Meet Hannah Neeleman: the perfect wife, mother, and homemaker. Known online as Ballerina Farm, aptly named after her former aspirations to become a ballerina, Hannah Neeleman is a lifestyle influencer with a whopping 10 million followers on both TikTok and Instagram. Alongside her husband, Daniel Neeleman, and her eight children, Hannah rose to social media fame by posting about farm life, how she homeschools her children, and preparing meals from scratch. The Neelemans, living on a 328-acre farm in Utah, were leading a seemingly perfect life, with many viewers admiring their family for their traditional values. That is, until The Sunday Times published an article in July 2024 about Hannah’s daily life making content as a housewife and mother of eight and the challenges she faces behind the scenes. In this article, the author, Megan Agnew, debates whether Hannah’s lifestyle is “an empowering new model of womanhood or a hammer blow for feminism”. 

 

As this article sparked controversy amongst netizens, a video of Hannah and Daniel resurfaced, drawing further backlash. In this video recorded by Daniel, we see an excited Hannah opening a birthday gift from her husband of 13 years, hoping he got her plane tickets to Greece. Can you guess what Daniel Neeleman–son of multimillionaire David Neeleman, who just so happens to be the founder of 5 different commercial airlines–got for his devoted wife? Spoiler alert: not plane tickets to Greece. Instead, he got her an egg apron. Yes, you read that right. An apron for keeping her eggs in that he didn’t even bother to wrap or decorate in any way, shape, or form. Somehow, a man with a fortune of over $400,000,000 was only able to afford a $15 apron for his loving wife’s birthday. Upon the publishing of The Sunday Times article, people began looking at Hannah’s videos, like the egg apron video, in a different light. In hindsight, they seemed to portray a less-than-ideal image of her situation. Many expressed their empathy for Hannah, saddened by the idea that she sacrificed her dreams only to become a passing thought in her husband’s mind. However, others had their skepticisms. One user claimed that she does not feel bad for Hannah Neeleman, and neither should anyone else, as she was living in a hell of her own making: “She chose to marry her husband, and she chose to give up her dream of being a ballerina, and now, she chooses to glamorize her lifestyle and influence young women all over the world through her social media profiles. She is a willing participant in all of these things. When do we as women start to hold each other accountable for our own choices?” This might seem like a reasonable take to some, however, it fails to take into account one thing: the influence of religion. 

 

Like many of the tradwife influencers online, the “queen of tradwives” is also part of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In other words, Hannah and her family are devout Mormons. A 38-year-old content creator and mom of six took to social media to talk about her experience as a an-ex Mormon tradwife: “[...] I don’t have an education, I got married young, I had kids young and I absolutely gave up on my hopes and dreams to ‘choose’ the life that I have now. If you would have asked me 5 years ago if I felt like I had choices in my life, I would have hands down told you that I was incredibly happy with the choices that I made, and that I made those choices knowing full well what I was choosing. Now that I've been out of the church for 3 years, I will tell you that I was never actually given a choice. [...] It's not fair to show someone 10 candy bars and say, ‘Hey, you can choose this candy bar, which is the right candy bar that you should choose, or you can choose these nine which are poisonous and deadly, and if they don't kill you, they're going to kill all of your friends and family members. What would you like to choose?’ That's how choices are given in Mormonism.” Other ex-Mormons have also discussed how girls are taught from a very young age that their sole purpose in life is to be a mother and a housewife, and how Mormonism dictates that when a couple gets married in the church, they are bound together for eternity, and that there would be dire consequences for a woman if she were to leave her husband.Amongst other things, she would still be “bound” to him, except she would lose access to her children in eternity since they “belong” to him, which is a terrifying concept for any devout Mormon. This is known as a Hobson’s choice, meaning that though technically there are multiple options, only one of them is actually offered. You think you have a choice, that the decisions you are making are of your own free will, but in reality, it’s just an illusion.

