#3: Is Hannah Neeleman really an oppressed trad wife?

What if we take her for her word?

Hellloooo. Did you forget about me? It’s okay if you did. It may feel like I forgot about you, as it’s been two months at this point, but no, I did not. I think about you quite often, actually.

I’m sorry that it took a good bit to get this one out — the past two months have been a bit of a blur for good reasons and bad reasons and no reasons. I’m going to spare you my excuses, because I think that’s rather unbecoming, but all routine was lost, and I’m just now poking my head out of the sand and organizing my shells. I fully intend to publish more regularly (at least one essay a month), and I hope you trust that I’ll get back to that now. My mom was always really big on not breaking trust, so I am feeling rather bad about this! On top of Life, this piece was complicated for me. I went down many a holes working on it. It took me a while to clarify my point of view and then string together the right words so that you might understand what it is I’m trying to say. After re-working it several times, I resisted and ignored it, always finding something else that needed tending to, all the while knowing that would only make me feel worse. My mysterious, mystical brain … I hope you can forgive her. She did just finish developing a year ago.

The Times piece on Ballerina Farm that I’m responding to in my essay got a lot of attention when it was published in July, and, naturally, spurred lots of reactionary pieces. I read most, along with hundreds of comments on social media. Each day that passed, I felt like I was another day further from my essay being at all relevant, but I ultimately feel better sharing something I’ve dug my teeth into, choked on, and spit up (and in this case, sat on, regrettably) rather than nibbled on just to post during the peak. Hopefully I get a bit quicker with all of that the more I do this. Trad wife content hasn’t gone anywhere, that is for sure. I think it’s still relevant (and it goes beyond Ballerina Farm), and I hope you do too. As always, if this gets your gears turning, your motor purring, your engine humming … I’d love to chat in the comments or via DMs, text messages, conversations in person. Allllllrighty, onto the essay.

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From the Ballerina Farm website

On Saturday July 20, 2024, The Times published Megan Agnew’s “Meet the queen of the ‘trad wives’ (and her eight children),” in which Agnew chronicles an afternoon spent with the controversial Hannah Neeleman (@ballerinafarm) — a Mormon, a former ballerina, a mother, an influencer, a businesswoman, a “trad wife” according to many, “the queen of the trad wives” according to Agnew. It’s positioned as an inside peek into Neeleman’s real-life, and aims to answer a rather polar question: is Neeleman “an empowering new model of womanhood — or a hammer blow for feminism?” Agnew’s answer, very blatant from the start, is that Neeleman represents the latter.

With 10 million and 9.8 million followers on Instagram and TikTok respectively, Neeleman has a massive following. She fills her grids with aesthetic videos of herself, and occasionally her husband, Daniel, taking deep care of their home, land, animals, and eight children on a farm in Utah. By deep care, I mean hands-on to the utmost extent — she makes butter from scratch with milk straight from their cows; she makes beef stroganoff for the whole lot with the youngest strapped to her chest. At the same time, she and Daniel run a business, Ballerina Farm, through which they sell everything from subscription meat boxes (made from cows raised at Ballerina Farm and other select parter family farms), to the “Willa Sourdough Starter” (the sourdough starter created on the farm), to tomato beeswax candles, and so on. In great part due to Neeleman’s social media presence, they’ve built a highly profitable business together.

Did not now there was such a thing as high protein flour or farm flour for that matter

The Times piece went viral, I believe, because it stripped Neeleman of her dimensionality and her independence, and painted her as something singular: an oppressed trad wife. A woman with little agency. I don’t think she’s a trad wife, and I don’t think she’s oppressed. My rebuttals, dare I say, to both below.

