Ballerina Farm and the weird Christian Nationalist dream
What can Mormonism, Project 2025, and a hit trad wife brand teach us about sacrifice and women?
Welcome new readers! You can subscribe for free below. For the full experience, including the full archive, weekly chats, and book club content, get a paid subscription at a limited-time summer discount price. Thank you for being here!
As you’ve no doubt heard by now, the Sunday Times finally sent a reporter with a POV to cover America’s leading trad wife, Hannah Neeleman, and in her now viral profile, writer Megan Agnew portrays a less-than-glamorous day in the life of the social media star behind the Ballerina Farm “trad wife” brand with 10 million followers, and 20 million across platforms.
In the profile, we see an “exhausted” Hannah Neeleman, beset by children to the point that she can’t hold a conversation, not even with the Times. We see a woman that confesses that she secretly wishes for epidurals when her husband isn’t there, who entered pageants as a way to escape domestic overwhelm and drudgery.
“Hannah sometimes spends a week in bed from exhaustion,” her husband casually drops in the interview, perhaps unintentionally pulling back the curtain on what it’s like to be “Queen of the Trad Wives” with one swoop.
The now-viral profile has set off a media firestorm questioning whether Neeleman is “a victim of both a controlling husband and a lucrative brand that thrives on her submission to his ideals,” as Kady Ruth Ashcroft put it in Jezebel.
“A peak behind the Ballerina Farm facade is bleak as hell,” she wrote, summing up what a lot of the internet concluded. Reading the profile, there are moments where you want the reporter to tell Hannah to blink twice if she needs help.
Several days ago, Hannah Neeleman posted a response to the profile and internet furor in which she stands by her man (“The day I married him was the best day of my life"). In a voiceover montage performing traditional femininity with on a very big budget (making painstaking home cooked meals, staying fit in what appears to be a barn converted gorgeously into a gym), she responds in a manner that’s sure to please her fans and not sway any of her critics.
Of course, none of us will ever know what it’s like inside the Neeleman relationship exactly, and it’s not really anyone’s business. As Kathryn Jezer-Morton wrote for The Cut, that’s part of what makes momfluencers so captivating: “They seek to contain the concept of ‘home’ which we all know is absolutely uncontainable.”
But I’m not interested in one couple’s private life or judging their lifestyle choices. To each their own. What I am curious about is the powerful brand they have created for their enormous audience, and what it reflects back to us about gender roles and the very weird times that we are living through.
At a time when one of our major political parties is basing their platform on stripping women’s rights, the fact that one of the most popular brands on social media (BF now has half the following of Oprah) and features a Mormon white woman with eight children in the role of a stay-at-home pioneer homesteader strikes me as…significant.
In these times of J.D. “women belong at home having babies” Vance, what does it mean that America can’t get enough of a rich, beautiful young woman who sacrificed her ballet career to live on a farm where she’s perpetually in the kitchen and pregnant?
Maybe it’s because I was also raised Mormon, but it seems to me that a brand featuring a Mormon woman churning butter and breastfeeding and homeschooling her children for 10 million viewers is not NOT connected to female subordination and Christian patriarchy.
//
I don’t know Daniel and Hannah, but I crossed paths with them years ago when we were all newlyweds in the same Mormon church congregation in Manhattan.
They were treated as a kind of Mormon royalty—or rather, Daniel was. Hannah was mere arm candy at that time. Mormons, like all subcultures, love their rich and famous—the Romneys, the Huntsmans, the Marriotts, that guy from the band The Killers. “He’s the Jet Blue guy’s son,” young men whispered about Daniel as they breathlessly fluttered around him at church.
At the time, I was in grad school at Columbia, and Hannah was at Juilliard. Within a few years I was leaving the church and leaving my marriage, and Hannah—well, she was on her way to becoming Queen of the Trad Wives.
I didn’t think about her again until 2020 when her name came up in a group chat with a bunch of girlfriends who are also New York former-Mormons. A friend sent a link to Ballerina Farm which was just beginning to blow up, and there was Hannah in all her cow-milking glory—transformed from her city-girl ballerina days.
This was not the typical Mormon influencer vibe. This appeared to be the country mouse answer to the typical influencer’s luxury life: all cows and kids. I was perplexed. How did the pretty young woman who married an airline heir in New York City end up working a farm with eight kids clad in denim and cowboy hats (almost no one in Utah wears cowboy hats, btw). What the hell is this? I texted back.
