What are women allowed to want?
On trad wives, the Ballerina Farm controversy, and the hypocrisies of contemporary feminism
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If you’re online much at all, you’ve probably come across the term “trad wife.”
A “trad wife” is a woman who uses her social media platform to showcase herself doing “traditional” female tasks like, say, baking pies or tending to babies or making sourdough or folding freshly washed linens.
Usually, these tasks are performed in a shaft of buttery sunlight at a rustic wooden table, and the trad wife is wearing a peasant blouse or a checkered dress, her hair in a loose french braid down her back, narrating: “Come with me as I mold crayons from the wax I harvested from our beehives, then dye them with turmeric and beet juice.” Smiley folk-pop thrums in the background.
Some of the trad wives stay out of politics and gender discussions entirely, but the most outrageous among them make provocative speeches about obeying their husbands, dressing “feminine,” and other cringey norms straight out of the most horrific episodes of Mad Men (Betty angrily sticking toothpicks in tiny wieners, anyone?)
The very online feminist left responds to this goading with pearl-clutching horror, and immediately starts bull-horning from the rooftops that this is the next stage of right-wing patriarchy coming to herd women back into the kitchen to strain butter. The trad wives kindly smile at the camera and slice peaches.
And the discourse goes round and round, missing pretty much any meaningful conversation about what different women want, what it’s okay to want, what it’s okay to represent, why in fact it’s only okay in contemporary U.S. feminism for women to want and represent certain things.
This all came to a head when a reporter for the Times of London wrote a profile of Hannah Neeleman, who runs the Instagram account Ballerina Farm. Neeleman has nearly ten million followers and regularly posts videos of herself milking cows, making elaborate meals from scratch (think peach biscuit ice cream with the peaches reduced to a syrup, biscuits handmade, ice cream churned in a steel bucket, etc), and tending to her eight children, the youngest of whom was born late last year.
Endless snarky “think pieces” have been written slamming Neeleman already, the majority of which boil down to:
How dare she pretend to be a traditional wife and mother when she actually makes a very good living – and has built a career – performing wifehood and motherhood for her Instagram
How dare she misle women into thinking that this life is beautiful and lovely when actually raising children and doing domestic work is mostly hard and miserable
How dare she perform and glorify stereotypical gender roles in a climate in which women’s rights and advancements are being rolled back daily
She’s privileged (her husband is the son of the founder of Jet Blue) and therefore it’s all bullshit
What most of these pieces have in common is the infantilization of women. They assume that the faceless masses out there scrolling Instagram have no idea that Hannah Neeleman is rich or that it’s a luxury to make peach biscuit ice cream from scratch or that child-rearing is actually often really hard and tedious or that they’re watching a performance. These poor women are so innocent and susceptible that, well, geez, they’re going to want to move to Utah and have a passel of babies and strain their own cheese too! They might get so confused they forget about women’s rights!
These takes all strike a similar note of condescension – even scorn – for the work Neeleman depicts. Making your own food – pathetic. Birthing at home with no epidural – crunchy. Milking cows – silly. No childcare – absurd. Homeschooling –laughable.
The Times piece replicates all of these attitudes. At the start of the interview, Neeleman takes her infant daughter from her husband. The interviewer, who does not have children, notes this. She places this detail strategically at the end of a paragraph, using it as an ominous launching point for the rest of the profile: “[The baby] will not leave Neeleman’s chest for the four hours we’re together.”
Well, yes, this is a breastfed infant. Most infants are held for a great majority of the day! But this is supposed to be a powerful and damning piece of evidence. Put the baby down! Get your priorities straight!
We’re supposed to tsk-tsk like good contemporary feminists that this woman would possibly prioritize and coddle her child in such a way, especially with media present! She shouldn’t have to do this. She doesn’t have to do this. Day care! Formula! It’s all hers for the taking! How dare she?
The writer expresses a similar smugness about screens, grilling the children about why they don’t have a TV.
I notice there’s no TV. “We watch some stuff on the computer,” one of her daughters says. YouTube videos? “No, just Little House on the Prairie.” How about iPads? “No,” another little girl says. “Except we can play ring-a-ring-o’-roses and jump on the tramp and play lacrosse and that’s everything.” How about phones? “No,” says eight-year-old George, one of the older kids. “Sometimes if we go with our cousins and we play [on a phone], then we’re, like, addicted to ’em.”