Not a trad wife – a modern Martha Stewart

Trad wife, short for traditional wife, refers to a married woman (often a conservative Christian) who embraces traditional gender roles, focusing on homemaking and supporting her husband as the primary breadwinner. While Neeleman may look like a trad wife based on her content, she isn’t one. Importantly, she doesn’t think so either. From The Times piece:

“I don’t necessarily identify with it,” she says, “because we are traditional in the sense that it’s a man and a woman, we have children, but I do feel like we’re paving a lot of paths that haven’t been paved before.” That is the biggest paradox: in selling the life of a stay-at-home mother, Neeleman and the other trad wives have created high-earning jobs. They are being paid to act out a fantasy. “So for me to have the label of a traditional woman,” she continues cautiously, “I’m kinda like, I don’t know if I identify with that.”

Is the husband the head of the household here? “No,” Daniel answers. “We’re co-CEOs.” “Yeah,” Neeleman says. “We are.”

The paradox Agnew speaks of — the paradox of selling the life of a stay-at home mother while creating a high-earning job, the paradox of being paid to act out a fantasy — only exists if you, as a viewer and consumer, believe that someone’s social media presence is the reality of their life. No matter how real or authentic it can seem, to create an image of oneself online — to construct oneself as one wishes to be seen — can only ever be an act of performance. Tap “new post”, tap “next”, tap “next”, type caption, tap “share”.

When someone makes a career out of this image making, when someone uses their social media presence to sustain their life financially, their life’s work is in performance. It is in creating and sustaining a fantasy. This may feel like a stretch, but I’d posit that it’s a modern art form — some blend of theater and reality TV and producing and directing. It’s also akin to branding — establishing a point of view, tone, voice, and visual identity (which can all evolve and be multi-dimensional), and then being consistent enough on all fronts to build recognition, trust, and loyalty. This is how you amass followers and influence. This is how you acquire customers and sell product. It’s performance, it’s a modern art form, it’s branding, it’s work. Neeleman, a former ballerina, a professional performer, does not identify with the label of “trad wife” for a reason. She knows that the seemingly effortless grande jeté on stage is not at all effortless. She knows the hours spent practicing, the discipline required to put on a beautiful show. She knows the difference between the image of her life and the reality of her life, and I’m not sure she ever expected that her followers would take them as one and the same.

What we do know about Neeleman’s reality is that she monetizes a version of her domestic life. In her content, she does not explicitly promote her Mormonism or her lifestyle. She does not say: you should convert to Mormonism, you would be a better person if you made butter from scratch. She stages and records videos, and sells her products. She does say: you might enjoy this pleasing video of me making granola, you should check out the Denim Half Apron I’m wearing and have linked here. It is abundantly clear that her content serves her various interests, both the income she generates from social media organically and the income that her content generates for Ballerina Farm. She has no personal social media account — there is no @hannahneeleman, only @ballerinafarm. It’s a marketing strategy, and clearly, it works. Trad wife life and trad wife content are not the same thing, yet it seems that the lines between reality and social media are so blurred that many of us are failing to recognize the difference. One is a life dedicated to homemaking and childrearing, the other is a career, and in Neeleman’s case, marketing too.

Three screenshots from her Instagram stories - she is somewhat subtle with it, you see?

So, yes, without a doubt, Neeleman has crafted a compelling fantasy, an intentional and idealized image of her life online, both in service of her own personal financial gain and that of her company. This is what influencers do. Yet her version of this, compared to, say, a fashion influencer’s version, strikes a different chord. Each sells their lifestyle, their understanding of the world, their products, or some combination of such to us. Each want us to buy in on them, yet, Neeleman unnerves people (more women than men, from what I can tell) who don’t seem to take issue with the influencer sharing videos of themself trying on outfits and getting flown to Ibiza on a brand-trip for free. Both are performers, both are profiting off of a fantasy, yet the idealization of a traditional life is deemed deceptive and regressive, while the idealization of mass-consumption and a hyper-luxurious life is deemed aspirational and progressive. Neither is realistic to a woman pursuing a career that is not “influencer,” but Neeleman’s presence, if processed as reality, pokes at a deep-rooted fear, or an insecurity, as she pursues her career with seemingly equal time and intention as she does parenting and homemaking. It seems as though she gets to do both to the utmost degree, something impossible for any person whose job is not to post videos of themself cooking for, taking care of, and spending time with their family. Neeleman’s time and resources are not split the same way they are for most of us, so she is seemingly able to devote her time to both with little sacrifice.

