Ballerina Farm and the tragedy of the ‘tradwife’

If you have been on the internet of late, you may well have come across a ‘tradwife’. These are women who dress in impractically flowing sundresses, their hair perfectly curled, as they tend to their sourdough starters and sip on raw-milk lattes.

If you’ve never been exposed to tradwives, seeing one for the first time can be something of a shock to the system. All across the internet, a small but vocal crowd of young women are espousing the virtues of traditional gender roles, ‘holistic living’ and, quite often, fundamentalist Christianity. The message of these influencers, either explicitly or implicitly, is that women should reject women’s liberation and embrace their ‘traditional’ role.

Of course, housewives never went away. But it has been a very long time since the lifestyle of a stay-at-home mother has been portrayed as something aspirational. The tradwife trend goes even further than that, offering up a nostalgic, deeply conservative and strangely stylised version of being a woman in the home, served up for the consumption of the TikTok generation.

While the tradwives are hardly a mainstream movement in society, subcultures can still be pretty big in the internet age. Hannah Neeleman, aka Ballerina Farm, is the undisputed queen of the tradwives, with nine million Instagram followers and a further nine million on TikTok.

It’s not hard to see why Neeleman is so popular. She sells a life that looks utterly idyllic. For starters, she is gorgeous – a former professional ballerina and current beauty queen – and is always dressed like a character from a tastefully sexy version of Little House on the Prairie. The 34-year-old lives on a 328-acre farm in Utah – the Ballerina Farm – with her billionaire husband, Daniel, and their eight children. She doesn’t self-identify as a ‘tradwife’, but that’s clearly the vibe she’s going for.

As far as tradwives go, Neeleman’s content is pretty inoffensive for the most part. She mostly posts photos and videos of her kids, animals and cooking. Recently, though, a Sunday Times article on Ballerina Farm ignited a storm of controversy. Earlier this month, a feature, titled ‘Meet the queen of the “tradwives”’ hit the internet, causing chaos and sparking discourse that has lasted for weeks.

For many people, that Sunday Times article confirmed a lot of what they had already suspected about Neeleman and her supposedly perfect tradwife life. Writer Megan Agnew went out to Utah to interview her, but found that Neeleman could barely speak without being ‘corrected, interrupted or answered for’ by her children or husband.

It gets worse. We learn that not only was Neeleman a professional ballerina in a past life, but that she was also accepted into the Juilliard School’s prestigious dance programme – a course that takes only 12 women every year. Neeleman doesn’t do a great job in the article of convincing readers that she was actually ready to give this life up for marriage and motherhood. When asked by Agnew if Ballerina Farm was the life she dreamed of, she hesitates:

‘I left home at 17 and I was so excited to get [to New York City], I just loved that energy. And I was going to be a ballerina. I was a good ballerina.’

We get the distinct impression that Neeleman, herself one of nine siblings, is not exactly living out her dreams. She met her husband shortly after she arrived in New York. Just three months into their relationship, they were married and Neeleman was pregnant, while still an undergraduate at Juilliard. Needless to say, her ballet career didn’t last long.

As the archetypal tradwife, most of Neeleman’s adult life has revolved around her husband and children. She claims that she and Daniel have ‘both made sacrifices’ for their marriage, but the balance seems more than a little unequal. As Agnew writes:

‘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.’

Neeleman even refused pain relief during birth on Daniel’s request. (This belief in the superiority of ‘natural’, unmedicated childbirth is common in trad circles.) She confesses to Agnew while Daniel is out of the room that, with one of her babies, she did get an epidural. But only because Daniel was away for work.

The Sunday Times feature can certainly be accused of playing up the bleakest aspects of Neeleman’s life. But shortly after it was published, Neeleman herself posted a video on TikTok that underscored the quiet misery of it all. In the clip, she opens a birthday present from Daniel, expecting tickets to Greece – not exactly a big ask, given that his father is the founder of several commercial airlines. Instead, she’s given an apron for carrying eggs. The box isn’t even gift-wrapped. ‘You’re welcome’, Daniel says, before she can even thank him.

Hannah Neeleman’s life certainly sounds like most women’s idea of a nightmare. But at least she has, wittingly or unwittingly, helped to expose the darker side of tradwifery. Most tradwives do not admit to having any regrets about adopting their lifestyle.

Nara Smith, wife of model Lucky Blue Smith, is another ubiquitous online tradwife. The 22-year-old has amassed almost four million followers on Instagram and almost nine million on TikTok. Her whole schtick is that she cooks everything from scratch and does so while wearing elaborate ball-gown-esque outfits. ‘My husband mentioned that he was craving Coca-Cola today’, she says in a whispery voiceover, classical music tinkling away softly in the background, ‘and since we’re out of soda, I decided to make him some’. She then proceeds to cook up a glass of cola while wearing a silver sparkly slip dress. A matching SMEG brand toaster and kettle are proudly on display behind her.

Smith and her husband have three children (improbably named Rumble Honey, Slim Easy and Whimsy Lou). Like the Neelemans, they are Mormons. Her brand of tradwifery similarly revolves around embracing an over-the-top version of femininity and submission.

Other online peddlers of tradwifery are more explicit in their opposition to women’s liberation. Estee Williams is a former meteorologist who gave up her job to become a homemaker. Now she makes videos for her almost 200,000 TikTok followers, dressed like a caricature of a 1950s housewife and preaching the benefits of so-called traditional femininity. Similarly, Gwen the Milkmaid talks on TikTok about finding God and rejecting feminism after a short stint as an OnlyFans model.

The tradwife movement promotes the notion that being a wife and mother is somehow the easier, more natural path for women. Why sit in a cubicle all day serving your boss when you can live on a beautiful rural homestead and serve your loving husband instead? Of course, anyone who has ever looked after children or run a household knows that such a life, while fulfilling for many, is far from idyllic in all aspects.

You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out that most of this is staged for social media. What are Smith’s kids doing while she spends hours baking Goldfish crackers from scratch? How is her kitchen always so meticulously clean, despite the endless cooking she apparently does? People have, understandably, speculated that she has a nanny or at least a cleaner. Neeleman has a cleaner, too, even though she apparently isn’t allowed a nanny. A lot of tradwife creators don’t even have children.

Tradwifery needs dressing up like this because it is fundamentally a raw deal for women. Neeleman may have only reluctantly revealed the darker parts of her life, but others have been far more candid. Remember Lauren Southern, the Canadian darling of the alt-right from a few years ago? She quit her political activism back in 2019 and virtually disappeared off the face of the Earth. Then, last year, she reappeared, newly divorced with a toddler in tow, to tell the world of how her supposedly traditional marriage turned abusive and ended with her husband abandoning her and their young son.

Yet the face tradwives put to the world is that marriage and motherhood are basically effortless. They might not say it explicitly, but the message is always that this is what women were created for. Nevermind having successful careers as ballerinas, models, meteorologists or political activists. Apparently, returning to traditional gender roles and pumping out babies is the only path to true fulfilment and happiness. The reality, of course, is a lot less picture-perfect. As Southern has opened up about, giving all your freedom over to your husband leaves you vulnerable to being taken advantage of. Past generations of women fought for their autonomy for a reason, after all.

Of course, if these women want to live this life, that is entirely their prerogative. Certainly, sneering at women more generally for choosing family over career is an unpleasant part of modern culture. The beauty of the modern world is that women now have the choice. But we should be honest about what the tradwife ideal really is – a reactionary fantasy that, were it to escape the bounds of social media, would be a big step backwards for women.

Lauren Smith is a staff writer at spiked.