This is not framed as a laudable achievement in a society in which children’s attention is increasingly colonized by glorified advertising from Big Tech, a society in which many adults are struggling to reclaim their lives from the misery of screens. It’s meant to be seen as pathetic. Crunchy. Woo. Insulting. Superior. Holier-than. Ridiculous. Who does she think she is?
The writer seems to see children only as distractions, irritations, like the baby on her mother’s chest for hours. The writer appears to be annoyed by the children and their noise, by the fact that she must talk with and over them. In one paragraph she writes,
“Finally we get back into the kitchen, sitting at the table surrounded by an ever-changing number of children. One is clattering a can opener next to my tape recorder, another is pulling a whole roast chicken from the Aga, three more gather around it with forks, eating it from the pan. Another spills a pail of milk over the floor. We have half an hour to talk before Neeleman has to take some of them to a ballet class.”
The children are nameless, faceless, “ever-changing,” like dogs. The stove, a familiar object of critique and disdain in discourse about Neeleman (it costs $30,000) is noted by name, but the children are not.
The writer doesn’t ask them about their school, their interests, their life, she doesn’t see them in the way a strategic reporter could, as sources of deeper insight into her subject. They are nuisances, spilling milk, “clattering” next to her tape recorder.
Neeleman doesn’t hew to many contemporary feminist orthodoxies. The writer spends most of her article highlighting this with more or less sensational framing. Unlike a true journalistic profile, which attempts to critically explore the complexities of its subject, asking difficult questions that challenge both the writer and reader’s assumptions and upend familiar ideas, this piece has a firmly established ideological line from which it does not stray for a second.
The writer asks Neeleman if she’s a feminist and Neeleman begins to say yes, then questions what this means.
“I feel like I’m a femin-,” she stops herself. “There’s so many different ways you could take that word. I don’t even know what feminism means any more.”
As a journalist, this should be a charged moment, wrought with compelling tension. Why does Neeleman start to say the word, then stop? The writer could ask: What did it used to mean to you? What does it now? Why? How did having children change this? How did farming? How did rural versus urban life? So many ways to use this as an opportunity to delve and deepen.
But the writer has zero curiosity. She doesn’t follow up. The point here is not alternative views. It’s not to get us to think, to nudge any of our givens and expectations. It’s judgement and outrage.
She quickly moves on to point out that Neeleman doesn’t support elective abortions and she doesn’t use birth control. The writer does not ask a single question about what’s informed these beliefs or changed them over time. They are simply litmus tests, and Neeleman fails, and we are meant to groan and roll our eyes at the horror of it. There is only one angle and one appropriate reaction. This is now passing as journalism.
The most damning litmus test, the one we are meant to read as true tragedy, is Neeleman’s attitude toward her former career. Neeleman studied ballet at Juilliard. She was living in New York City when she met her husband. She could have been, the piece suggests, a successful professional ballerina. But she gave it up. Neeleman tells the writer the sacrifice was worth it.
But this writer, who is visiting rural Utah from London and has her own professional career and no children, does not believe her, and makes this known: “I look out at the vastness,” she writes, “and don’t totally agree.” She decides, without asking Neeleman herself, who is right in front of her, that Neeleman’s husband has made all the decisions for her.
She opts to strike an elegiac note about Neeleman’s career, concluding a paragraph with the mournful observation that Neeleman’s ballet studio ended up becoming the children’s schoolroom. She observes that Neeleman was “the first Juilliard undergraduate to be expecting ‘in modern history’” – a statement that sounds uncannily like an elder male academic shaming his young mentee for throwing away her career.
Many women have gone to New York City at age seventeen hungry for success, fame, and adventure. So many of them have left that “Goodbye to all that” is now its own literary genre and cliche. Could it be, perhaps, that something about life in New York becomes toxic and oppressive and much less attractive once one isn’t twenty-two years old?
But the writer of the Times piece can only see Neeleman’s departure as a regretful capitulation, a life lived in the shadow of what could have been greatness. Ironically, the same leftists who relentlessly critique capitalism – critiques I largely agree with –see it as a tragedy that a woman might choose to give up her career.
An article in The Mary Sue lauding the Times piece declared that Neeleman had been hoodwinked by her husband into leaving ballet and having multiple children, concluding, in what is meant to come across as a cataclysm: “She gave up an entire life.”
