The Unlikely Rise of Mormon Mom Culture
And the marketing of motherhood
I live in New York City, a place where moms are 40+, where only children abound, and where it seems babies are made in a doctor’s office with IVF just as often as not.
That’s the world that I live in, but it’s not where I’m from. If you’re newish here, you might not know that I was raised Mormon, in Salt Lake City, and I often write about patriarchy through the lens of Mormonism. I grew up in a majority-Mormon neighborhood surrounded by big families, driving big Chevy Suburbans, and making very big Costco runs. All of my early ideas about family and motherhood were shaped in this community, one that famously emphasizes big families and traditional gender roles.
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If you had told me when I was younger that Mormon moms would become a pop culture phenomenon, I would have laughed out loud and spit out my Diet Coke. And yet, here we are: some of the biggest social media influencers of our time are Mormon moms, and perhaps stranger yet, their brands are largely built on being Mormons and moms.
Sara and have talked before about the branding of Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm, the megafamous influencer who married a Jet Blue heir and became “queen of the tradwives.” She’s Mormon, has eight kids, and has raised eyebrows by appearing on the cover of the political alt-right Evie magazine, funded by pronatalist tech bro Peter Thiel.
This time, Sara had questions about her sister, Micka Wright Perry. Perry is 46, the mother of ten children, and pregnant with #11, and she has built a following of her own with her penchant for beauty pageants, which she shares with her sister. She showcases her big family and faith-based lifestyle. As Sara noted: “her entire feed is centered around the unsubtle message that motherhood is a woman’s most important and fulfilling endeavor, and is always soft, always gentle, and always unabashedly feminine.”
What does all this mean, she wondered, amidst a bizarre, tech-bro based pronatalism movement led by a woman who “would be happy to die in childbirth,” and claims from the White House that they want to “persuade” women into having more babies. Is Ballerina Farm’s sister performing as a pronatalist dream girl or is this authentic; when is a “tradwife” just a stay-at-home mom?
And why would anyone want to have 11 kids?
Sara: I recently wrote about Micka Wright Perry (sister of Hannah Neeleman, of Ballerina Farm megafame), and I still have so many questions for someone more familiar with the world she inhabits! How is her "motherhood is the best thing ever" messaging (combined with such an overt emphasis on traditional femininity - dressing up her little girls in fantasy gowns, etc etc) is typical of Mormon culture? If it is? She REALLY underscores the "motherhood is a Mormon woman's [and any woman's] most beautiful endeavor" stuff, you know?
Lane: I think Micka is an interesting example of how the conversation around pronatalism and “tradwives” can get tricky and muddled, and alienating for some women. This might sound bananas, but I actually find Micka’s content more relatable and, in a way, appealing, than her sister’s. Ballerina Farm to me looks immediately fake—beautiful, but staged and unattainable in the same way that, like, Katie Perry going to space in full makeup is staged and unattainable.
There’s also something about the farm aspect that reminds me of the weird isolation of what I imagine my polygamous Mormon great-great-great-great grandmothers lived through (but they were poor farmers, not rich ones!). But Micka’s life actually feels real—she’s a mom in the ‘burbs with a relatively basic-looking house and yard who is shooting her own stuff on her iPhone. Her husband is a dentist, not a billionaire. There’s no churning butter here, or egg aprons, or publicity team, or inherited millions.
I would be remiss to not point out that there IS bee content on Micka’s page!
Ha! But beekeeping also feels much more attainable and relatable than celeb tradwife content. I know women who have bees (in Brooklyn!), I know zero women who married a billionaire and bought a ranch and became internet megafamous.
Very true!
I know women who are not quite like Micka but a step or two away—some of the women that I went to high school with are not that different, and I’m still friends with some of them. They have 4-5 kids, not 10 or 11. And they are not pageant queens. But they live in neighborhoods like hers and they genuinely value motherhood and their family—their family is not just Instagram content. Micka feels more authentic because I think her performance of motherhood is relatively more authentic.
Because “authenticity” has become nearly a subjective term in the influencer economy, how would you define Micka’s brand of authenticity?
