What happens when a trad influencer leaves her husband, questions her beliefs, stops selling anti-feminism T-shirts – and still needs to make a living online?
The first time Bernadine Barber saw the word “tradwife”, 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’d been drafted to represent the tradwife at a 2019 right-wing event in Miami.
“I don’t care if I ever go onstage again,” Bluntly announced after speaking against women’s suffrage and promoting wifely submission. “My kids are my first priority! My husband is my first priority!”
Onstage and online, Bluntly argued the tradwife’s cause with passionate intensity. But privately, “I was already going back and forth about leaving my marriage,” 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.
“You’re 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,” she said. “It’s honestly a miracle of God that I woke up and got out.”
Last 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 “any act or pattern of domestic violence”.) After their divorce was finalised earlier this year, she posted a video titled “What I Got Wrong About the Trad Movement”. It signalled a new life for her, and a new job: as an ex-tradwife influencer, warning women away from what she now describes as a programme of spiritual manipulation and covert marital abuse.
“I no longer believe in extreme gender roles, especially when they’re wrapped in spiritual language,” she says in the video.
“If any belief system creates a power imbalance that puts women or anyone in a position of fear, isolation or total dependence, I reject it,” she says, adding, “If my past content contributed to that, I am so genuinely sorry.”
The “tradwife”, cutesy internet shorthand for “traditional wife”, 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 ultra-rich in-laws, and who sells protein powders under the name Ballerina Farm.
But the trad trend is showing its cracks. Nara Smith, the 24-year-old home cook known for her purred voiceovers and high-femme look (4.8 million followers on Instagram), recently went on the Call Her Daddy podcast in jeans, described her marriage as equal and denied that “tradwife” had ever described her.
“Between Maga cracking and the tradwife trend coming to an end, we’re going to start seeing women come out of these marriages,” said Tia Levings, the author of the 2024 memoir A Well-Trained Wife, who once maintained a homemaking blog and now identifies as an “ex-evangelical trad cult survivor”.
Leaving tradlife is not as easy as Smith might make it seem. The typical tradwife may be “four, five, six babies in”, Levings said, and yoked to a doctrine of constant childbearing and subservience to men. “And oh, by the way, their husbands bought in, and they’re not going to let them out,” 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.
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, “I was just trying to fight for my own mind,” she said. Now her independent city life “feels like it’s a dream”.
“I’ve been using this time to strengthen myself,” she said – boxing, tennis, target practice, articles, studies, books. She changed her Instagram bio to “DV survivor and mama of 6″. She joined a club for women in business, started attending a Presbyterian church and met her new best friend at the DMV. Since the divorce, she said, “I’ve been slowly shifting what I believe, and finally having the space and the freedom to do that.”
‘Being erased’
Before 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 – the son of a US serviceman – relocated the family to the United States when she was 7. At 16, she read evangelical pastor Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life, and then, she said, “I gave my life to Jesus.”
At 17, she met a boy at a church housed in a local movie theatre. When he left for a charismatic Pentecostal church, where he would become a youth pastor, she followed. By 20 she was engaged, and by 21 married.
But as her marriage progressed, “my dreams, my passions, my talents were absolutely secondary”, she said. “And then, increasingly, they were framed as an obstacle. I felt like I was being erased.”
Even as she resigned herself to domesticity, she “still needed a creative outlet”, she said. Digital content presented “a happy medium”, a way to work from home and a social outlet for her increasingly isolated life.
She branded herself Bernadine Bluntly and opened an online storefront selling $25 shirts that read “R.I.P. Feminism”. 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.
Soon, Bluntly’s influence became the family business, and her modest and inconsistent online income – it brought in an average of $2500 a month, she said – was stretched to meet the family’s needs. Meanwhile, she said, “I was constantly getting pregnant again.”
She felt trapped, she said, in a psychological and spiritual cage. Traditional wives who try to leave “are not just feeling that they’re disappointing their husbands”, Bluntly said, adding: “It’s worse than that. They are directly disobeying God.”
One day in May 2025, she found herself in that off-grid home with six children. She believed that she had done everything to try to make her marriage work, she said, but “I felt like I was dying inside”. 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.
She called the police station, asked for a patrol car to be sent and sneaked down the path to meet it. “I just jumped, and I wasn’t sure how I was going to land,” she said.
Mothers of reinvention
When 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’ll find other women on a similar path. Like Jennie Gage, who calls herself “Ex Maga, Ex Mormon, Ex Tradwife” 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 “how to make up for 6 years no job experience or education due to being a tradwife @19 no borax no glue”.
Enitza Templeton, a 43-year-old Colorado mother of four, identifies as a “former tradwife” and “current baddie” to her 247,000 TikTok followers. When she became disillusioned with her own tradlife, Templeton created an Instagram account called Sweet by the Slice. “I thought that if I could post my life online and make it look beautiful, then maybe I would believe that my life was beautiful,” she said. But social media also gave her a window into her unlived life – and a future income stream she could use to escape. Scrolling Instagram “was a huge shock”, Templeton said, adding, “I saw other mothers that had five children, and they were single moms, and I was like: You can do that?”
Bluntly 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’s ambitions, but she’s grateful that many of her former mentees are still following along. “I’ve been there, I’ve done that, I’ve got the T-shirt, the restraining order and the divorce,” Bluntly said. “Now I’m like, Just be careful.”
She is not dating yet, but “if God has it in the cards for me”, she said, she’d like to someday. “I don’t know if I’m having more kids,” she added. “I think I might – I kind of want – I’d be open to one more.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Amanda Hess
Photographs by: Michael B. Thomas and Kim Raff
©2026 THE NEW YORK TIMES
