“Tradwife” or Period Drama? What The Forsytes Can Tell Us About Life in 2026

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a promising young ballet dancer meets the heir of a wealthy family. Despite her initial trepidation, she ultimately agrees to a romance, which ends with her giving up dance to focus instead on the role of wife and mother. Depending on your background, that description fits Irene, the ingénue at the center of MASTERPIECE’s new show The Forsytes. But don’t let the (gorgeous) historical costumes and settings fool you: this period drama has a lot to tell us about our current cultural moment, where Victorian ideas around gender, sexuality, and marriage appear to be back in the zeitgeist. For instance: for some readers, that story of a young dancer calls to mind real life influencer Hannah Neeleman, more commonly known as her nom de plume @ballerinafarm.

If you’ve never heard of Ballerina Farm: Hannah Neeleman is a Julliard-educated dancer who met and married the son of an airline magnate, left her dance career behind, and now shares a curated vision of life on the farm with their nine (so far) children. I won’t write yet another thinkpiece on the family; this one in The Baffler sets the stage particularly well, and this piece in The Times highlights the controversy they’ve garnered in recent years. While Neeleman doesn’t identify as such, her public persona is perhaps the ur example of a tradwife, and has inspired other influencers who follow in her footsteps and very intentionally identify with that label. For our purposes, it’s enough to say that influencers who fall under the modern conception of “tradwife” perform a type of historically-coded femininity. But homemaker isn’t just an occupation for these women: it’s also a product. While “tradwives” inhabit the role of retro housewife, they actually have a full time job: social media influencer. Armed with a smartphone, these women share their idyllic day to day lives: churning butter, preparing meals for their families, and maintaining their homes, all while surrounded by their beautiful children.

The Forsytes is an adaptation of John Glasworthy’s “The Forsyte Saga,” a series of novels and novellas published in the early 1900s, and set in the late Victorian period. In the first season we follow the conflict between Soames and Jolyon, cousins who are both in contention to lead the family’s extremely successful investment firm. Jolyon, who’s set to inherit as the son of an eldest son, represents the kinder, gentler version of wealth accumulation: he doesn’t particularly want to be there, but if he is, he’d prefer that their mines not have disasters that kill a bunch of workers. Soames, on the other hand, has been molded by his father into the perfect scheming ultra-capitalist heir: he will happily shove kids into the orphan crushing machine if it provides a decent ROI. And yet midway through the season, Soames seems to have a change of heart.

Enter Irene (pronounced, for reasons I cannot fathom but feel you need to know, eye-reen-ee). Irene’s firmly working class. Her deepest ambition is to become a professional ballet dancer in Paris, and her father supports her dreams, investing money with the intention of bankrolling her studies. Alas, it’s not to be: he dies suddenly, and with all the money lost. (Lost, as it happens, due to Soames’ schemes, but Irene doesn’t know about that.) Feeling a combination of guilt and attraction, Soames decides that the best way to make up for his failings — and get what he wants in the bargain — is to woo, marry, and financially support Irene. He even falls in love with her (or thinks he does). For her part, Irene isn’t as sure. She doesn’t love Soames, but she does love the idea of a husband who supports her career aspirations, and being rich doesn’t suck either. Crucially, Soames also promises Irene that he will let her leave their relationship if she ever asks for her freedom, and this is what finally convinces her to agree to the marriage.

Through the early Victorian era, married women were legally considered to be a joint entity with their husbands under a principle of English Common Law called couverture (this applied in the US as well, as our legal system was based heavily on the English system). In practice, this meant that married women could not own property in their own right. Once married, women were also unable to leave their marriages. In the late 1800s, the setting for The Forsytes, a woman could only get a divorce if she could prove that her husband was committing adultery and was also physically cruel, incestuous, or bestial. No-fault divorce, which gives either spouse full rights to leave a marriage without proving adultery or abuse, or requiring a lengthy separation, didn’t become legal until 1970 in the U.S., and shockingly not until 2022 in the U.K. So when Soames ultimately reneges on his promise to give Irene a divorce should she ask for one, she has no legal recourse. She’s stuck.