It’s like they are millionaires cosplaying farmers for followers, a friend said, a sentiment that many critics have repeated. But I was getting something else, something closer to home.
It feels like cosplaying Utah polygamist wife circa 1880, I wrote. The churning butter and the eight kids and the linen dresses and uncut polygamist hair of it all.
Many Mormon influencers have come through New York City, and in this way Ballerina Farm was not new. Amber Fillerup Clark, another preternaturally pretty blonde who married young and became a social media mogul, took a turn through our Manhattan congregation around the same time. There was Natalie Jean Holbrook-Lovin in Brooklyn (aka “Nat the Fat Rat”), and Naomi Davis of “Love Taza” who achieved Mormon blogger fame documenting her city life on the Upper West Side with her five kids.
This post is public, I’d love for you to share it. If you aren’t a subscriber yet, sign up for a free or paid subscription!
All of these women built brands of domesticity, but in the city, trading on the city’s cachet of cosmopolitan sophistication as a counterbalance to their Mormon domestic bliss.
Not Ballerina Farm. It was something entirely different. It leaned into the dusty backwater Utah big-family-ness, and yet it didn’t explicitly mention Mormonism. It almost seemed to conceal it.
And the followers and comments were not giving Mormon vibes, either. At the time I was doing a profile of Rachel Parcell, another early Mormon breakout blogger who, like many others, got an early follower boost from the Mormon network. But the comments from followers on Ballerina Farm were not Mormon-coded. Instead, there were Bible verse quotes and Jesus references; a lot of “women in Christ” speak—and that’s not Mormon.
Why are there so many evangelicals on here? I wrote in my group chat. This feels weird.
While other successful Mormon influencers pursued images of sophistication and girl-boss feminism, Ballerina Farm tapped into something else, and it would make the brand ascendant. Today the Ballerina Farm brand has follower counts that blow away those other Mormon influencers—even Fillerup-Clark, who has her own hair care brand at Sephora, has one-tenth of the followers of Ballerina Farm.
Simply put: Ballerina Farm collided with the rise of conservative Christian Nationalism, and a trad wife star was born.
When the Times profile came out, the incomparable
, chronicler of all things Ballerina Farm, asked me to comment for her piece on it (highly recommend). I told her about this:I think what Hannah/Ballerina Farm did really well that made their account so successful was tapping into this belief that was just cresting from MAGA evangelicals and Christian Nationalism that women who submit to their husbands is what's best for everyone and should be reflected in our government. So the Ballerina Farm brand seems to downplay the Mormon part, because evangelicals don't really love Mormons typically and don't consider them real "Christians." But the benevolent patriarchy and sacrifice of a beautiful and talented young woman to the point where she agrees to live an isolated and relatively austere life on a farm alone with her husband--that lands.
It was clear to me from early on that Ballerina Farm was blowing up because of the rise of Christian Nationalism, which relies on notions of “traditional” gender roles where a woman’s place is in the home having kids and cooking and cleaning and submitting to a husband as Jesus intended.
Now, it’s undeniable that the inverse is also true: Christian Nationalism relies on wildly popular and beautifully-shot depictions of female subordination—broods of blonde children, painstaking and time-consuming home cooked meals, beauty queens perpetually pregnant and in the kitchen—to sustain itself and flourish. And that’s what Trad Wife brands give them.
If you don’t believe me, ask extremist right-wing group and MAGA fundraiser Turning Point USA:
THE BEST SOCIAL MEDIA PAGE IN EXISTENCE! -Says well-known anti-vax right-wing extremist group and billionaire-funded MAGA fundraiser.
I’m not saying that the Ballerina Farm brand set out to be patriarchal right-wing Christian propaganda, but it certainly has been co-opted as such. And Ballerina Farm’s affinity to that community has led to much of its success.
When Hannah Neeleman will neither confirm or deny whether she’s a “trad wife,” and hedges when asked directly about her views on gender roles (“I’m not sure what the word feminist even means anymore,”) she’s dodging anything that might alienate her audience. She’s not going to say she’s a feminist, and she’s not going to say that she’s not a trad wife who believes in submitting to her husband, either.
Daniel meanwhile is more outspoken, he comes out against abortion as “a bad choice” in the profile, and makes anti-divorce comments in a follow-up piece from the Times while making his own views on gender roles clear:
“He expected his wife to stay at home with the children,” writes Agnew. He was a “firm believer” that men “make stuff work” and women “beautify.”
//
When reached out to me for comment in her piece, she asked about Mormonism and religious patriarchy as it relates to trad wife trends.
