A profile on Utah-based influencer and Mrs. American 2023 winner Hannah Neeleman, known online as Ballerina Farm, has taken the internet by storm. The Sunday Times article, published July 20, crowned Neeleman as “the queen of the ‘trad wives.’ ”
A “tradwife” is a woman who follows traditional values: She’s often a homemaker while her husband is the breadwinner.
After a couple of weeks of heated discourse, Neeleman took to Instagram and TikTok on Wednesday to dispute the Sunday Times story, which she said had an agenda.
Advertisement“We were taken aback 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,” Neeleman said in the video to her almost 19 million followers across the two platforms. “This couldn’t be further from the truth. Nothing we said in the interview implied this conclusion, which leads me to believe the angle taken was predetermined.”
In a follow-up article, Sunday Times journalist Megan Agnew — who has also come under scrutiny for the story — wrote that the online debate “further confirmed what was known before: Neeleman, whom people have labelled the queen of the internet ‘trad wives,’ has become an avatar through which people hotly debate motherhood, womanhood and freedom to choose either.”
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Neeleman, a pageant queen and Juilliard-trained dancer, has gained a massive social media following for chronicling her daily life as a homesteader and mother of eight. Whether she’s milking the family cow Tulip, helping her sheep give birth, gutting a turkey for a Thanksgiving meal or baking her signature sourdough bread (and everything else from scratch), she takes followers behind the scenes of life on Ballerina Farm. In addition to the farm chores, Neeleman helps with the marketing and operation of their family store. She’s been documenting her life for almost 10 years.
AdvertisementAccording to the Sunday Times story, Neeleman and Daniel met the summer before her final year at Juilliard. They got married a few months later and decided to immediately start a family. They moved from New York to Rio de Janeiro before settling on a 328-acre ranch in Utah.
Of their eight children, six of them were born at home with no medicine. The only time she had an epidural — which she described as “great” in the article — was when Daniel was not present for the birth of the child.
In the Sunday Times article, the parents say they aren’t done having kids yet, and that they have children based on God’s plans.
AdvertisementAgnew spent four hours at the Neelemans’ Utah home and farm for her piece. While the story was supposed to be a profile on Neeleman, the journalist said her husband, Daniel, seemed to take control of the conversation.
In the original article, Agnew often describes Daniel — son of David Neeleman, founder of JetBlue, Breeze Airways and other airlines — as speaking on Neeleman’s behalf. Agnew calls him “a husband who thinks he knows better.”
“I can’t, it seems, get an answer out of Neeleman without her being corrected, interrupted or answered for by either her husband or a child,” the article reads.
While Neeleman says the farm is both her and Daniel’s dream, the article questions that.
“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,” Agnew wrote. “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.”
At a time in which women’s bodily autonomy is constricted, the ‘cool auntie’ offers a model of glamorous independence — and a counter to the ‘tradwife.’
While the article — and now the internet — has made Neeleman the face of the tradwife movement, Neeleman does not agree with that title.
“I don’t necessarily identify with [the tradwife title] 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,” she told the Sunday Times. “So for me to have the label of a traditional woman, I’m kinda like, I don’t know if I identify with that.”
AdvertisementIn an Instagram video on Wednesday, Neeleman said her husband was portrayed as an oppressor. She insisted that she and her husband act as equals.
“We are co-parents, co-CEOs, co-diaper changers, kitchen cleaners and decision makers,” she said. “We are one.”
“The greatest day of my life is when Daniel and I were married 13 years ago,” she continued. “I love him more today than I did 13 years ago.”
She shared another post on Wednesday, urging her followers to read her story in her own words.
“For longtime followers and those just joining the journey, I wanted to take the opportunity to tell you our story in my own words,” the caption read. “My time before marriage, before kids, before I even dreamt of creating Ballerina Farm.”
The link she shared leads to the about page of Ballerina Farm, a website which also hosts the family’s farm shop.
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Many internet users took the article, and ultimately the family dynamic, as evidence that Neeleman was repressed.
“The Ballerina Farm profile by The [Sunday] Times is so sad,” one user wrote on X. “The way people idolize their trad life content when in reality it’s just a broken, exhausted woman who has no say with a Mormon husband who calls all the shots.”
“Ex ballerina reading that new Ballerina Farms article. I wanted to cry. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting to pursue homemaking and just wanting to take care of your children but my god that man is evil,” another user added.
“I was going to be a ballerina. I was a good ballerina,” Neeleman said in the article, which social media users interpreted as her being forced to abandon her dreams. “But I knew that when I started to have kids my life would start to look different.”
To those social media users, the article’s showcase of traditional values is a step back for the feminist movement.
“The ballerina farm story is so sad [I don’t know] if my [significant other] had a dream and they were almost there to achieve it i would full on support them not have babies [with] them,” one X user wrote.
AdvertisementReaders also expressed concern about a part of the article that read, Neeleman “sometimes gets so ill from exhaustion that she can’t get out of bed for a week.”
Another point of contention online was the couple’s first date. When Neeleman declined Daniel’s advances for six months, he pulled strings at his father’s airline JetBlue to book a seat beside her on a five-hour flight from Salt Lake City to New York.
Readers were also shocked that Daniel moved her pageant gowns to the garage to make room for their children’s clothes in her bedroom closet.
Others, however, see Neelman’s lifestyle as a celebration of a woman’s choice.
“I’m glad Ballerina Farms stood up for her family & her marriage. Just bc you don’t like how someone else lives, doesn’t mean you write a hit piece on them,” a supporter on X wrote. “Who cares if she’s a traditional wife? She is just documenting her life on her farm with her family. Let people live freely!”
Others disagreed with the article’s portrayal of Neeleman as a victim.
“The Ballerina farm lady isn’t a moron. Shes fully capable of making choices and has never been held hostage. She’s fulfilled and joyful,” an X user wrote. “Miserable women can’t stomach that so they create fake narratives.”
Neeleman is one of many popular Mormon influencers, including Nara Smith — a TikTok creator with 9 million followers — who have amassed sizable online followings in recent years.
Advertisement“The way people hate on Ballerina Farm and Nara Smith is so irritating like, if a women CHOOSES the traditional life, cooking and cleaning for their families it’s THEIR choice, people want them to be unhappy soooo bad and it’s weird,” an X user wrote.
After the article’s publication, an old Instagram video Neeleman had posted resurfaced in which she appears disappointed after Daniel gifts her an egg apron (with tiny pockets to collect eggs on the farm) for her birthday, instead of tickets to Greece. Now the couple’s social media accounts are flooded with comments demanding he take Neeleman to Greece. Other comments ask her to blink twice if she needs help.
Kimberly Aguirre was a 2024 Entertainment & Arts intern at the Los Angeles Times. She studies journalism at the University of Southern California, where she is also the editor in chief of the Daily Trojan.