In addition to the vastly different legal realities faced by Irene and the modern tradwife, there’s also a major structural difference between how their relationships function. While Soames thinks of Irene as his property, the modern tradwife and her spouse have a more symbiotic relationship. In many cases, these women are the cornerstone of the family’s financial stability, if not the breadwinner outright. In the example of Ballerina Farm, Hannah Neeleman has the power to craft their family’s narrative and bring in money from their followers, while her husband Daniel gets to live out his dream of owning a farm without worrying about whether that farm is actually sustainable financially. Homemaking is of course labor in its own right, but a central argument made by trad influencers is that returning to the home instead of working in an office is more fulfilling for women. Despite the appearance that a tradwife is supported by her husband financially, allowing her to avoid the workforce, most families can’t actually afford to survive on one income. In 2026, the system only works with both partners playing their role.

By contrast, a Victorian woman marrying someone like Soames Forsyte would be sold financial security in exchange for her compliance. An upper class wife in this era had very little legal recourse, but the trade off is that she really didn’t have to work outside of some expected philanthropy. The main “job” we see the wives on The Forsytes fulfill is preparing their children to marry, and, occasionally, light scheming. Having entered this upper echelon of society, Irene doesn’t have to make money; she’s living the life that today’s tradwives are selling. But she’s miserable. Irene values freedom above all else. It’s a desire she learned from her mother, and it’s a central part of her character. And yet for Soames, her freedom is antithetical to safety, and he isn’t really interested in letting her occupy the role of society wife either. Better to install her in a country home where she can’t go out in the world, forming attachments and realizing what she’s missing. She’s a possession, and for Irene, being a highly valued possession does little to dull the sting of being treated as an object.

So why does the modern tradwife feel so similar to Irene, a fictional Victorian, despite the legal and financial differences? For one thing, despite over a century having passed since the setting for The Forsytes, we’re currently facing similar economic and social forces. The late Victorian period followed the Industrial Revolution, when society transitioned from agriculture to manufacturing, completely upending job prospects and expectations for workers. Today, workers have experienced a similar shakeup in the transition from manufacturing to white collar email jobs, and another seismic change is on the horizon with the rise of AI. Many families today rely on gig economy jobs, which are very similar to the piecework that working class Victorian families would have taken on. Today’s young people find themselves growing up in a world with increasingly limited prospects for the type of comfortable middle-class lifestyle they’ve been taught to desire. It’s hard not to wonder if folks coming of age in the Victorian period felt the same way.

Beyond individual workers, both eras feature a significant class divide. The Forsyte family are emblematic of the nouveau riche class: their wealth has been recently acquired by their own labor and investments, and sets them apart from the peerage and gentry who inherited titles and self-sustaining land. This new infusion of class mobility gives the appearance of wider opportunities for self-improvement and helps sell new money families like the Forsytes as aspirational, despite the reality that very few people would be able to attain that level of wealth and status. The same can be said of the American tech billionaires, who inhabit a similar sphere both financially and politically. Many successful influencers today either find themselves entering a similar sphere, or in the case of the Neelemans, start out from a position of wealth. Daniel Neeleman comes from a very successful family, and Ballerina Farm (the account managed by Hannah, and to some extent the online store associated with their farm) has made the couple wealthy beyond anything they may have inherited from Daniel’s parents. By contrast, the average American is faced with a level of precarity that is both hard to ignore and unpleasant to acknowledge, which feeds nostalgia for “simpler” historical periods.

Finally, it’s worth noting that the Victorian era is widely associated with restrictions on gender and sexual expression. The general belief is that Victorians were prudish, fanatical about repressing sexual desire, and invested in the idea that men and women occupied separate but compatible spheres. Of course, for many people, these expectations weren’t a reality. A very similar dynamic is at play today, with the “tradwife” trend explicitly encouraging the doctrine of separate spheres, and a push to combat the changes brought on by the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s. The focus on gender roles is even echoed in the current political battles over trans healthcare and gender identity. In so many ways, our culture mirrors that of the Victorians, and that’s why the stories playing out in The Forsytes feel so relevant to us today. The difference is all in the perspective: is this version of society aspirational, or restrictive? You’d have to ask Irene and Hannah.