“What does this profile illustrate about patriarchal religions and why does the immense popularity of such a traditional family (in terms of power and gender roles) matter?” she asked.
There is something distinctly Mormon about the brand, even though Mormonism is downplayed in the content. Ballerina Farm captures a frontier Mormon dream. Not many beautiful and rich young women want to move to an isolated life on a farm in the middle of nowhere with a brood of children, but some men certainly have that fantasy.
The Ballerina Farm brand portrays a very masculine American frontier fantasy. It signals old-school patriarchal Mormon homestead, and it’s also Little House on the Prairie, spaghetti western landscapes, Louis L’Amour novels, and Manifest Destiny. It harkens back to a time when American patriarchal masculinity was at its most secure and mythic and celebrated.
In the profile, Agnew asks Hannah if an idyllic farm life of living off the land with an ever-expanding brood of children was her dream.
“No,” she [Neeleman] 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.”
Agnew asks about how the farm came to be, and Hannah Neeleman describes the “sacrifices” that she and her husband made: “Our first few years of marriage were really hard, we sacrificed a lot,” she says. “I gave up dance, which was hard. You give up a piece of yourself. And Daniel gave up his career ambitions.”
And yet, Agnew is not so sure about this “mutual sacrifice.”
“I look out at the vastness and don’t totally agree,” writes Agnew. “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.”
That’s part of the appeal of what
and have called the “Edenic allure” of Ballerina Farm. The American frontier fantasy is not a woman’s dream, per se, it’s a man’s dream that requires a woman’s sacrifice. And the Ballerina Farm brand successfully markets and glorifies that sacrifice in various ways. Eden was idyllic, but it turns out it wasn’t a great place for free-thinking women, after all.
By the way, I keep thinking about this famous painting used to promote the frontier belief of “Manifest Destiny”—the notion that it was God’s will that white people should take dominion over all of North America to promote Christianity and capitalism. One of my favorite history professors loved to point out that it was curious that Manifest Destiny was portrayed not as a conquering army, but as an angelic and innocent, even “virginal” white woman. It definitely seems that she was onto something there.
//
Is it consequential that the so-called “Queen of the Trad Wives” is Mormon?
Does it matter that a brand built on glamorizing various forms of female sacrifice—foregoing a career and dreams to have eight children starting at age 20, un-medicated childbirth, giving up birth control, minimal childcare, milking cows, making toast over an open flame using cooking tools that look like props from Little House on the Prairie— is created by Mormons?
It almost certainly does, considering Mormonism’s unique patriarchy and attitudes toward gender roles. To explain these connections is a lot, honestly. Because in order to do that, I would have to explain to you a lifetime of conditioning in a patriarchal subculture. It makes me tired to think about it, tbh!
I think the best way to make the connection is to go straight to the thing that makes Mormon patriarchy special within the wide world of patriarchy: the part where the founder of Mormonism in the year of our lord 1843, did something that nobody asked for, and brought back the ancient *literal Old Testament concept* of making women submit to polygamy. In America. In modern times.
Whatever else you want to say about Mormonism, and some of my favorite people are Mormons, its founders were certifiably awful in their treatment of women. There’s no getting around that when you put down the facts of the matter. Joseph Smith used “plural marriage” or polygamy as a cover to coerce dozens of women into relationships with him. Some of these were clear examples of abuse, including a girl as young as 14 years old.
She later said: “I would never have been sealed to Joseph had I known it was anything more than ceremony. I was young, and they deceived me, by saying the salvation of our whole family depended on it.” 1
Brigham Young, who the church’s flagship university is named after (Brigham Young University) succeeded Smith and took it to the next level. While Smith tried (and failed) to keep his side girls and predation on the DL, Young wasn’t even trying to hide anything.
Young moved his followers outside of the boundaries of the U.S. into Mexico Territory (present day Utah) where he built a mansion with 20 gables with 20 small rooms where he lived with dozens of women and girls he also called “wives” (it’s amazing the way that merely naming a relationship a “marriage,” no matter how bizarre the relationship is, provides cover for abuse.) Young lived there as a frontier emperor-prophet.
Here’s an image that I think about a lot, that begins to capture the specific weirdness of Mormon patriarchy: Young’s mansion, called the Lion House, remains in the middle of Salt Lake City as a historical landmark. It’s so normalized that to this day that you can visit and have lunch there in the Lion House Pantry restaurant (the rolls are famous!) which has a 4.5 on Yelp reviews—I’m not making this up.
