos with captions like \u201chow to make up for 6 years no job experience or education due to being a tradwife @19 no borax no glue.\u201dEnitza Templeton, a 43-year-old Colorado mother of four, identifies as a \u201cformer tradwife\u201d and \u201ccurrent baddie\u201d to her 247,000 TikTok followers. When she became disillusioned with her own tradlife, Templeton created an Instagram account called Sweet by the Slice. \u201cI thought that if I could post my life online and make it look beautiful, then maybe I would believe that my life was beautiful,\u201d she said. But social media also gave her a window into her unlived life \u2014 and a future income stream she could use to escape. Scrolling Instagram \u201cwas a huge shock,\u201d Templeton said, adding, \u201cI saw other mothers that had five children, and they were single moms, and I was like: You can do that?\u201dWhen Bluntly and I left the cafe, she drove me to my hotel in her minivan, a hand-me-down gift from a friend. She kicked a tennis racket aside to make room in the passenger seat. The next day, I joined her at a studio owned by a woman she\u2019d met through her businesswomen\u2019s club; it\u2019s the kind of place designed for girls\u2019 nights, with a jewelry bar and floral photo backdrop. Bluntly set up her phone on a tripod, flipped her hair twice and filmed two videos using TikTok\u2019s built-in teleprompter feature. Both were warnings: against husbands who demand secrecy in marriage, and against communities that uphold an image of family values over women\u2019s and children\u2019s lives.Bluntly now shares lifestyle content about women-owned businesses in St. Louis and her new reality there. She made one slapstick video of herself hanging a boxing bag, a new hobby.Credit...Michael B. Thomas for The New York TimesAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTBluntly is still finding her footing as a post-trad influencer. She shares lifestyle content about women-owned businesses in St. Louis and speaks about her Filipino heritage in a way she never did before. She regrets preaching marriage as the height of a woman\u2019s ambitions, but she\u2019s grateful that many of her former mentees are still following along. \u201cI\u2019ve been there, I\u2019ve done that, I\u2019ve got the T-shirt, the restraining order and the divorce,\u201d Bluntly said. \u201cNow I\u2019m like, Just be careful.\u201dBluntly has received support online from women who are questioning their own beliefs \u2014 and skepticism from those who feel her reversal is too little, too late. \u201cIt\u2019s a legitimate criticism; some of it is deserved,\u201d Bluntly said. \u201cI have apologized for the things I\u2019ve said, and I will continue to do that, and take ownership of it.\u201d She is still disentangling a lifetime of patriarchal influence, and she isn\u2019t sure where she\u2019ll land politically. \u201cI feel like so many of the things that I thought \u2018the left\u2019 or \u2018feminists\u2019 believed were not accurate,\u201d she said. \u201cThey\u2019re attacking systems and ways of doing things, not just all men.\u201dShe is not dating yet, but \u201cif God has it in the cards for me,\u201d she said, she\u2019d like to someday. \u201cI don\u2019t know if I\u2019m having more kids,\u201d she added. \u201cI think I might \u2014 I kind of want \u2014 I\u2019d be open to one more.\u201dIn time, she said, she hopes her social presence can \u201chelp bring awareness and education on abuse and coercion, specifically within religious or traditional circles.\u201d\u201cI just have this weird kind of desire,\u201d she said, \u201cto make my life count for something.\u201dFrom the comments766Amanda HessStyles reporterI started following Bernadine Bluntly a few years ago, when I came across her hard-right, pro-tradwife posts on Instagram. The cognitive dissonance in her content interested me \u2014 she was promoting wifely submission even as she built a career for herself as an outspoken political voice. A few months ago, she announced that she was divorcing her husband and questioning the trad movement, and I knew I had to speak with her.Amanda HessStyles reporterWhat I found was a woman who seemed to be emerging from a cage for the first time, and sharing that the real life of a trad wife can be so much more fraught, and dangerous, than Instagram makes it seem.Read 6 repliesAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT",
    "published_at": "2026-09-24T14:09:20+00:00",
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    "ai_simplified_title": "Bernadine Bluntly Leaves Tradwife Movement and Marriage",
    "ai_excerpt": "Bernadine Bluntly, a former tradwife influencer, has left her marriage and is no longer advocating for the tradwife cause. This article appears to be a news piece from The New York Times.",
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