As I see it, Neeleman presents no paradox, no hypocrisy. She found a loophole. A rare intersection. The same one Martha Stewart did in the 70s. And now, she’s receiving the same backlash and criticism that Stewart did at the height of her career. To build a business around homemaking in the way Neeleman and Stewart do puts them in acute positions. Positions unrelatable to any woman whose career is not to create content of making beautiful their homes and lives. They are businesswomen selling the home. They get to do both at the same exact time, something impossible for any woman whose career is not such. Those of us who aspire to do both can envy that and hate them for it, or we can see that they’ve found a loophole, and take from them what we choose to.

Martha Stewart in 1978, from her Instagram

Do not forget that you define your values. You decide the standards to which you hold yourself up. You decide what you want your life to look like. You decide if you want to pursue some career or passion, if you want to pursue homemaking and childcare full-time (if that’s an option to you), or if you want to pursue both. You make your life beautiful, and it goes far beyond aesthetics. Your perception of an influencer’s life should not inform these decisions. And, to be very clear, I am not speaking to women alone here, because these decisions should not be left up to women alone. If you’re doing it with a partner, you decide together. No matter which way you splice it, raising children and taking care of a home requires sacrifice. You sacrifice together. You step away from your career or they do, or you both stretch yourself thinner and find the help you need, whether through friends or nannies or housekeepers, to do both. A new rhythm. You sacrifice, and from everything I’ve heard and read about becoming a parent, you expand.

In 2000, Joan Didion tackled the discourse around Martha Stewart in her essay everydaywoman.com. She ends the piece with this:

“The dreams and the fears into which Martha Stewart taps are not of ‘feminine’ domesticity but of female power, of the woman who sits down at the table with the men and, still in her apron, walks away with the chips.”

We need to stop thinking of Hannah Neeleman as a trad wife, and see her, like Martha Stewart, for what she is — a strategic business woman whose domestic fantasy pays the bills. There is no need to compare ourselves to her, hate her, make a threat of her, or idolize her. Follow her or don’t. If you want her apron, buy it, but don’t think that pursuing the life of a traditional wife will look like hers on Instagram. There is a reason she will not accept the label.

Not oppressed – just changed

Throughout the piece, Agnew also suggests that Neeleman’s life has not truly been her own since Daniel made her his. I’m not sure that’s fair. In Agnew’s words:

“Daniel wanted to live in the great western wilds, so they did; he wanted to farm, so they do; he likes date nights once a week, so they go (they have a babysitter on those evenings); he didn’t want nannies in the house, so there aren’t any. The only space earmarked to be Neeleman’s own — a small barn she wanted to convert into a ballet studio — ended up becoming the kids’ schoolroom.”

Daniel wants to take me to see the new dairy farm buildings, while Neeleman goes back into the house to make lunch for the “kiddos”. We stop at an irrigation ditch (which he explains); the offices (which he explains); the milking stations (which he explains). I check my watch, feeling edgy. I want to talk to Neeleman.

We are to believe that Neeleman’s input on the life choices above were null and void, despite the fact that she herself claims to love Utah and farming, and that they run Ballerina Farm on the property together. According to what she shares on Instagram, she too likes date nights. Parenting is critical to her content, so I’m not sure nannies would serve her interests, and there is no instance in which she says she wishes she had any. There is an $12,000 Aga in the kitchen because it brings her joy.

Agnew harps on Daniel pretty clearly (see the second part of that quote) and persistently emphasizes how he interrupts Neeleman. His interruptions are subtle but visceral and grating, serving the narrative that Neeleman is disregarded in the relationship. While Daniel may have a tendency to interrupt, it’s also possible that he was under the impression that the piece was about the whole operation, him included. In a video posted to Neeleman’s Instagram from the day the Times came to their home, she says:

We have the UK Times … The UK Times is coming out and doing a profile piece, so we’re just getting ready for that. They’re just going to shadow us through the day as we make meals, and be a mom, and create content. We’re also going to do a little family photoshoot out in the meadow. They want me in like a gown.