The Lion House mansion was also a very popular venue for birthday parties for little girls. I went to several—just blowing out birthday candles for Sage Smith circa 1986 underneath the sleeping quarters of dozens of polygamist captives wives! TOTALLY normal.
I went on a school field trip to the Lion House as a kid, and we peered into the tiny dorms where the women and girls slept. In no way was the site, or what it contained, examined for its problematic history (and it still isn’t to this day.) Let that sink in for a minute, and imagine the effect that has on the psyche of Mormon boys and girls, and you start to get an idea of the effect of Mormon patriarchal conditioning.
Consider that Mormon boys are absorbing lessons that god’s chosen #1 guy and a venerated role model is someone who moved to the desert and created a harem right out in the open. He had total control and power. In my Mormon upbringing, it was never questioned whether it was ethical to control women and make them submit in this way; and in that silence it was almost as though Brigham Young’s ability to do that is part of what made him powerful. Like his ability to make women submit, even in weird ways, didn’t make him creepy, but were a sign of his righteousness.
And what lessons are kids absorbing about women?
When early Mormon leaders forced women to submit to polygamy, they attached extreme sacrifice to the roles of women’s marriage and motherhood. Mormon patriarchy required that women go far beyond the usual burdens of Victorian marriage ideals to sacrifice societal norms, to sacrifice sexual satisfaction, love, partnership, equality, and any basic sense of self-respect and fairness.
Polygamy required a betrayal of the self for women, a sacrifice of the self. Submitting to extreme sacrifice was what made Mormon women righteous.
The Mormon church officially ended polygamy in 1890 (not of its own free will but because the U.S. government sent troops and threatened war over it). But here’s the thing: polygamy is still essentially part of the doctrine because men can be “sealed” or Mormon married to more than one woman if they get divorced and re-marry, or if they are widowed. (Fun fact! My ex-husband is technically a polygamist “married” to two women—me, who he is still “sealed” to in Mormon records, and his current second wife.)2 It’s taught that polygamy will be practiced in the next life in this way, and that men will possibly have the chance to partner with additional women who were never married.
Thus, the spectre of extreme sacrifice for Mormon girls and women is ever-present, always hanging over their heads, ready to follow them into the next life. Mormon women can have eternal life and be with their families forever! (Reads fine print: **If they submit to god’s will that they may be subject to eternal misery, while it’s also god’s will that men are essentially kings).
This is not to say that all Mormon women feel oppressed, or are unhappy. Some of my favorite people are Mormon women and I certainly believe they can live fulfilling lives. But the conditioning and the system of benevolent patriarchy is 100% oppressive and gendered. (As I’ve written here, there’s no equality between the genders in the structure of the Mormon church, where only men are given decision-making authority.)
When Hannah Neeleman says that she doesn’t feel oppressed, that can be true, while it’s also true that she was conditioned by and lives in a religious system that requires women’s subordination, sometimes to the extreme.
And as I wrote about recently, many Mormon women do feel oppressed, as evidenced in a recent social media firestorm when the church tried to claim on its social media accounts that it treats women better than any other church—and tens of thousands of Mormon women came pouring onto social media to disagree, collectively saying ahem, WTF, come again, you have to be kidding.
And this is what’s tricky about patriarchy and the trad wife content that seems to represent it: patriarchy claims that it’s not only not oppressive, but that its requirements of extreme and bizarre female sacrifice are best for everyone. Indeed, it claims that extreme and bizarre female sacrifice is best for women.
And trad wife content, with all its idyllic scenes and soft lighting, makes it appear as though that just might be true.
//
And this brings us to the current Republican party platform, which has become a kind of Christo-fascist patriarchal manifesto based on…what else? Extreme female sacrifice.
To a level that should strike us as profoundly bizarre.
This is stuff that just, to use the parlance of the moment, gets weird. It gets weird in a way that’s Brigham-Young’s-Lion-House-Mansion-with-20-Gables-for-20-Girls-level weird.
Forcing women and children to give birth, whether or not they want children, is weird AF.
J.D. Vance saying that children as young as 12 having to give birth in cases of rape and incest is “inconvenient” is weird AF.
Ending no-fault divorce and trapping women and children with abusers is weird.
Cutting off funding for affordable birth control and replacing it with messages to “get married” is weird.
Banning life-saving interventions and condemning women and children to sacrifice their lives in pregnancy and childbirth is freaking weird.
Making IVF illegal “because women shouldn’t delay getting pregnant” is freaking weird.
Making homophobia legal in the workplace and banning medical services to transgender people is freaking weird.
