Hannah Neeleman, who you might know on TikTok as the proud Mormon woman behind ‘Ballerina Farm’, was once hailed as the ultimate ‘tradwife’: a portmanteau of ‘traditional wife’ that originated in alt-right circles and then was reclaimed by some women who embrace ‘50s style gender roles in their marriages. The petite blonde bombshell was a Juilliard-trained ballerina and pageant queen before she married her husband Daniel, but now the two live on a rustic-chic homestead in rural Utah where they raise cattle, pigs, chickens, and eight perfect blonde children.
Hannah has been both admired and envied for her seemingly effortless ability to be the perfect ‘tradwife’. She cooks every meal for her children from scratch — with most of the ingredients being home-grown — and does so with a smile on her naturally gorgeous, makeup-free face. She takes the children with her everywhere (even grocery shopping) and seems to genuinely enjoy their constant babble and company. She is a practicing Mormon, open about her views, and believes true happiness will be found in pleasing the Lord, which she does by pleasing her husband.
The Neeleman children spend most of their time on the 328-acre property, where they are also home-schooled. They do not have a TV, iPad or any other device to burn their attention span away. Instead, they pick lavender in the garden, play with chickens, and do whatever else it is that children raised organically like this do. They also rarely leave their mother’s side, as the Neeleman household does not have any nannies despite their considerable fortune (they are millionaires) because, apparently, Daniel doesn’t want any.
Despite having given birth eight times (most of which were at home with no pain relief, of course), Hannah is in tip-top shape. Just this January, the 34-year-old competed in a pageant two weeks after giving birth to her youngest daughter, Flora. The regimen to get her body into peak condition was brutal, but she did so with determination and without complaint. Whether this was an example of empowerment and ownership of one’s body or an endorsement of impossible and cruel patriarchal beauty standards depends on who you ask.
Either way, Hannah is tiny and beautiful, soft-spoken and graceful, good-natured and a devout Christian to boot. It’s no surprise that for some, she is considered the ultimate ‘tradwife’ — effortlessly beautiful, kind and nurturing, and most importantly: genuinely content and empowered by her patriarchal servitude. Though, the question on everyone’s lips after her bombshell interview with The Times is: is she?
Journalist Megan Agnew interviewed Hannah about precisely this: is Hannah Neeleman aware she is the poster child of tradwives, and if so, what does she think of it all?
But instead of finding a woman who glowed in the knowledge that she had dedicated her life to the noble cause of raising a nuclear Christian family, Agnew reportedly discovered a side of Hannah that has never been seen (at least in public): a woman so exhausted by her countless children that at times she wasn’t able to get out of bed for a week, who was pressured into marriage and having children before she was ready by a seemingly domineering partner, and who was forced to give up her dream of dancing — and therefore a piece of herself — as a consequence.
In the span of a click, Hannah’s public image in feminist circles shifted from conservative, all-American, rich white woman perpetuating patriarchal Christian norms to victim of the very patriarchy she was once believed to be an agent of. The discourse around Hannah’s class status and her links to a billion-dollar fortune were forgotten (even forgiven), and women from all corners of the internet came together to mourn yet another victim of a society that encourages women to put everyone ahead of themselves, at the cost of their own health and fulfilment.
Suddenly, Hannah became a woman from humble beginnings who was pressured to trade in her dreams of independence, autonomy and a career for the sake of marriage and financial success. She became a cautionary tale, a selfless yet doomed hero in a Greek tragedy. But interestingly, in her victim/perpetuator dichotomy, she’s gained more respect on both sides of the political spectrum.
@ballerinafarm Out for my birthday lunch. Best present is spending time with this crew right here. ♥️
♬ original sound – Ballerina Farm
Since the article exploded online, think piece after think piece has been written on the ‘dark reality’ of being a tradwife and the unreliable veneer social media affords these lifestyles. What is it really like being a tradwife? Are we surprised at the links between this lifestyle and alleged coercive behaviour by patriarchal figures?
While these are interesting and perhaps needed conversations, the real question posed by the Ballerina Farm controversy should be whether ‘tradwives’—and their aspirational lifestyle—really exist at all.
Tradwives as a concept are predicated on a nostalgia for the 1950s, which is considered to be a better time because it was when women knew their divine role in society was to be mothers, wives, and homemakers — not workers or *shudder* feminists. The ‘50s were a supposed golden era for the nuclear family because men could be expected to provide wholly for their spouse, and women were to be respected and revered for their divine femininity and naturally nurturing qualities.