 

Despite being known as the “queen of tradwives,” Hannah Neeleman does not actually think of herself as a tradwife. In her interview with Megan Agnew for the aforementioned The Sunday Times article, she says, “I don't necessarily identify with it 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 parts that haven't been paved before. So for me to have the label of a traditional woman, I'm kinda like, I don't know if I identify with that.” Agnew also asks if Hannah is a feminist, to which she responds, “I feel like I'm a femin–” she stops herself. “There's so many different ways you could take that word. I don't even know what feminism means anymore. [...] We try so hard to be neutral and be ourselves and people will put a label on everything. This is just our normal life.”

 

 Interestingly enough, none of the supposed tradwives online are tradwives at all; they are businesswomen who sell the illusion of a perfect life, profiting off of the impressionable youth–who make up a majority of their audience–buying into that fantasy. Afterall, actual homemakers don’t live aesthetically pleasing lives 24/7: they have to wash the dishes, clean dirty countertops, scrub the toilets, and do all the “unpalatable” chores that probably wouldn’t make for good content. Most “tradwife influencers” simply want to wear vintage dresses, cook appetizing food, and look good while doing it. On the other hand, there are also those who use their platform to promote ideals that are outright anti-feminist, such as being a “good and submissive” wife. Nevertheless, all of these women either explicitly or implicitly promote the idea that a woman’s place is in the home. They essentially cosplay housewives from the 1950s without having to suffer the way the women who came before them did, or even acknowledging their hardships in life. Afterall, women from that time period were famously subjected to lobotomies, a neurosurgical “treatment” for patients with mental illnesses/psychiatric disorders/neurological disorders that involves severing most of the connections to and from the prefrontal cortex of the brain. In this case, the “mental illness” for which so many women were lobotomised was the gall to speak up to their domineering, often abusive, husbands, or for daring to dream about a career. And how could one forget the way these housewives basically had to sedate themselves with drugs just to make day-to-day life bearable? Infact, the usage of barbiturates and benzodiazepines was so rampant that the Rolling Stones even made a song about it, titled Mother’s Little Helper. The chorus of the song goes, “She goes running for the shelter/ Of her mother's little helper/ And it helps her on her way/ Gets her through her busy day.” 

 

A lot of feminists online think that there are no issues with a woman wanting to be a homemaker or a tradwife, which is true to a certain extent. However, I think it’s a bit more complicated than that. First of all, a major reason why some people hold that opinion is because of “choice feminism,” which is the belief that any and every choice a woman makes is inherently feminist, simply due to the existence of a choice. Simply put, even if a woman makes a choice that perpetuates patriarchal culture, it’s fine, and feminist even, just because she is a woman who made a choice. This is an extremely flawed argument. Yes, feminism is about freedom of choice, but when it only focuses on women’s agency to make decisions, and not the reasons behind why they made those decisions and the consequences they or other women face, it may end up reinforcing the very systems and structures it seeks to dismantle. I don’t think the decision to be a homemaker is inherently anti-feminist either; on the contrary, I think that it is a full-time job. The issue is that more often than not, when a woman chooses to become a homemaker, it is not an isolated decision. They are influenced by many things, such as religion, familial values, culture, and a pressure to conform in general. 

 

On the topic of full-time jobs, another problem I have with the concept of one homemaker and one breadwinner is that both partners are doing labour, but only one is being paid. This lack of financial independence can leave women in vulnerable positions. To me, it only seems right that couples split the income evenly, so a woman has financial freedom. Unfortunately, that is not commonplace, and I highly doubt that it will become so any time soon. Being a tradwife comes with risks;when a woman has no source of income other than her husband, it makes her financially dependent on him. In such a case, the husband holds all the cards in the marriage. If he walks away from the table, the wife is left with no job, little to no work experience, and possibly no education. The health, happiness, and safety of the wife is entirely reliant on whether the husband is a good person and will remain a good person. Even if he does, the possibility of a change in circumstances may render the husband unable to work, and thus earn a living.

 

Overall, I think that the Ballerina Farm controversy, as well as the epidemic of online tradwives, is much more nuanced than a lot of people give it credit for. It is vital that we hold people accountable for the ways in which their choices and platforms can influence broader societal norms, but it is equally important to approach these issues with empathy and understanding.