The Online Staying Power of a “Ballerina Farm”
Hannah Neeleman is not here to make you feel better about yourself—which is perhaps why so many people resent her. A homeschooling mom of eight who milks cows and prepares daily farm-to-table meals for her growing household, Neeleman is, as a sneering July 2024 profile in the UK Times put it, “queen of the ‘trad wives’.”
The face and voice of Ballerina Farm—the Neeleman family’s fantastically aesthetic Utah homestead and lifestyle brand—Hannah, perhaps inadvertently, has captured the imagination of a particular corner of the American Right. She embraces traditional gender roles and eschews mass-produced food and clothing; as a former Mrs. Utah and Juilliard-trained ballet dancer, she is impossibly fit, pretty, and poised. And, like countless other social media influencers, she is the star of a picturesque reality show of her own design.
Neeleman is not just any influencer, though; she has emerged as a sort of avatar in America’s cultural battles. The subheading of the Times profile asks whether she represents an “empowering new model for womanhood” or a “hammer blow for feminism.” The author, Megan Agnew, strongly suggests the latter.
But what does Neeleman represent? Agnew appears to believe that the “trad wife” movement is a reaction to “girl-boss feminism” à la Sex and the City, which celebrated solo urban living, careerism, and sexual libertinism. In Agnew’s words, “As the years went on women realized they’d been sold a lie: this individualistic feminism didn’t resolve anything unless you were a millionaire. For normal working mothers the girl-boss era achieved virtually nothing.” The effort to break glass ceilings, in other words, made daily living, and especially motherhood, even more of a strain than it had been before. The response, in Agnew’s telling, was dramatic: where Sex and the City’s characters enjoyed chic Manhattan restaurants and quick delivery service, trad wives “film themselves cooking mad things from scratch (chewing gum from corn syrup, waffles from a sourdough starter), their faces glowing in beams of sunlight, their voices soft and breathy, their children free range.”
But a history of reality television might interpret the trad wife movement in another way: as a reaction to a certain kind of cheap celebrity that emerged in the mid-2000s. Bravo, VH1, MTV, and other networks showcased ever-rotating casts of wealthy, petty, vacuous characters who hyper-fixated on family infighting, projecting a nihilism sold as authenticity.
Cable TV’s infamous “hot messes”—from the Kardashians to Paris Hilton to the countless “real housewives”—drink and party heavily, speak and dress coarsely, and occasionally engage in criminal activity. Reality TV came to be understood as a guilty pleasure, the junk food of entertainment; the trashy clothes and trashier personal lives of its stars granted viewers a strange kind of comfort. Even rich people can’t hold it together, these shows declared; no one can really have it all. Reality stars didn’t challenge anyone to better themselves; on the contrary, they allowed audiences to feel a little smug.
Not so with Neeleman. The life she presents is unequivocally aspirational and far more wholesome. She married young—to Daniel Neeleman, an heir to the JetBlue fortune—and together they purchased a 328-acre farm in Kamas, Utah. Now in their mid-thirties, the Neelemans sell high-end meat and dairy products, sourdough starters, gingham apparel, furniture, and other home goods on the Ballerina Farm website. But Hannah is primarily selling an idea, through the highly curated images and videos of her family that she shares with millions of followers.
Like many of my peers—terminally online, conservative women—I first came across Neeleman while scrolling through Facebook reels. Over time, as her videos passed my screen with the increasing frequency of an alert algorithm, Neeleman became this familiar figure to me, a gorgeous blonde mom narrating intimate tableaus of domestic rural life, baking and farming and raising her children against a stunning mountain backdrop. Her cooking videos are particularly striking; she produces staple ingredients from scratch, allowing her children to participate, their little hands making messes in the kitchen while she remains composed and relaxed. (In a recent video, Hannah makes beef pie, complete with homemade puff pastry; one of her daughters fluffs Hannah’s hair as she puts something in the oven, but Hannah seems entirely unbothered.) It’s perfectly controlled chaos, and maybe a smokescreen. Neeleman, with the help of her children and husband, has perfected a new kind of social media performance art.
In a way, Neeleman is following the lead of all-American lifestyle gurus like Martha Stewart and Ina Garten, who bring you into their homes to show you how to live and eat beautifully. Martha shares her calendar and blogs about her heritage-breed chickens; Ina will walk you through her backyard garden on Instagram. But neither Martha’s nor Ina’s version of homey Americana is quite so family-centric, so religious, so intimate, or so wholesome. First, their brands are of a distinctly East Coast variety; Martha has homes in Manhattan, upstate New York, Maine, Connecticut; Ina is a fixture in the Hamptons. Martha has been divorced for decades and has one child; Ina, happily married to her college sweetheart, chose not to have kids. Despite their cozy domesticity, they fit a certain image of modern womanhood as tied to the city and relatively unencumbered, especially not by a flock of children.