However, what often goes unacknowledged in conversations about the male fantasy of the tradwife is that it is indeed a fantasy. The notion that women only entered the workforce after the golden era of the ‘50s is a false and ahistorical one.
Women did work in the 1950s, and even before that — it’s more a matter of which women worked, and which women had the privilege of choosing to opt out. For many, working was a reality, and being a housewife was a dream sold to the middle class who could afford it.
But who sold women this dream? Is it a coincidence that the postwar phenomenon of middle class, white women leaving the workforce and raising their children at home occurred around the same time as the white flight (when white people migrated en masse to the suburbs through the 1950s and ‘60s to escape non-whites)?
Or, for (mostly Christian) white women at the time, was being at the head of home-making a way to ensure their house would be free of undesirables/racialised Others like Black help? In doing the housekeeping and child-rearing themselves, white women kept their children safe from outside influences, academics Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek write in their book After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time — a sentiment that continues to hold strong in modern tradwives, many of whom view their choice of escaping to rural homesteads and homeschooling their children as an attempt to ensure the survival of the white race.
Much like the ‘Make America Great Again’ slogan, the 1950s refers to a time that was hardly great for women of colour and other marginalised classes of women, and it’s no surprise that both these concepts are popular in Christian white supremacist circles. So, if the ‘traditional wife’ as we conceive it is predicated on a false notion of reality, how does it even work?
Well, the answer is… it doesn’t, because most tradwives actually do work. As UNSW lecturer Astrid Lorange and Canadian professor Sarah Brouillette pointed out in their article for Verso Books titled From Scratch, tradwives who post on social media are also influencers, and have simply swapped out waged work for their online empires, some of which are valued in the millions.
“Tradwife content is a kind of daydream out of the reality of domestic labor and waged labor,” Lorange and Brouillette write.
“Tradwives have not exited the workplace. They’ve turned their images into shareable personae and their homes into stages to the benefit of Meta, TikTok HQ, and their ad partners. The function of their housework is doubled: it is the work of caring for home, husband, and children; and it is also the work of cultural production – a performance of housework that is potentially lucrative, garnering a wage for housework performed on social media.”
@allyrooker trad wife/stay at home gf content is gonna brainwash us into an entire new generation of Betty Drapers i stg #tradwife #stayathomegirlfriend #feminism #feminist
♬ original sound – Ally Rooker
Despite tradwives gaining popularity because of their rejection of girl boss era feminism of ‘doing it all’, many tradwives are doing it all, including Hannah Neeleman — who, on top of her domestic duties and pageantry, is also considered co-CEO of the Ballerina Farm empire alongside her husband. The pair have more than 40 full-time employees under them and a creative director who manages their website’s visuals.
Crucially, though, Hannah has never claimed to be a tradwife and acknowledges in The Times interview that, if anything, her life is rather exceptional — Juilliard only accepts 18-26 dancers a year, and, well, how many people have eight kids and a 328-acre farm?
The key debate that has raged since this revelation is: is Hannah a victim coerced into being a tradwife, or is she a woman who chose to trade in a free lifestyle for financial success and her religious beliefs? (And isn’t it oxymoronic to be coerced into being a tradwife when a defining feature of the movement is to accept it willingly?)
Or is Hannah an enabler of sexism who shouldn’t be absolved of her role in upholding the patriarchy for her own benefit? Are we giving her a free pass because she is sympathetic to us as a white woman? Is this another example of white feminism?
What Hannah is remains elusive, but the elephant in the room is, of course, Hannah’s context: she is a white, wealthy Christian woman in America, married to a millionaire who is heir to a billionaire. It’s a fact that is largely left out of conversations discussing her, when class and race should be key factors in our tradwife discourse. Given its root in white supremacy — and the fact that maintaining white Christian families appears to be a genuine goal for some tradwives — race and class cannot be divorced from this narrative.
Perhaps it’s time to move beyond binaries in our discussion of tradwives as either victims or villains, and instead grapple with the questions around their existence in the first place: it’s only then that we’ll actually be able to have productive discussions about them, and maybe even dismantle the circumstances that tempt women to trade their autonomy for financial security.
Having these conversations remains difficult so long as class and race are bracketed out of the conversation.