Oh sure, “authentic” is almost an empty term now. But I think compared to Nara Smith and Hannah Neeleman for example, it doesn’t present like she’s a wealthy internet personality/celebrity so much as a stay at home mom. Like I said, I know zero models who take eight hours to make Cheerios from scratch like Nara Smith. But I do know women whose lives and Instagram feeds don’t look that different from Micka’s (minus 5-6 kids!). The content is just not as aspirational, which makes it feel more “authentic”? Also, so many celebrity tradwives have leaned into traditional gender roles as a way to tap into rising Christian Nationalism and gain fame that way. I’ve said that I think politics are a big part of Hannah’s success–she broke away from the girl-boss brand of Mormon blogger that was previously popular, and tapped into an evangelical/MAGA wave that rocketed her into fame beyond what other Mormon influencers have ever achieved. But Micka, by comparison, presents like she could just be a stay-at-home mom.
This is where I wonder what you think about how content like Micka’s fits into the larger political “womansphere.” Because she also has 200,000 instagram followers and does sponsored posts, and she is having an 11th baby (for herself, for an internet audience?), and motherhood is always political. And there will always be women who promote patriarchy whether they know it or not, and maybe now they just have social media accounts.
Content like Micka’s just doesn’t feel as self-conscious or deliberately provocative. Some people, including some Mormons, sometimes think it’s not nice of me to write about Ballerina Farm as though she’s just a normal lady posting about her life, and I’m like…Ballerina Farm is an internet megacelebrity more famous than Glennon Doyle, and Hannah Neeleman has been known to support the alt-right for profit. As someone who cares about women’s rights and democracy, critiquing that seems very fair.
But what’s interesting about content creators like Micka is that they’re just posting about their lives with no overt politics or big profit agenda. Is that their superpower? Does it allow the politics of their content to fly more under the radar, or normalize it? Does it make it harder to critique the politics of their content and other “tradwife” content– or is it not that deep?
This is such a good question. So interestingly, I think Hannah Neeleman, despite her stint as an Evie (Glamour for the MAGA crowd, openly supportive of Trump and the conservative agenda) covergirl, convinces most of her followers that she is apolitical. And she’s publicly stated it’s her goal to seem apolitical.
While most cultural critics (me included) would argue that it’s not possible to be apolitical as a private citizen, and it’s certainly not possible to be apolitical when you’re as famous as Hannah Neeleman, I think her aspirational aesthetic goes a long way towards making her content seem politically innocuous.
On the other hand, Micka Perry is very publicly Mormon in a way that Neeleman isn’t. She frequently references her faith, using hashtags, sharing details about her kids’ missions, etc. So for me, because she’s so openly evangelizing the Mormon religion, she’s a harder sell as “relatable” than Neeleman to a secular audience, even though you’re absolutely right that she presents as more ‘burb basic then Neeleman. If anything, I think accounts like Perry’s might appeal to women looking for faith or meaning in their lives, and her “just likes us but super Mormon” vibe might be very compelling.
I wonder if maybe it’s red-pilling in a more low-key way, because it feels less performative and alt-rightish than, say, posing on the cover of alt-right Evie magazine. And some women who see themselves in this content might feel alienated by feminists who are critical of “tradwives” if they aren’t familiar with the whole discourse around tradwives as celebrity influencers who are enforcing strict gender roles as an alt-right pipeline to White Nationalism, etc.
A Mormon stay-at-home mom with several kids recently told me that she didn’t feel like feminist content like mine was “for her,” even though she by no means considers herself alt-right or MAGA, and is probably anti-Trump. I wanted to be like: But I write about structural things that would support all women and children--like better schools, maternity leave, subsidized child care! And feminists have fought for us to have all those things, plus the right to vote, and own property, and have our own bank accounts…!
What do you think (specifically) feels off-putting about explicitly feminist content for women like the Mormon mom you spoke to? I’ve heard the centrist complaint that feminism isn’t making room for traditional moms, but almost every feminist writer I know values the role of mothers in their feminism, so?
Right! I’m also a mom. I think this is because being a “stay at home home” or someone who works in the home can become conflated with being a “tradwife.”
If someone like the Mormon mom I described is looking at content like Micka’s it’s easy to see how she might see herself or her friends and family in that content. And meanwhile liberal feminists “having it all” are saddled with corporate work as well as domestic and reproductive labor, so our proposition doesn’t look that great; it’s much less glamorous. I’m always writing about how tired I am. Not creators like Micka!
So I think part of why this kind of content is really successful in terms of pronatalism and pushing alt-right ideas is because the alternative doesn’t feel that appealing or relatable to a lot of women. And I think what a lot of people miss about the kind of pronatalism that Micka displays is that it also gives women a sense of status. Which is something that women everywhere understandably crave in a society that chronically undervalues women, women’s bodies, and their domestic and reproductive labor.