In Agnew’s telling, Hannah Neeleman might once have chosen that sort of life, too. In a private moment during her interview with Neeleman (Agnew makes a point of noting that she and Hannah were rarely left alone), she asked her if “this was what she always wanted.” Neeleman’s reply was as follows:
“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.”
Later, Hannah admits that giving up dance to establish Ballerina Farm was hard: “You give up a piece of yourself.” But, she qualified, Daniel, too, “gave up his career ambitions.” Agnew tells the reader that she does not agree:
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 depicts Hannah’s past life as the dream that almost was. In many ways the archetypal Manhattan woman—talented, beautiful, business savvy—Hannah might have enjoyed countless professional, social, and romantic opportunities. Rural Utah and women’s liberation, it seems, don’t mix.
As a former Manhattan dweller who moved to Texas the week I got married, part of me relates to Neeleman’s story. I, too, had made a life for myself as a single woman in New York and met a guy who made leaving it behind well worth it. I quit a teaching job I loved at a top private school, along with lucrative side gigs—if you’re from New York City, you know—and a community I had worked hard to build. And, like Neeleman, I would defend that choice to anyone, because my commitments to my husband, and hopefully, our family, are of an altogether higher order.
But why should Neeleman have to defend herself? What makes her such a polarizing figure? In her Times profile of Neeleman, Agnew presents her as a woman who hadn’t meaningfully made her own life choices, who was under the thumb of an entitled and domineering husband.
In response to fierce criticism of the profile (including a gracious if forceful response video from Neeleman herself), Agnew published a follow-up piece in the Times, which is also worth examining. In it, Agnew poses a question, claiming to echo Neeleman’s detractors: “How dare she make motherhood and domesticity look so easy, many cry.” Agnew explains that, before meeting Hannah, she had had questions of her own: “How did she keep it all together? How was she always so calm? Was it really like that?”
Agnew assumed that, behind the overly coiffed social media façade, she would find a grittier reality. Instead, she admits, she found herself amazed. Ballerina Farm, situated among arid Utah mountains, was “simply awesome,” among the most beautiful places she had ever been. The Neeleman kids “running around in tiny cowboy boots and climbing fences, were truly as wild and lovely as they looked online, helping each other, entertaining themselves,” she said. “And Neeleman herself really was as calm.” When Agnew asked Neeleman about the online tensions surrounding her business, Neeleman’s responses were simple, serene; this was her life; she posted about it.
In the follow-up article, Agnew doesn’t disavow her obvious dislike for Daniel Neeleman—she very clearly sees him as an overbearing jerk—nor her obvious frustration at not getting more time alone with Hannah. But she acknowledges that there is something about Hannah’s life choices, in and of themselves, that are perceived as threatening to other women.
Perhaps it’s simple jealousy; after all, Neeleman and her kids are exceptionally beautiful and seem happy, relaxed, and healthy. But Agnew does try to identify what is bothering her. Her original piece laments Hannah’s bouts of exhaustion: the results of childbirth, child rearing, farming, and business management. Perhaps feminism embraces only sacrifices that can be discarded at will—the exacting demands of ballet, or corporate-lawyer hours—not the unending obligations of a large family.
This is not to say that none of Agnew’s criticisms has merit; she expresses frustration, for example, that the Neelemans eschew screens but make much of their living by recording internet videos. They reside on an “analogue, old-fashioned farm” underwritten by “social media cash.” There is something to this; earning a livelihood by sharing intimate details of one’s life and children with the world, including a home birth, is questionable at best. That in itself reflects the coarseness of our age.
But Agnew (and the online chorus of Hannah’s detractors) never meaningfully addresses why the Neelemans’ life might be inspiring; she doesn’t really seem curious about that. Without seeming to realize it, Agnew notes a telling detail: the Neeleman kids are kept away from screens, but they are permitted to watch occasional episodes of Little House on the Prairie, the show based on the classic, semi-autobiographical children’s book series of American pioneer life by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I love the Little House series; it remains a favorite from my childhood. In some ways, Neeleman reminds me of Laura. Like Wilder, Neeleman did not seek success in the city, but in the American midwest, once a land of pioneers. Also like Wilder, she is devoutly religious. Neeleman reflects an American spirit of building that differs from the careerism of Martha or Ina. The Neelemans aren’t simply selling comfort or attractive surroundings, but the fruits of sacrifice, faith, and deep attachment to one’s family and land. They are not seeking mere self-enrichment, but a rich legacy for their children, one of creativity and the American entrepreneurial spirit. In this and in many other ways, perhaps they do present a threat to modern feminism.
Image by seaseasyd and licensed via Adobe Stock.