Breaking down Ballerina Farm. The love, hate and thoughtful takes on Hannah Neeleman's 'tradwife' life.
Hannah Neeleman is a 34-year-old mom of eight who lives on 328 acres outside Kamas, Utah. Neeleman, a Juilliard-trained ballet dancer, is known as Ballerina Farm on social media, and has amassed 20 million followers across her various platforms. She helps homeschool her children, drinks raw milk fresh from a cow’s udders, makes sourdough, wears milkmaid dresses and long skirts with cowboy boots, as well as gingham and floral, and has come to represent the “tradwife,” the latest designation for a woman who practices — and in many cases, promotes — traditional gender roles.
Since 2017, Hannah, has been sharing her life as a first-generation farmer with her husband, Daniel Neeleman, who is the son of David Neeleman, the billionaire founder of JetBlue and WestJet. But it wasn’t until she participated in a beauty pageant just 12 days postpartum with her eighth child in January this year that she became mainstream fodder. She made many moms mad — whether they were defending her from critics or the ones doing the vilifying.
Then in July, Hannah was profiled in London's The Sunday Times, and, once again, Ballerina Farm was headline news. The reporter, Megan Agnew, described how the Neelemans work to curate a family life and business apparently dreamt up by Daniel, while sacrificing Hannah’s lifelong ambitions of being a dancer in New York. However, as Hannah later shared in a video on Instagram, she and her husband were “taken aback” when they saw the published piece. “[It ended up] being an attack on our family and my marriage. Portraying me as oppressed, with my husband being the culprit,” she said, countering: “We are co-parents, co-CEOs, co-diaper changers, kitchen cleaners and decision makers.”
That brings us to today. First, Neeleman appeared on the cover of Evie magazine, a publication that claims to be “the future of femininity” and a Cosmopolitan for conservatives. Then she was interviewed, photographed and shared recipes for the New York Times. An article in Glamour followed. Lastly, she was named one of People's 2024 Creators of the Year. With these pieces, Hannah was able to telegraph different personas: timeless values (Evie), working mom and entrepreneur (Glamour), famous foodie (New York Times) and devoted wife (People).
The press push
As the editors of Evie see it, Neeleman “reminds us of the joy and fulfillment that can come from living close to the earth and embracing your unique calling.” They said she represents the “new American Dream” and their “vision of American culture — a celebration of Americana, beauty, grounded ambition and timeless values.”
Meanwhile, in Glamour, Hannah declined to discuss the term "tradwife" at all. “Pushing ourselves as individuals is key,” she said. “Keep pushing yourself, keep inspiring yourself. You just have to keep going, keep moving, keep going upward.” She instead focused on changing the narrative. As a young woman in her 20s, Neeleman said, she didn’t ditch dance for her children: She brought her first-born to the ballet studio with her. “I was like, I’m just going to keep trucking along. And it was very unconventional in a way to a lot of people around me,” she said. In another effort to correct the record, she said Daniel wasn’t the one who wanted to live out West on a farm and raise children without nannies, as the Times appeared to be saying. Hannah told Glamour that starting a family business was her idea and that she was the one who led the way in making it successful with social media marketing in particular. “I posted our journey of what it was like to be first-generation farmers knowing nothing, and this drastic lifestyle change,” she said of growing an engaged following. “I think people just loved the rawness, the realness. And I tried to share the story as much as I could.”
The New York Times also sets Hannah’s record straight, while focusing on her business: She’s not a one-woman show, she has part-time babysitting help, and a homeschool teacher comes to their home three times a week. It noted that the Neelemans have a $400,000 robotic milking system for their cows, which will help Ballerina Farm expand into a creamery (the direct-to-consumer website already sells handmade baked goods, mountain-raised beef and pork, protein powder, a sourdough kit, bread bow knife, merch and more). As the food reporter Julia Moskin noted: “The goal of all this enterprise, Ms. Neeleman said, is not to accumulate more wealth, converts or fame, but to bring her followers the joy she experiences in family farming.”
In People, Neeleman praised her spouse. "Daniel, my husband, is so good at just being a steady rock and just being that constant for me," she commented. "And he doesn't ever get entangled with the ups and downs [of] social media. He's just like, 'No, we're doing our thing. It's not about them, it's about us, and we're going to keep doing what we love — and sharing.'"