I gotta say for a lot of my Mormon ladies (and I imagine for other women in similar faiths) I think it’s hard to find a place in the wider culture because the culture is only interested in extreme or cartoonish versions of them that they do not identify with (The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives TV series on Hulu, for example, that’s filled with drama.) And many Mormon women that I know are a lot more progressive than Hannah Neeleman and Micka Perry, too, and wouldn’t relate to them entirely either–or even see some of the content as gauche. Mormon women are not a monolith and I want to try to do right by representing them here. I think many of them feel like they are misrepresented which is frustrating and sometimes embarrassing. I certainly felt that way a lot when I was practicing, and I still see it all the time.
And it’s not as though all Mormon women just blindly follow patriarchy with no questions or pushback. There have been several Mormon feminist movements over the decades, including a feminist uprising in 2013-2014 called “Ordain Women” that pushed to get women ordained to the Priesthood that got national attention (the effort failed in 2014 when its leader was excommunicated.)
And in fact last year, women in the church made national headlines when they reacted to a social media post in which a church leader claimed that no other religious organization in the world “has so broadly given power and authority to women.” And tens of thousands of Mormon women jumped into the comments to collectively disagree and be like, um what are you talking about?? They created a whole social media firestorm, leaving tens of thousands of comments about how many of them struggle with feelings of disempowerment in the church. I think some of these women feel frustrations with patriarchy on the one hand, and feel dismissed by a lot of liberal feminists on the other, and this feels isolating.
So, I do think about these women, and whether there is an opportunity for many of them to be gathered into feminist solidarity, or whether they are more likely to be drawn into more conservative content if they feel dismissed by feminists, too.
Can you talk about the role of pronatalism as it relates to Mormonism and high-control religions?
The role of motherhood for women in Mormonism cannot be overstated. There is no role for women in the Mormon church outside of motherhood, really. From childhood, girls are prepared for the goals of "temple marriage" and motherhood, while boys are preparing to receive the priesthood (starting at age 12 and usually complete in their late teens). This is the "path" not only for this life, but also part of God's plan for eternal life. And in that way, the role of motherhood for women is also part of salvation.
I’ve always been a little confused about Mormon family size in this context - do more children equate to a higher role in the after life? Forgive me if this is a ridiculous question!
I can see why you’d ask, but no, there’s no teaching that more children equates to a higher role in the afterlife. It is taught that it’s women’s role to have children, and couples are directed to “multiply and replenish the earth” (from the Genesis verses where Adam and Eve are commanded to do this). So you could say that in this way, children lead to a higher role in this life. Like Catholics and other religious groups that promote sexual abstinence before marriage (and might have more conservative ideas about using birth control), Mormons also tend to marry quite young and have more children than the national average.
And as I mentioned, motherhood also grants women a certain amount of status in high context religions like this, which I think is interesting because in a society that so badly devalues women’s worth and labor, especially reproductive labor, I think this aspect can be really affirming and appealing.
There’s a part of me that responds when pronatalist talk is like: “Women’s bodies are powerful and amazing, and should be honored for this beautiful creative act…” And I’m like, yeah, sounds good! But then it’s like: “And it is women’s duty to reproduce and make babies, and it should be done in a way that makes women financially dependent on men…” I’m like, noooooooooo.
But the hook sounds pretty good at first, you know?
YES. The right (both religious and secular) has been very good about weaponizing motherhood in a way that the left historically hasn’t. In Seyward Darby’s excellent book, Sister In Hate, she interviews the alt-right mama hero, Ayla Stewart (who rose to fame through her white baby challenge rhetoric), and Stewart was clearly drawn to the alt-right because the alt-right actively recruits women by emphasizing their supposed respect for motherhood.
It’s like that Adrienne Rich quote about motherhood, where she says that “at certain times in certain cultures the idea of woman-as-mother has worked to endow women with respect, even awe, and to give some women a say,” but goes on to say that for most of mainstream recorded history it has worked more often to “degrade” female potential while pretending to do otherwise. Like, it could be so great! But often it is not!
What kinds of messages about motherhood and gender might a Mormon woman of Micka’s generation likely grow up internalizing?
