Is Ballerina Farm the Type of Feminist We Actually Need?
Hannah Neeleman's recent profile in The Times reveals that feminism is under attack. She might ultimately be the type of feminist feminism needs to survive.
I’m a bit late to
.At the beginning of the year, I remember hearing controversy about a woman competing in a beauty pageant shortly after giving birth. I remember thinking how strange it was that anyone would criticize a woman for being able to do that. But beyond that, I didn’t pay much attention to her.
Then a month ago, I found myself scrolling through YouTube videos, searching for a tutorial on how to make cheese from raw milk. That’s when the algorithm introduced me to Hannah Neeleman.
Hannah and her husband, Daniel, along with their eight children reside on their farm in Utah aptly named Ballerina Farm. They sell meat boxes and sourdough starters through the farm’s website, all while documenting their lives on social media.
The controversy surrounding Hannah Neeleman is hard to understand. Hannah is a young woman who found success at home, in business, and in the performing arts, first in ballet, then in beauty pageants. There’s nothing overtly wrong with her. She’s no different than other female role models like Taylor Swift or Simone Biles.
What makes Hannah so controversial is that she elevates the role of motherhood, marriage, and family life alongside her professional success. She’s a mom and a business owner; a CEO and a wife. She’s built a lucrative career for herself inside the home rather than outside of it
Modern-day feminists are grappling with the notion that success doesn’t necessarily have to come at the end of a corporate ladder. They bought into the idea that the only way to find professional success was to perform alongside men, working outside of the home in corporate jobs as disposable cogs in a profit-driven machine.
That’s why it’s so hard for many professional women in today’s #girlboss culture to comprehend that women like Hannah Neeleman not only exist but are actually happy being housewives.
To be fair, career-oriented feminism made sense for a time. It has allowed women to eliminate structural barriers that legitimately prevented them from exercising any form of agency over their own lives. The days of opening a bank account after acquiring your husband’s permission are, thankfully, long gone.
But as feminism became a dominant cultural ideology in the workforce, professional women find it unconscionable that any woman would voluntarily degrade herself to the status of mother and homemaker. Women like Hannah Neeleman are looked down upon. Instead of aspiring to be more like Hannah, many professional women would rather continue slaving away for a corporate employer who would have no qualms about cutting them loose if the bottom line necessitated it.
Hannah Neeleman undermines the prevailing feminist narrative. She represents a new version of the modern housewife, one who is able to retain the dignity of her womanhood while also still having professional ambitions. Much to the chagrin of women like Anne-Marie Slaughter, Hannah Neeleman suggests you actually can have it all.
This essay will dive into what feminism gets wrong about traditional wives and modern homemakers. It will argue that the invention of the internet and the ability to build scalable businesses online has made it possible for women to build careers for themselves while raising families and managing their homes. Women, like Hannah Neeleman, who have chosen this path demonstrate that with enough hard work and persistence, it is possible to be as successful — if not more successful — than most corporate careers.
Ballerina Farm, it seems, has delivered on the promises that feminism failed to.
A British reporter recently visited Ballerina Farm in rural Utah. Instead of profiling Hannah Neeleman, she wrote a piece to help feminists recapture their narrative — all men are bad and motherhood comes at the expense of professional ambition.
The British newspaper The Times recently published a profile of Hannah Neeleman titled “Meet the queen of the ‘trad wives’ (and her eight children).”
Before I dive any deeper, there is something worth noting about this piece right up front. The headline misidentifies Hannah as a trad wife, attributing her to a movement she herself does not identify with. In the piece Hannah clearly states this:
Neeleman, however, thinks otherwise. “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.”
Instead, Hannah identifies as a woman who is performing the duties of mother and wife according to her Mormon faith. She just so happens to be sharing her experience on social media and monetizes her brand to support herself and her family.
If OnlyFans girls don’t find shame in selling their lives online, why then, should a homemaker like Hannah Neeleman?
By lumping Hannah in with all of the other social media tradwives — women who are doing little more than larping for likes — the writer comes to a false conclusion that shapes the tenor of the entire piece:
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.
While this might seem like an innocuous bit of copy, it undermines the journalistic credibility of the author and thus the objectivity of the entire profile. If she can’t correctly identify Hannah’s identity, what else did she misrepresent in the piece?
