The Sinister but Familiar Layer Missing from the Ballerina Farm and Tradwives Debate

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | August 9, 2024 |

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | August 9, 2024 |

If you want to understand the internet term “Tradwives,” just ask Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance:

“If your worldview tells you that it’s bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs, you’ve been had,” Vance tweeted after the overturning of Roe v Wade in 2022.

See also his feelings about Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris not having biological children:

“Why have we let the Democrat party become controlled by people who don’t have any children? And why is this just a normal fact of American life?” He said in 2021, calling Harris and other senior Democratic leaders “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.” (The Guardian)

Tradwives, slang for traditional wives, is an internet phenomenon of women, usually mothers, touting traditional family values to their followers. The Tradwives of Instagram cook and clean and bake and sew and rear their broods with smiles on their faces and faith in their hearts, usually in some kind of smocked sundress, romanticizing an idealized version of the so-called American dream of the past. Their queen is a woman named Hannah Neeleman, but you probably know her by her Instagram handle, @BallerinaFarm.

Neeleman was just another milk-churning, diaper-changing, sun-dress-wearing farmer’s wife until this January, when the former Juilliard-trained ballerina turned pageant queen competed in the Mrs. World pageant less than two weeks after giving birth to her eighth child, without pain relief. “I am still bleeding a little,” she said on the day of the pageant, though she added that at least she didn’t need post-partum diapers anymore. (The New York Times) Neeleman went viral for this because no one could agree if it was empowering or not. Was it, “Look, moms can have it all!” or was it, “Blink twice if you need help”? Never mind that beauty pageants are inherently disempowering and sexist.

The point is, Neeleman’s decision to put on a swimsuit and walk across a stage in heels so soon after giving birth incited a new interest in her, her life, and what she represents. People flocked to her Instagram in record numbers. Then, a reporter from The Times paid the farm a visit, and the internet blew up. Some thought the interview was evidence of Neeleman being abused and brainwashed; some thought she was the poster child for modern feminism.

First, the facts: 34-year-old Hannah Neeleman is married to 35-year-old Daniel Neeleman, the heir to the JetBlue fortune. They have eight children, including the pageant baby, and they all live on a 328-acre farm in Utah. They are Mormons.

It was Daniel who greeted Megan Agnew, the reporter from The Times. It was Daniel who answered most of Agnew’s questions or was sure to add his two cents whenever his wife did speak. It seems to be Daniel who believes that babies should be born at home without the help of modern medicine, as evidenced by Hannah lowering her voice when he wasn’t in the room to admit to Agnew that she had an epidural for one of her babies because the birth was complicated enough that she had to go to the hospital, and he wasn’t able to be there. Neeleman, for her part, did not think the interview represented her as a person or them as a family, and posted a video response saying as much.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Hannah @Ballerina Farm (@ballerinafarm)

It’s also Daniel who has the money. Therein lies the problem I have with all of the coverage of the Neelemans and Tradwives in general: you have to be rich to live like this. Forget what it means for feminism, what does it mean for the economy? The traditional family values of yesteryear were built on the assumption that a man would make a good living and a wife would stay home to rear the children, and as long as you stuck to that formula you could have the house and the white picket fence and the whole shebang.

It simply doesn’t work like that anymore. Most modern American families, straight and cis-gendered or not, cannot survive on a single income. Hell, single people with no children *author raises hand* can barely survive on one income. Unless they’ve got daddy’s billionaire trust fund to fall back on, that is.

The women watching and following Neeleman might be yearning for a simpler life, and I can’t blame them for that. I asked some moms I know about the Tradwives movement, to better understand this. One of them called it “The vocalization of women who feel left behind in modern motherhood culture,” by which she means, “a generation of parents who have adopted an egalitarian household.” I get that—I can see how some women who were raised with the ideals of motherhood and family might feel lost in adulthood. This friend of mine admitted she could relate to what she called an “identity crisis in this generation” of mothers because they feel they’re “damned if we do and damned if we don’t.”

“We’re expected to work as if we have no children and mother as if we have no work. We’ve come to learn that it’s an unachievable standard,” she explained, adding that she commends the women “who pick a lane and firmly stay there” because she is not one of them.

Another mom I talked to might identify as one of those women who picked a lane. Of everyone I spoke with, she was the most sympathetic of Neeleman, referring to herself as a “BallerinaFarm apologist.” She admitted that she probably ticks “a number of the TradWife qualification boxes,” like being a stay-at-home mom and being financially supported by her husband, but she says that works for them, and she genuinely enjoys full-time housekeeping and child-rearing. She admits that Neeleman is selling a particular lifestyle, but doesn’t believe that means she’s trying to recruit single women to the Tradwife cause.

The thing she, and I, and all of the other mothers I spoke to can’t relate to, though, is “having access to literal billions of dollars” and not using any of it on childcare, because that’s what the Neeleman’s claim—that Hannah does it all by herself, and that she’s happy to. Well, except for the occasional times she “gets so ill from exhaustion that she can’t get out of bed for a week.”

Even my BallerinaFarm Apologist friend says it’s “obvious she has help.”

“She probably has an entire staff. And to be honest, I am more than okay with that. If I had her financial means and that many kids, I’d hire a village to help me too,” she said. But she was quick to add that she, like Neeleman, grew up in a religious environment.

“At one point I decided that I would have as many children as God blessed me with…I’ve since left religion and have changed that opinion and will more than likely be done at two. Mostly because we aren’t billionaires,” she told me.

When you’re as rich as the Neelemans, says another mom friend, of course all the traditional stuff is easy. But for most women, birth control and abortion access offer financial security as well as bodily autonomy. “Maybe if we were all endlessly resourced then we’d make different choices,” she said, adding that mothers with money who “pretend like it doesn’t change the experience of motherhood are entirely cruel.” She’s a teacher and her husband is finishing his PhD. They live with her parents and are constantly surrounded by siblings and cousins and in-laws. Even with all of that family support, she says she can “barely swing making time for myself.”

This is where the Tradwives movement becomes controversial, especially during this election cycle: rich white internet influencers are espousing privileged lifestyles that are simply out of reach for most American families. Documenting your lifestyle is not an inherently bad thing, but making a lifestyle that is inaccessible to most look aspirational can be dangerous, especially when that lifestyle adheres to values that, when they bleed into policy and lawmaking, threaten the rights and freedoms of the very people who aspire to them. Abortion access is already being limited and/or outlawed; the next logical step after that is birth control. Far-right lawmakers like JD Vance want us to have more babies, but most of us don’t have the means to support them, much less the motivation. Most of us don’t even have the means for a mortgage. Who’s gonna take care of my eight babies when I have to go to work for $20 an hour?

@BallerinaFarm is a bucolic family oasis built on generational wealth. Hannah Neeleman may not think she’s on a soapbox, but the days of “live and let live” in an internet culture that doesn’t allow for nuance, are unfortunately coming to an end. On Instagram, value statements are the same as value judgments, and we all have to pick a side.