The College for Tradwives: Where Conservative Women Pursue Their Mrs. Degrees | Vanity Fair

Sarah Smith still keeps tiny color-coded cards printed with recipes for apple crisp, old-fashioned bread pudding, and hash brown casserole stashed away in her West Virginia home. They were coursework notes from Crock-Pot Cooking, a class in the Marriage and Motherhood program at Hyles-Anderson, the college in Indiana she graduated from in 2010. “Talk about a trigger,” she says with a laugh.

Back then, 20 young women would gather every Monday morning for a 50-minute tutorial in the art of the slow simmer, with other courses offering lessons in canning and freezing, and rearing teenagers. On its website, Hyles-Anderson describes the program as a course of study “designed to train ladies to be capable wives and mothers. Ladies are given vital training in Biblical concepts of marriage and child-rearing, as well as in practical skills such as cooking, sewing, and household management.”

“I thought, for sure, it’s 2026, they can’t be still offering [canning and freezing], and I was really shocked that they were,” Smith said. “The end goal basically was to be a wife and a mother.”

Sarah Smith at her graduation with her husband, Frank Smith.

Hyles-Anderson, an unaccredited college founded in 1972, is an hour drive from downtown Chicago and awards four-year degrees, operating independently of government oversight. Its website maintains this is to “avoid the potential of outside influences or pressures to change our theological, doctrinal, and moral position.” Hyles-Anderson did not respond to a request for comment.

While prospective applicants “must be either a high school graduate or have a GED certificate,” the admission policies at Hyles-Anderson also consider a student’s marital status. According to the 2025-2026 academic catalog, “Married students must be at least 20 years old by the first day of registration for each semester. Single, divorced students must be at least 25 years of age by the first day of registration for each semester.”

Tuition costs a modest $2,500 per semester with the total rising to $5,550 to include room and board and a registration fee. The alumni network is narrow, with graduates mostly appearing to funnel into the familiar pipeline of pastors, missionary, or ministry leader roles.

For men, the college experience at Hyles-Anderson took a much different trajectory than it did for women. According to Stuart Hardy, a former student who graduated in 2008 with a degree in assistant pastoral theology, while classes in subjects like English, history, and finance were coeducational, male students were also required each semester to take Church Education, essentially a bootcamp in how to run a church, and were notably exempt from the cooking and housekeeping courses that shaped the women’s curriculum.

That divide appears to persist; the course list for the current academic year differentiates between men-only and women-only degrees. Women-only programs include administrative assistant, missionary wife, and general studies in the department of Bible, while the men-only alternatives are missions, youth ministry, and pastoral theology.

“Men were there to study and find a wife. Women were just there to get a husband,” said Hardy.

Hardy, who now works in digital marketing in Southern California, was raised in a religious family where the natural trajectory to become a pastor was to attend a school like Hyles-Anderson.

“My dad was a pastor,” he said. “That was kind of the apex for people who wanted to go into the ministry. There were other colleges but that was supposedly the best one.”

Another former student, Shawn Collins, who left in 1997, recalled a similar divide. “The men took church every semester and the woman basically took classes on how to be a good wife,” Collins said. “I didn’t like the fact that the girls had a different curfew. They were treated like second-class citizens in my book.”

The college sits within a cluster of other unaccredited schools—many of them religious institutions—whose degrees hold no weight in the civil service and often go unrecognized in higher education and most workplaces.

Abroad, the rules are stricter. In Australia, calling your institution a university without government approval is against the law. In the UK, degrees can only be awarded by government-recognized institutions. In the US, though, the terms college and university are essentially unregulated at the federal level, although the federal government recognizes legitimate accrediting agencies, and most state agencies do regulate the term.

“A lot of people will say, ‘Oh you must’ve known better,’ but they’ve never lived that life and dealt with that level of sheltering,” said Mary, who asked that her last name not be used to protect her privacy. Mary graduated from Hyles-Anderson in 2007 and was unaware at the time of the limits of her degree. “Maybe there is somewhere in the fine lines, but I just think it should be made more clearly known to the students that unaccredited versus accredited will really hurt you in the end.”

Mary, who now lives in the Miramar neighborhood of San Diego, grew up in a strict religious household. She was homeschooled and forbidden access to the college pamphlets that would arrive for her in the mail. She enrolled at Hyles-Anderson in 2002 under her mother’s instruction, and during a school singing tour, she met a woman in the military and realized she wanted to enlist. Mary recalls limited internet access, routine dormitory checks, and rules barring women from driving without two chaperones, so it was nearly impossible to pursue, but after graduation she was able to discreetly join a boot camp program.

“I was scared because I had no idea what was going to happen,” she said. “I knew the comfort of my oppression.”

Later, when Mary tried to apply for the officer program, she said her undergraduate credits were rejected. After she eventually graduated from American Military University with an almost 4.0 GPA, she says LSAC dismissed her AMU GPA, recognizing only her first undergraduate GPA from Hyles-Anderson.

“None of my actual college credits went anywhere. It was probably worth as much as the paper on the bottom of a birdcage,” she said. “It’s the shadow that just doesn’t go away.”

Hyles-Anderson was initially founded by Jack Hyles as a ministry of the First Baptist Church of Hammond, Indiana, in 1972. In November 2023, the Independent Fundamental Baptist movement, of which this church is a part of, was featured in the Investigation Discovery docuseries Let Us Prey: A Ministry of Scandals.

“When extra information came out later about certain leaders, I think that just stoked the fire even more,” Mary said. “That created something within me that made me intensely hate anything having to do with the IFB movement.”

Sarah Smith smiles on the Hyles-Anderson College campus in 2009.

Today, the college reflects the same tradwife-y philosophy, seemingly rooted in a strain of Christian nationalism that casts women as wives, childbearers, and homemakers. Smith recalls there were around 1,000 students when she attended over 15 years ago.

Smith says that in the past professors would lead church services or late-night devotions around their teaching commitments.

“There was a strong emphasis on rule keeping and conformity, often over academic exploration,” Smith said. “There was significant pressure to fit a very specific mold of what a ‘good’ Christian looked like, with little room for questioning or individuality.”

In the fall of junior year, female students can still earn three credits each in clothing design and construction and how to rear infants, and two credits in time management. Smith says that strict rules governed dress, appearance, and students’ after-hours activities when she was a student. A dating manual, purportedly written by the school in 2018 and leaked online, noted that relationships are subject to parental approval from either of the participants’ parents.

“It’s just the same system dressed up in a different costume,” said Esther Gallarde, who graduated in 2012. “I sometimes look at where I’m at in life and feel frustrated just knowing that I didn’t want to go there and I wasn't really given a choice.”

Schools like Wheaton College in Illinois, Bob Jones University in South Carolina, and Baylor University in Texas are all religious institutions known for promoting more traditional views on campus, among others. Baylor students post online about a campus mantra known as “ring before spring”—start dating in the fall, get engaged by spring. Even so, its course catalogs are conventionally academic with mainstream degree offerings that strongly contrast to those on offer at Hyles-Anderson.

“I would really like to start an organization that specifically helps women that are leaving so that they can find more resources,” Gallarde concluded. “If they decide to stay, they stay, but at least they know what their options are. If you look at who is benefiting from the way that it’s structured, it’s always the men at the top.”

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