‘Could I be living that way?’
If the four aforementioned pieces were a “PR coup,” as Emily Amick described it, the reactions — and there’s a range of them — have been a blitz.
There’s Sara Petersen, who argued the New York Times piece treated Neeleman with kid gloves.
The vast majority of Ballerina Farm critics don’t care about whether or not Hannah Neeleman chose motherhood and wifehood over ballet. I don’t care if motherhood, domestic work, and entrepreneurship really do come as naturally to Hannah as it appears online. I care that the alt right has always weaponized idealized depictions of white motherhood to their political advantage, and Hannah Neeleman is simply the most famous arbiter of the most romanticized example of maternity we currently have. Which means I won’t stop talking about Ballerina Farm until the power of Hannah’s particular blend of maternal excellence ceases to have direct political consequences on our daily lives. And when the paper of renown publishes a profile that the Ballerina Farm PR team hardly could’ve improved upon, I’m gonna talk about that too.
On her Substack, Femlosophy, Aly Dee wrote that Ballerina Farm hate is a symptom of “Left-Wing Media’s war on Conservative Women.”
The correct response to her excellence is to be inspired by her and not seek to hate yourself for failing to live up to the Hannah Neeleman standard. Almost none of us will, and that is okay. We can still be the best and healthiest versions of ourselves without trying to fit into a Hannah Neeleman mold that Hannah isn’t even trying to convince us to fit into.
As Carmen Schober summed it up: “A woman with a beautiful, happy family broke the internet multiple times. Some people hate that idea so much, but there's nothing they can do to stop it.”
In an article with the headline "The Longing and the Loathing Inspired by Ballerina Farm," Mariah Proctor wrote in Neeleman's defense for Public Square Magazine:
Ballerina Farm may be performance art, but the reason we’re still talking about it is because it’s so well done. The wholesomeness at the center of its aesthetic is something many of us are deeply craving. Maybe somewhere off in the rolling rural hills, a world still exists where kids have dirt under their fingernails and run through pastures and make lemonade out of a fistful of dandelions and rhubarb they found in the yard instead of fighting over iPads. Maybe I can’t have the farm, but it’s possible I could turn off the TV and let my 3-year-old help me feed our very first sourdough starter.
Gabby Del Valle took issue with Evie, writing for The Baffler, “For Evie, the Neelemans’ secret wealth isn’t proof that living off the land is largely inaccessible to the masses but a symbol of the virtuousness of Ballerina Farm’s mission. They have enough money to live glamorously; instead, they choose to live a simple life. That this simple life might be an expensive illusion is never considered.”
The reaction to the string of coverage is neatly summarized by the conversation between Amick and Jo Piazza on the podcast “We’ve Got Issues.”
Piazza, calling Neeleman a “homesteading/homeschooling/Laura Ingalls Wilder fantasy,” summed up her thoughts like this: “Very far-right cultural ideas are injected into this content. It’s portraying a fantasy that a lot of young women are being caught up in, it’s pro-natalist, anti-women in the workforce and dependence on a man. And all of that is a fantasy, because we know Ballerina Farm is backed by massive inherited wealth. I’m sure they work hard, and it’s a very successful brand, but talking about it as anything other than a media business I think is false.” For Piazza, it’s personal: “I don’t like aspirational content injected with politics, particularly with politics that I think are dangerous for women.”
Amick, on the other hand, a self-described “Ballerina Farm-stan,” loves Neeleman’s aesthetic, cooking and dresses and recognizes that as fans, her readers are only getting a small glimpse into her life. “The thing about the short clips she’s been posting to TikTok all of these years is that they’re edited clips. She’s not making that for dinner every day. And an educated media consumer is able to make that jump mentally. Nonetheless, it does inject your brain to think, ‘Could I be living that way? Could I be focusing more on making things homemade?’”
Lightning strikes twice
Whatever has been and continues to be said about Neeleman, it seems that no matter what she does, she’s become a lightning rod for commentary, left, center and right. Perhaps Kathryn Jezer-Morton, writing for The Cut, puts it best: “In the midst of polarization and endless cycles of reactionary take-baiting, and despite whatever she writes on her website’s About Us section, Hannah Neeleman is a cipher. This is what keeps us coming back for more.” Until next time.