While I believe Agnew earnestly writes what she observed, I also believe she makes some questionable leaps, especially when it comes to Neeleman’s agency. Take the epidural snippet:

The bedroom is also where she had her children, with the exception of Henry and Martha, who were born in a hospital (a fact that did not escape some of her followers). “After that I was, like, I’m ready to go back home,” she says. “I just love having them at home. It’s so quiet.” She also gave birth to them without pain relief. None at all? She shakes her head. Why? “I don’t know, I just have never loved taking it.” She stops herself. “Except with Martha — I was two weeks overdue and she was 10lb and Daniel wasn’t with me … ” She lowers her voice. Daniel is currently out of the room taking a phone call. “So I got an epidural. And it was an amazing experience.” Where was Daniel that day? “It was shipping day [for the meat boxes] and he was manning the crew.” But the epidural was kind of great? She pauses — and smiles. “It was kinda great.”

In the context of everything else written about Daniel, this part of the piece is pretty damning, as it implies that Neeleman could only take an epidural behind Daniel’s back. While this may not have been Agnew’s intention, I think the general understanding is that Neeleman lowers her voice so that Daniel doesn’t hear her. I wonder if that is the case. For starters, she is talking to a journalist, so I’m fairly sure she knows that anything she says is fair game, and that Daniel will be reading the piece. Is she whispering so that Daniel doesn’t hear her, or is she whispering because of her own discomfort around making a decision that doesn’t align with her own standards? She knows that plenty of her followers worship the trad wives and admire the dedication to natural births. Maybe she’s whispering because she made a decision that doesn’t align with her brand? But why would she have only made this decision when Daniel wasn’t there? As it turns out, there’s lots of research out there about the comfort and strength that a partner being present during childbirth brings. Without him by her side, she made a decision she would not normally make, and she is glad that she did.

While Agnew herself may not prescribe to the lifestyle Neeleman leads, while she may find Neeleman’s commitment to her home and children (alongside her business) oppressive and regressively traditional, does that mean it is fair for her to imply that Neeleman is actually oppressed?

It’s a serious implication, in my opinion. To take away a woman’s agency in a major publication is not a small thing. For much of the history of the United States, women were confined to the home. Women had to actively fight for the right to pursue a life outside of the home. Women choosing to pursue ambitions outside of the home were cast out. And today, there are women, real women, who are born into communities or coerced via religion to assume the role of a trad wife (without a social media persona attached). Tia Levings, author of A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy, writes and creates content extensively about and for these women (her website here, the podcast episode that introduced me to her here). Critical to Tia’s story is that she was not equipped to recognize the coercion, the abuse.

Neeleman, on the other hand, while raised Mormon, was not indoctrinated with the belief that she was bound to the home. She did not picture herself solely a wife or a homemaker. In a Ballerina Farm Q&A video (self-published late 2023), she says she looked up to her parents who worked together as florists, and wanted Ballerina Farm to operate the same way:

“I watched my parents working together and so whatever we do, we got to do it together.”

But, before Ballerina Farm, Neeleman dreamt of being a ballerina in New York. This part of The Times piece really got people riled up:

We drive past the dairy cows, looking out across a river valley and the arid mountains beyond. Was this what she always wanted, I ask when we get a moment alone, while Daniel checks on the animals. “No,” she says. “I mean, I was, like —” She pauses. “My goal was New York City. I left home at 17 and I was so excited to get there, I just loved that energy. And I was going to be a ballerina. I was a good ballerina.” She pauses again. “But I knew that when I started to have kids my life would start to look different.”

111.5K likes and 3,626 comments on TikTok

It is true — Neeleman did not always picture her life being what it is now. And while this may strike you as devastating in the context of Agnew’s portrayal of Neeleman’s life now, is it necessarily devastating for someone’s life to take a turn they did not anticipate upon committing to a relationship and having children? Is it inherently tragic to let go of a dream one once had? For values to change in the face of parenthood?

