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This past summer, the internet was all abuzz with news of the Ballerina Farm. I was out of the country at the time–okay, I was in Canada but saying “out of the country” makes me sound like a fancy jetsetter–so I completely missed it besides seeing the phrase “Ballerina Farm” everywhere whenever I occasionally checked social media. I assumed the obvious: there was a new “Dance Moms” style reality show where people shipped their ballet-curious children to a rural farm where they’d have to work grueling hours hauling feed around while competing in challenges, like who can jete over the biggest cow.
Sadly, or happily perhaps, that was not actually the case. I learned (much too late to join in the discourse) that the Ballerina Farm is an actual working farm run by a “trad-wife” social media influencer who had been profiled in The Sunday Times by writer Megan Agnew.
If you’re not aware, “trad wife” is short for “traditional wife,” and it’s become a popular label for women on TikTok and Instagram who present themselves as the ideal woman for, usually, a made-up manly man from the 1950s: obsessed with making and raising babies, cooking, taking care of their man’s every need and desire, being white, not working outside the home, and definitely not having any other opinions on anything.
Last year, Amanda Marcotte wrote a very good overview of the trend, particularly how the entire thing is a “toxic fantasy” that manipulates the audience into believing that these women are really living humble lives of focusing on family over fame and fortune, while they voice strong opinions and rake in the dough. They aren’t ACTUALLY “traditional” wives. They’re performers.
Agnew’s Sunday Times piece referred to Hannah Neeleman as “the queen of the ‘trad wives’” despite Neeleman herself saying she doesn’t apply that label to herself. But she does have 10 MILLION followers on Instagram, where she posts photos and videos showing her life raising eight children on a farm in Utah, so named “Ballerina Farm” because she trained as a ballerina at Juilliard and continued to dance and compete in beauty pageants even after she started popping out babies. Whether she likes the label or not, she does seem to be a prime example of a “Trad Wife Influencer.”
I know the Times piece is old news so I shouldn’t spend too much time talking about it, but I do want to say that it left me kind of liking Neeleman and also feeling bad for her. Like, obviously this is a piece written from a very particular standpoint that I sympathized with and Neeleman has responded to rebut it a bit but let me give you the overview: Neeleman is a Mormon from Utah who wanted to be a ballerina, so she went to Julliard in New York City. When she was back home in Utah during a break she met Daniel Neeleman, also a Mormon and the son of the founder of the airline JetBlue. He immediately wanted to marry her but she wouldn’t date him for “six months.” One day she mentioned she was flying back to New York, and he called his dad and booked the seat next to her, pretending it was just a funny coincidence.
In the airline industry, insiders refer to this move as “a giant red flag.”
After the flight she agreed to date him for at least a year before getting married, so that she could finish school. This is a normal thing to tell someone when you are from a culture that prioritizes getting married and having children as soon as humanly possible. And Daniel said “no.” So instead they dated for one month before getting engaged, and then got married two months later.
In the wedding industry, insiders refer to this as “another big fucking red flag.”
Three months after the wedding, she was pregnant. In the obstetrics industry, you know what I’ll just drop this joke because you get the idea.
She did still manage to finish school while pregnant, but instead of becoming a dancer, she and her husband had several more kids and moved back to Utah, where his dream was to own a farm. She describes this time as being very hard and involving a lot of sacrifice, but Agnew points out that all the sacrifice appears to have come from Hannah: “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.”
Agnew points out that Daniel appears to be a “hands on father,” but also reports that Daniel says Hannah “sometimes gets so ill from exhaustion that she can’t get out of bed for a week.”
Which…is not good? Not normal? And also not ever shown on their social media posts, as best as I can tell.
As I mentioned, Hannah responded to the piece on Instagram by calling the article an “attack” on her family and lifestyle, insisting that she really loves their life and can’t wait to have more babies.
Anyway, I was thinking of this profile recently because I happened to stumble upon a recent paper published in the Journal of Rural Mental Health. What, you don’t subscribe to the Journal of Rural Mental Health? I guess you didn’t grow up in a forest surrounded by friends, family, and neighbors dealing with undiagnosed anxiety, depression, and ADHD by drinking too much and obsessively collecting guns and commemorative NASCAR-themed dinner plates. It’s a fascinating place. And only 45 minutes from the shore!