In her dramatic earnestness, this writer cannot imagine not only that Neeleman might have actually chosen her current life, but also that the life she chose could be just as worthwhile as the one she gave up. How could children possibly hold a candle to Juilliard?
Feminists rightly bemoan the lack of functional workplace policies and paid parental leave and quality childcare and any real social or cultural recognition of the work of motherhood, and increasingly, many recognize the crushing weight and diminishing returns of defining oneself by one’s accomplishments. Yet women who step aside from or opt out of their careers to raise their children are rarely celebrated and are often criticized for making an “anti-feminist” choice.
Elite ballet is likely a culture riven with all of the worst and most damaging capitalist values, and if Neeleman had pursued it and then dropped out and written an expose about its white supremacy, diet culture, and achievement pressure, she’d likely be a hero – but giving it up to move to a farm and have kids? Quelle horror.
The problem, particularly for those feminists stridently arguing against “choice feminism,” is that sometimes what women want – to stay home with a baby, to give up their career for a stretch to be with their children, to savor domestic life – is also what patriarchy wants women to want. So the feminist answer has been a stark and simple one: stop wanting it. Your wanting it forces us all to want it.
Feminism’s failure to reckon with that difficulty and paradox is why a number of very online women responded to my recent New York Times article with rage. They all misread the piece in the exact same way, seeing it not as a call for balance – in a culture that so heavily values historically male, white, capitalist achievement over care, valuing the latter can actually be a radical act – but as a demand to “send women back to the kitchen,” as one Guardian writer immediately declared I was doing.
One of the critics, Jill Filipovic, went on a Twitter rant claiming “How dare women want to achieve highly or see their creative works recognized even in a capitalist system, when what they should do instead is... marry men with jobs that pay well enough to support them, then make their lives small!” Never mind that my essay never advocated for women to marry, much less be supported by men, but rather for our society – including its literature – to consider what kinds of work and lives it values.
Filipovic proceeded to write an entire Substack rant about why ambition is good, as if ambition in American culture (see: the Olympics! See: Simone Biles and all of her suffering and the narratives around her!) needed more defending. Thank goodness someone spoke up for ambition!
Filipovic is, unsurprisingly, child free, and has also written posts debating whether it’s okay to dislike children and arguing that instead of criticizing leftists who openly say they hate children, the left should be fighting – you guessed it – conservatives.
It is disconcerting how radically having children can change a woman’s life. How much it can rattle the perfect ideological framing of contemporary feminism. How complex it is, how much it can recast a woman’s definitions of herself, how much it reveals about how little our society actually values fundamental and life-giving practices: tending to and protecting the earth, growing and eating nourishing food, caring for children and animals and other human beings, building community.
It is easy to be rational and political and ideologically impeccable when one spends all day and night writing on the Internet. It is another thing entirely in the middle of the night, with a warm body in your arms, wondering what you’re doing with your life. What it will all amount to in thirty years, and how you will measure up as a human being?
Love, care exist both within and beyond those tired political frameworks, but many refuse to see the beyond. They cling to the same old rhetoric, the same old polarities. This piece was a shining example.
The writer asks nothing about homeschool, about Neeleman’s relationship with animals and nature, about farm life, family dynamics, Neelaman’s experience of motherhood and parenting, her work-life balance, her transformations from her early life into motherhood, her relationship to domestic work like cooking – because the piece isn’t about that. It’s not actually about Neeleman.
It’s not actually about women and their complex choices. It’s about what they’re not allowed to do and say.
It’s about proving this woman is not one of us and scolding her and then watching a certain very online feminist contingent rise up to scold her again, accusing her of being brainwashed and in denial about her own “abuse” and of holding all women “back.”
After the publication of the article, Neeleman made a very rare public statement about how it misrepresented her and her family.
In this response, Neeleman says, “A couple of weeks ago, we had a reporter come into our home, to learn more about our family and business. We thought the interview went really well, very similar to the dozens of interviews we had done in recent memory. We were taken back however when we saw the printed article, which shocked us, and shocked the world, by being an attack on our family, and my marriage, portraying me as oppressed, with my husband being the culprit. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Nothing we said in the interview implied this conclusion, which leads me to conclude the angle taken was predetermined.”