While I, personally, feel a twinge of sadness in reading that Neeleman deserted her dreams of being a ballerina (cue sad Pixar mini-movie playing in my head), and while I, personally, cannot say I would have made her same choice (or that I wouldn’t have), I do not think it is fair to imply that the choice she made was not her own. What if we take her for her word? When facing the prospect of motherhood, she decided that she could not be the mother she wanted to be while pursuing the career of a full-time ballerina. She chose to pursue a career that might offer her the balance she craved. She wanted to run a business with Daniel, and in time, they found a way. In the same YouTube video referenced above, she talks about this transition with Daniel, saying:

“And it took us a little bit to find out what your path is. And we knew that going into it. We’ve watched our brothers and our parents, like, you know, you don’t hit jackpot first time. We spent time working abroad. Daniel was working security. I taught dance at the University. There were things that we were doing and we somehow fell upon farming … and also we saw our parents, both of our parents, obviously your dad’s business is bigger than my parents’ flower shop, but both of them had start up businesses, you know, like they were in the thick of it at the startup of these businesses, and so we knew, like, at the beginning stage, like, it’s going to be rough. And it was really really hard, like looking back on those first years of Ballerina Farm, like they were really hard, and lots of discouraging nights, and we were bringing kids into the world, and really .. um really hard. And like, we didn’t have, you know, date nights. We didn’t have, you know, I never got my eyebrows tinted or any of that stuff, you know. It was just like … it was 100% like we were .. we were in it. But we knew that was just part of it.”

Often times, the people you invite into your life change it. The best ones do, really. Each choice you make takes you on some different path, one that presents you with new options, new ideas. You are allowed to make choices that do not align with the ones you think you would have in the past, no matter the direction. As Cheryl Strayed wrote, “There are some things you can’t understand yet. Your life will be a great and continuous unfolding.” It will always unfold in a way you did not plan for it to, and how boring would it be if that were not the case?

Who are we to say that the way Daniel impacted her life is for better or for worse? Who are we to suggest that she would have been happier dancing than raising her children and running a business on a farm with her husband?

Anyone who wants to both be an active parent and pursue a career will face tough choices. They will have to sacrifice. I am no parent (and have no plans of becoming one anytime soon), but I know enough parents to know this. I know women who have quit their jobs to pursue motherhood full-time, I know women who decided not to have kids, and I know women who have done both. None deserve less respect than the others.

In the midst of writing this piece, Neeleman posted a response to Agnew’s article through a montage of videos from her life with the following (somewhat robotic, I must say) voiceover:

A couple of weeks ago, we had a reporter come into our home to learn more about our family and business. We thought the interview went really well, very similar to the dozens of interviews we had done in recent memory. We were taken back, however, when we saw the printed article, which shocked us, and shocked the world, by being an attack on our family and my marriage, portraying me as oppressed with my husband being the culprit. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Nothing we said in the interview implied this conclusion, which leads me to believe the angle taken was predetermined. For Daniel and I, our priority in life is God and family. Everything else comes second. The greatest day of my life was when Daniel and I were married 13 years ago. Together, we have built a business from scratch, we have brought 8 children into this world, and have prioritized our marriage all along the way. We are co-parents, co-ceos, co-diaper-changers, kitchen cleaners, and decision makers. We are one, and I love him more today than I did 13 years ago. We have many dreams still to accomplish. We aren’t done having babies, we are excited for our new farm store to open, and I cant wait to see what the future holds for the rest of it. But for now, I’m doing what I love most — being a mother, wife, a business woman, a farmer, a lover of Jesus.”

We either have to believe her, or believe she is lying. I am fairly certain we should be doing the first.

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I never thought I’d be considering the viewpoint of a trad wife influencer, but here I am. More than anything, I hope this urges you to question things you read, even those from major publications. You should question me too. I love being questioned!!!!!! I’ll be putting out two 12 Things soon (for August & September) and then I’ll be back on schedule … if anyone caaaares :) <3 xoxoxoxoxoxo