Anyway. Researchers at University of Georgia’s School of Social Work have just published “A great life, if you can stand it,” which is a quote from one of more than two dozen women surveyed across six focus groups, about their experiences being married to farmers in rural Georgia. What they found really mirrors what Agnew wrote about Neeleman’s experience. The study itself is behind a paywall, but there are many details in the University of Georgia’s press release on it. Lead author Anna Sheyett says that these women tend to take care of everything that isn’t farmwork, like housework, yardwork, and childcare, to the point that one participant even referred to herself as a single parent. But it doesn’t stop with “just” keeping the house: more than half of the women reported being the business’s bookkeepers, with their husbands never even glancing at what money is coming in or going out unless the wife brings it to their attention.
But it doesn’t stop with “just” keeping the house, kids, and books: many of the women also worked the farm, but downplayed their contributions as “only” managing the hay or whatnot.
But it doesn’t stop with “only” taking care of the house, kids, books, and various farming duties: “Because farming is uncertain and one bad frost can spell disaster for the season’s crops, two-thirds of the women in the study also work full time outside the home. (FULL TIME!!) This provides more financial stability and health care coverage for the families, but it also increases the mental load the women carry.”
So a significant portion of these women are keeping a FULL TIME JOB, while being 100% responsible for raising their kids, while cleaning the house and cooking all the meals, while mowing the lawn and trimming the trees, while hauling around hay, while balancing the books for an entire business AND the household. Hold on, though, there’s one more stressor: Sheyett reports that in addition to all that, these women confessed that they are also in charge of reducing their husbands’ stress and managing their husbands’ emotions.
“The women described feeling like they had to be the “bright spot in everyone’s day,” saying it was up to them to manage their husbands’ emotions when things got rough and the farmers got grumpy.
““Any time they’re under stress, boy, you’re going to get the brunt of it,” said one participant.”
…
Whew.
Obviously this is just one in-depth survey of a limited sample size, but I think it highlights how far women still have to go. And I mean all women. You can argue that rural farming life is innately less egalitarian than the life of, say, a family living in a condo in downtown Atlanta, but I’d argue that the two are more similar than we think. I suspect that there are many families out there, from a variety of backgrounds and social and economic statuses, in which women are taking on far more work than anyone realizes, including the women themselves. Because we as a society do continue to innately devalue work like child rearing and emotional labor and doing all those behind the scenes things that keep the home going. And I think we as a society do still assume that if someone is going to make a sacrifice in a heterosexual partnership, it’s going to be the woman.
And that’s why I don’t hate Hannah Neeleman. In a way, she is a great example of someone who bridges that gap between those rural farmers’ wives and those urban “elites”: she is a beautiful and talented ballerina who married a multimillionaire who could give her whatever she wants. But her “wants” were immediately replaced by his wants: his want to date, his want to get married, his want to have children immediately, his want to live and work on a farm. And just like the rural women in that survey, she has decided that it’s all worth it. She finds it rewarding. She’s proud of her hard work, and her husband’s hard work. She doesn’t want our pity.
So fair enough! There’s still a lot to be critical of when it comes to Neeleman and, whether she likes it or not, her fellow “Trad Wife” influencers, for selling a fantasy. No, random woman working long hours in a soulless corporate job, you will most likely not find joy and happiness by buying a farm, because working on a farm is actually really hard, and if your dad didn’t own an airline at some point you can’t afford it. And no, guy who can’t get a match on Tinder and thinks women are too liberated these days, you won’t find a hot submissive blonde woman who just wants to cook you dinner and have your babies because you don’t own an airline, or have a dad who owns an airline. This is a fantasy, and it can be a dangerous fantasy if taken too far, like for instance in a country where men are becoming more emboldened to say things like “your body, my choice” to women.
But I still can’t hate Hannah. Because at the end of the day, she’s a woman who was born into a misogynistic religious cult, and felt her best option was to give up her dreams. But despite that, she still managed to find a way to have some control over her life, to become successful, and to do it on a stage like she wanted. And I have to respect that. I just hope she respects herself.