Ironically, the writing itself — rather than the substance of the article — reveals just how pervasive the feminist narrative is. The author can’t compute that the job Hannah has created for herself — running a successful farm and a social media brand — isn’t a fantasy. It’s real life.
What was intended to be a profile on Hannah Neeleman ended up being a siren song, warning women of the perils of traditional life. Hannah is portrayed as a tired housewife who has sacrificed all of her hopes and dreams to live on her remote Utah farm.
Reading between the lines, the author tries to imply that Hannah is trapped. Instead of being celebrated for the business she’s built, the author mourns her failed dancing career, debating whether she made the choice for herself or if her husband made the choice for her:
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.”
Like most men, Daniel Neeleman, Hannah’s husband, is unsurprisingly, cast to play the role of the villain. The son of the founder of a popular airliner, Daniel was destined for success. Hannah’s role in the marriage isn’t portrayed as one of mutual respect and equitable partnership, but rather being a baby mill for a billionaire’s son. The author observes:
I want to ask her about birth control, but we are surrounded by so many of her children and Daniel is back in the room now too. Do you — I pause and look at her fixedly — plan pregnancies? “No,” Daniel says. “When he says no,” Neeleman responds gently, “it’s very much a matter of prayer for me. I’m, like, ‘God, is it time to bring another one to the Earth?’ And I’ve never been told no.”
“But for whatever reason it’s exactly nine months [after a baby] that she’s ready for the next one,” he says.
The piece concludes with images of what Hannah has given up to live her life on Ballerina Farm. Her ballet studio in the barn was turned into a schoolroom for the children. Her sequin pageant gowns now collect dust in the garage. Those choices were made according to her husband’s wishes of course.
The reader is led to conclude that Hannah gave up her professional ambitions in order to start a family and her husband is to blame. But as Jessica Reed Krouse writes in
:Who cares if she gave up a competitive dancing career to have babies? She found someone she loved, a partner who shared her religion and life goals, and settled down to raise a family as she envisioned.
Regardless of whether or not Hannah identifies as a trad wife — or a hapless victim of the patriarchy — we are clearly living in a cultural moment where women are overtly rejecting the promises of feminism. Women, including myself, have woken up to the reality that our biological clocks are ticking and maybe a career isn’t what we actually want after all.
Career feminism works for young women but as you get older your priorities change. Your friends begin moving away and starting families of their own. Parents and loved ones begin showing signs of decline, no longer in the prime of their life.
You begin asking questions about the meaning of life. Eventually, you realize you can’t find happiness in your inbox. And while mothering a litter of cats may seem ideal in the present moment it won’t be when you’re on your deathbed a few decades from now.
Hannah Neeleman may represent an oppressed woman but only if you adhere to the feminist narrative and choose to view her from that lens. Objectively, she is a woman in her early 30s with a deep faith that engenders her with traditional values. She may have given up her career as a ballerina, but she might not concede to the idea that motherhood forced her too.
Hannah, like an increasing number of women, came to the conclusion that motherhood was more important to her than a “promising” career ever would be. It was a sacrifice, no doubt, but a sacrifice she was willing to make.
Modern feminists fail to acknowledge how easy it is now for women to build careers for themselves at home. Thanks to the rise of remote work and online entrepreneurship, it’s possible for women to have it all
In 2012, Anne-Marie Slaughter broke the internet with her piece “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All.” The CEO of a left-leaning Washington think tank, Slaughter’s career includes prominent positions at the State Department and Princeton University.
In other words, Slaughter was and still is the pinnacle of corporate success.
Her essay deeply resonated with women, especially those in the working professional class. It argued that unless structural changes were made to how work was conducted, women couldn’t have it all. Work-life balance simply wasn’t possible for modern career women.
Like the author of The Times profile of Ballerina Farm, Slaughter looked at the role of women in the workforce from a fairly myopic perspective. Rather than looking at how women could change the way they show up to work, the piece focused on work itself. It reinforced the prevailing feminist narrative that employers needed to do more to accommodate the needs of women. As a result, it cast women as victims of a structure that inherently disadvantaged them.
This is what makes Hannah Neeleman so controversial. Ballerina Farm provides a perspective about women in the workforce that is counter to this narrative.