The list goes on and on. And the truth is, the right’s radical agenda is bad for men too: cutting off birth control is an anti-sex agenda. Forcing men to pay for children that they don’t want or can’t afford is an anti-men agenda.
All of this and more is documented in Project 2025, the Republican playbook. You can read the full text but it’s 900 pages long; I suggest breakdowns like this one by
and this one by and this that’s specifically on reproductive rights by . Like Brigham Young, these guys are not even hiding this stuff. It’s right out in the open.What Mormonism, tradwife content and Republican politics have in common is normalizing the extreme sacrifice of women (and anyone, really, who is not a rich, straight white guy). There’s a common thread of normalization of women’s isolation, dependence on men, and extreme sacrifice of the female self and body, even into death or erasure, that should strike us as profoundly bizarre.
One of the strange things about being raised in Mormonism and leaving it is that it gives you such a glaring insight into how degrading and dehumanizing patriarchy can be when it requires extreme sacrifice from marginalized groups, and how easily it is used to control people using that patriarchy, even when it doesn’t benefit them.
But that’s not the weirdest part. The weirdest part is that when you leave Mormonism you think you have left all that behind, but then you see how the same thing is happening everywhere. You see how extreme sacrifice from women and girls is a normalized and inescapable part of American culture: from images of women dressed as pioneers serving men and children while perpetually pregnant as a form of popular mass entertainment, to American Presidents who are convicted rapists.
It’s so weird that it’s disorienting, actually. Like an Inception-style dream, where you think you woke up and it’s over. But no matter what you try, or where you go, it’s still 1847 and you’re still in Utah.
We are running a limited-time summer discount on annual subscriptions for $39 (that’s only $3.25 a month!) for a few more weeks. Paid subscribers get access to weekly subscriber chats, the full archive, and full access to our Summer Book Club reading “All Fours” by Miranda July.
If you loved this article or love what you see here on MR, please share it with a friend and give us a like.
Special thanks to my group chat friends, especially Ashley and Shauna, for helping me unpack some of the ideas in this piece and giving it language.
Special thanks to my partner, C, for editing and encouraging and doing childcare so I could get it done.
MATRIARCHY REPORT is written by Lane Anderson and Allison Lichter.
Lane Anderson is a writer, journalist, and Clinical Associate Professor at NYU who has won fellowships and many SPJ awards for her writing on inequality and family social issues. She has an MFA from Columbia University. She was raised in Utah and lives in New York City with her partner and young daughter.
Allison Lichter is associate dean at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. She has been a writer, producer and editor for radio and print, covering the arts, politics, and the workplace. She was born and raised in Queens, and lives in Brooklyn with her partner and daughter.
https://archive.org/details/CatherineLewisNarrative
But also, it means that I’m also a polygamist baller because I’m married to two dudes—my first husband and current one. How do you like them apples, Brigham Young?!
Lane, you nailed this so perfectly — the way everyone in a patriarchal system is taught to be believe that patriarchy is best for everyone:
“And this is what’s tricky about patriarchy and the trad wife content that seems to represent it: patriarchy claims that it’s not only not oppressive, but that’s its requirements of extreme and bizarre female sacrifice are best for everyone. Indeed, it claims that extreme and bizarre female sacrifice is best for women.”
I didn’t know much about the Ballerina Farm until I started reading your work on it. And I can’t pretend to know what’s in her mind. But in her case it must have been simply easier to just submit to the power of patriarchy (and the money and status she’s accumulated) than pursuing, say, the incredibly challenging dream of becoming a ballerina in New York City. Unless I missed this, they aren’t taking a of poverty out there. The whole thing is this incredible aspirational fiction that excludes the reality of poverty, racism and aging. (What’s their healthcare situation anyway?) As my husband just reminded me, courtesy of Margaret Atwood: “Better” never means better for everyone. It always means worse for some.
I LOVE THIS SO MUCH!!!!!!!
Unrelated thought, “Daniel gave up his career ambitions”… when? What does that mean? When he was sent to South America to run a business for Dadu JetBlue? Did Daddy JetBlue require this in order to receive continued financial support? Is “Succession” playing out quietly behind the scenes for the JetBlue kids? How much autonomy do *they* have and still receive financial support and how does that translate to how spouses (and eventually kids!) are treated? Assuming Dad helped purchase Ballerina Farm, what kind of ROI does he demand? I want someone to give Daniel the attention he craves and ask him straight questions until he no longer give straight answers 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🙃🙃🙃