One of the biggest feminist slogans of the past decade has been, “Trust women.” When we heard Christine Blasey Ford testify. When we heard the story of Chanel Miller and Brock Turner. I did trust women. I do trust women. But what I’ve seen in this Ballerina Farm discourse is that there is a very strong and disturbing liberal feminist tendency to only trust women who express the right kind of feminist views – who do not challenge ideological orthodoxy at all.
When Hannah Neeleman insisted she was not, actually, being oppressed, feminists did not trust her. On Twitter, the overwhelming response on the left was a mixture of scorn and pity: sure, sure, you really chose your Utah farm life with eight kids and no childcare, poor thing who was manipulated and abused and oppressed by your terrible husband into this traditional existence! This sounds a lot like another phenomenon leftist feminists are usually quite quick to criticize: gaslighting.
Do we actually trust women? Or only the right kind of women?
For a long time, the ideals of U.S. feminism have been for women to achieve what “successful” white men have achieved under capitalism. Motherhood could only be a hindrance, a distraction, a weight.
As feminists rightfully rebelled against depictions of the ideal woman as a mother, the right doubled down on them. And as our society has only become more maniacal about ideology and feverish about a complete and total negation of any shared truths between left and right, it has become unacceptable on the left to acknowledge motherhood and domestic life as experiences of beauty and significance, experiences women might choose to embrace and elevate.
But as ideological excess tends to do, this has had the result of alienating many women, to the point where some find themselves drawn to reactionary politics. Hence the triumphant rise of the “trad wife,” a way for women to claim power within a sphere where they have long been denied it – the home.
If feminists don’t find ways to honor and celebrate care and work in the home as well as the public sphere, and continue to mock, gaslight, and humiliate women who do seek meaning there, then they shouldn’t be surprised when women struggle to align themselves with the feminist movement.
This is not a rejection of feminism. I am immensely grateful for all that my U.S. feminist forebears have fought for, from the right to vote and control my own finances, to the right to safe abortion and divorce, to the expectation that I have a place and a voice in the university and the media and the Supreme Court. I have been raised with the feminist consciousness that I do not have to maintain a home, to support my husband’s career and sacrifice my own, to have babies because it’s simply what women do, to make myself beautiful and demure according to men’s tastes.
But I’ve also been raised with a confusion about what in fact it means to celebrate my motherhood, and my womanhood, in a patriarchal society that has so appropriated those realms that they’ve become synonymous with weakness. I’ve been raised to think – and been told, as an adult artist and writer – that I should stay as far away from motherhood and domestic life as possible if I want to be taken seriously.
So I ask: how can feminism reconcile this? How do we move forward?
My daughter went through a phase a few years ago when she became obsessed with birth. All she wanted to do was watch birth videos. And so we would spend hours during the pandemic watching crazy free births on YouTube, each time gobsmacked by the wonder and awe of it, even through a computer screen thousands of miles away. We marveled at the primacy of women’s power.
Women are so strong, I told her. They are so fierce. I told her the same thing when we watched the Olympic sprinters, their faces grimacing as they strained their whole bodies across the finish line.
My daughter loves caring for baby dolls, and she loves intense athletic activity, running so hard she collapses with effort.
I wonder how to keep both loves alive in her as she becomes a woman.
Sarah, I really appreciate your take on this debate and I think you have put into words a lot of the ideas that I've been grappling with for a while. It has been really hard for me personally as a highly educated liberal woman to come to terms with my own life /choice to be a homemaker at this stage of my life. Instead of embracing it and enjoying it, I feel wracked with judgement and guilt for not doing something "more" with my life/education/intellect.
Totally agree that there is a connotation of weakness and lack of seriousness associated with femininity, child rearing, “domestic tasks.” And I think it’s very fair to point out that this is an unfair element in the (very big!!) reaction to BF Times article. It’s been refreshing to see some books (recently, Boymom and When You Care— and would count Ordinary Insanity among these too ☺️) tackle these topics that the left has abandoned/avoided.
A pain point for me with BF - in a time when JD Vance and his ilk - is that it glamorizes a lifestyle and type of family that the right weaponizes on the country as a whole. Does BF have a responsibility to grapple with that? My definition of feminism- which includes an expansive care for others, particularly the marginalized, that looks out for more than your right to individual choice- would say yes.