Neeleman isn’t just an influencer, she’s a successful mompreneur. Like the thousands of other less controversial women who have come before her, Neeleman has figured out how to overcome challenges like unequal pay and unequal access to leadership roles all while taking care of her own children.
Neeleman isn’t advocating for policy changes or leading protests demanding that employers do more. Instead, she created a career for herself that fits comfortably alongside her duties as a mother and wife. Hannah did what Anne-Marie Slaughter said was impossible for women to do.
Mompreneurs like Neeleman have been conveniently left out of the feminist narrative. Instead of being part of the traditional 9to5 workforce and following a traditional career path, these women have built their own careers outside of that. They create products and services and sell their wares to customers around the world.
While career-driven feminists continue to struggle against the patriarchy, mompreneurs have removed the patriarchy altogether. This is due, in large part, to the ability to create online businesses at scale like never before.
In 2007, Tim Ferriss published his landmark book The 4-Hour Workweek. The book is essentially a roadmap that lays out how anyone can build a business that requires just a few hours of work to maintain. All it requires is building systems and hiring a team of assistants to delegate tasks to.
There’s no reason why a woman can’t pick up that book and teach herself how to build a business that generates enough income to live off. And there’s no reason she can’t follow Ferriss’s strategy to reduce her workload to just a few hours a week.
Thanks to the rise of internet-based businesses and increased productivity gains, a modern woman can manage her own business while raising her family and running her household. Surely if Tim Ferriss and hustle culture bros can do it women can too.
This is what the profile on Ballerina Farm gets wrong. By portraying Hannah as a victim, it overlooks her role as the successful CEO of a company she built. If you’ve watched any of her content you know Daniel works alongside her, but he isn’t the mastermind behind her social media strategy.
She built a business with her husband and hired a small team to help her with the day-to-day operations. Instead of spending 80+ hours a week in an office or on Zoom calls, Hannah is able to earn a living while making homemade grilled cheese — all from scratch — for her children.
This is what success actually looks like.
It isn’t just about equal pay or a promotion. It’s about the freedom to make memories with your children.
Financially savvy and successful moms with home-based careers have always existed. They existed when Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote her piece more than a decade ago, and they exist right now.
The problem is you’ve never seen them. Their existence is an existential threat to the feminist narrative. Their stories have been hidden by the very women demanding greater recognition in their own careers.
Professional women don’t want to acknowledge that it’s possible to have it all. Doing so would require them to take ownership of their own mistakes and concede that maybe they were wrong—maybe traditional women have been right all along.
Hannah Neeleman is controversial because she amplifies a narrative that undermines the credibility of the entire feminist narrative. As a result, feminists demonize traditional women to validate their own choices. They suppress the counter-narrative that women like Hannah Neeleman represent. They can’t acknowledge someone else’s success because doing so sheds light on their own failure.
Final takeaway.
The profile of Hannah Neeleman in The Times shows the pervasiveness of bias in the media. It reveals how journalists inject their own worldviews into the topics they cover.
But what’s most fascinating about the piece isn’t how Hannah’s life was distorted to fit the feminist worldview. It’s what the author left out in order to sell that worldview.
Hannah and her husband both left their careers and started a business on a farm in rural Utah. Anyone who has started a business knows how hard that is to do. And anywho who has built a successful business knows the amount of sweat equity that goes into turning a dream into reality.
Hannah didn’t give up her dream of being a ballerina. She lived that dream. She studied at Juilliard and performed on stage. She was a successful ballerina.
Life is about change and progress. Hannah had her season as a ballerina and that season came to an end when it needed to. She dreamed a new dream — being a mother, wife, and business owner.
She has found success in all three of those ventures.
While the author of The Times profile was busy asking the Neeleman’s about birth control, she forgot to ask more important questions.
What is it like to build a brand and a media company alongside a product-based business?
How did Hannah know when it was time to bring on their first employee?
Or what was the process like for creating and selling her famous sourdough starter?
Answers to these types of questions — within the context of raising children and running a household — would have been more valuable than conjecture about Hannah’s role as the supposed queen of the tradwives.
Modern feminism is in trouble. Hannah represents a reclamation of motherhood. And the rejection of corporatism altogether.
Maybe it’s Hannah Neeleman that feminism needs to save itself after all.
What do you think? Can women have it all? Is a more traditional lifestyle the key?
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