Micka and I are similar in age and both raised in Utah, so we would have had a lot of the same messaging and lessons within Mormon culture. For example, when I was a girl, on Mother's Day the leader of the congregation would ask not only all of the mothers to stand up, but the girls aged 12 and up too. Then, men and boys would come through the aisles and distribute a token gift--usually a single rose or some chocolates--to all the girls and women standing in the pews. It was a gift for "all the mothers” and the “future mothers" in the congregation. I now joke that this sounds like a cross between a scene from “The Bachelor’ and the “The Handmaid’s Tale,” and it did kind of feel like that. Even as a kid, I did not like being roped into this performance, even though I did want to be a mom someday. It may have been well-meaning, but it definitely cements the idea that a girl child’s future has been pre-determined for them and is being literally handed to them by men and boys—which did not sit well with me even when I was young.
And interestingly, the boys did not get the same treatment on Father's Day. They got to keep sitting in their seats and were not named "future fathers." The cultural message was that girls are future mothers, while boys are future men, who play any number of roles, including fatherhood and whatever else they wanted. Future women, on the other hand, is not a category of its own in this framing.
While many cultures assume boys will grow up to become fathers, those cultures rely on girls becoming mothers at least in part because they need those mothers to take on the bulk of unpaid domestic labor and caregiving, right?
Right, and that’s such an interesting observation–men need women to become mothers, not only to do the domestic and caregiving work, but also to grant them the title of father, which comes with its own personal rewards and also its own status. The whole project really hinges on women and their willingness to reproduce! Men depend on women to grant them this status, and really benefit more from the arrangement. But as is often the case in patriarchal cultures like ours, it’s somehow framed that women are the ones who are lucky to get picked to be wives and mothers, and they should be so glad to have a man choose them.
This isn’t to say that Mormon men are evil geniuses or something. They are just living in a patriarchy within a patriarchy (U.S. culture) that is the water that we all swim in. My own dad worked crazy hard, like 70-hour weeks, to give us a nice life and for my mom to be able to stay home with us. My dad was about as feminist as an 80’s- 90’s Mormon girl dad could get, which is partly why I am the way I am.
I grew up surrounded by stay-at-home moms in my majority-Mormon Utah neighborhood, and I had a mostly great childhood because my parents tried to give us the best. My mom took great care of us and we ran around from house to house and all the moms knew all of us. We had a version of “the village.” I loved those moms, I still love those moms. It wasn’t until I grew up a bit and saw how constrained some of them were financially, and how trapped they were if they were in bad marriages, and how easily they could end up in desperate circumstances that I started to question the equity of this whole setup, and if it was desirable, much less attainable, for everyone.
In regards to pronatalism and “fertility panic” I often write about how I think that true freedom for women would mean the opportunity for women to have more kids if they want, or zero kids if they want. Right now in this country we have neither.
I don’t think anyone should ever be coerced or “persuaded” to have kids, to be clear. Data indicates that some people just don’t want kids, and others would like to have kids (or more kids) but can’t afford to, due to class inequality and the government withholding essential services like childcare and family leave. Of course, abortion bans mean that some people with uteruses are forced to have babies that they don’t want. Either way—whether forced to have children they don’t want, or unable to afford children that they do want, the way I look at it, American women and childbearing people are robbed of their freedom. I would love to see women of all stripes come together on this, instead of getting sucked into “pronatalist”and political arguments that pit women against each other. We could be living in a different world!
Right! I recently read a relatively dated (1980s) academic paper written by someone at BYU (so I assume he’s Mormon but obviously can’t be sure), and he was studying the impact of family size on kids’ wellbeing, and he repeatedly emphasized that a Mormon mother’s sense of personal value being intrinsically tied to her motherhood was a huge factor in family wellness. It’s really fascinating how this sense of self piece is so baked into gender roles.
But conflating motherhood with women’s identity and worth is by no means restricted to Mormonism and high control religions, unfortunately—it’s everywhere. For example, every time another politician gets accused of sexual harassment, those on the other side come out and defend “the dignity of our wives and daughters,” which is well-meaning, but positions women’s worth in relation to men and children — instead of as people who are deserving of respect and rights as individuals. It happens constantly, in religious circles and outside, too—it’s so normalized.
But of course, the emphasis on motherhood and strict gender roles gets fraught–even within Mormonism it gets tangled in itself. For example, in discussions about gender equality in the church, it is often taught that "Men get the priesthood, and women get motherhood." This idea is commonly accepted and repeated culturally as a way to justify why women can’t get the priesthood. There are a lot of critics of this teaching who point out that the equivalent of motherhood for men is fatherhood, not priesthood. This is further complicated by the fact that in the Mormon church one must have the priesthood to ascend to any major decision-making leadership position (women are given subordinate roles overseeing other women and children only). Thus, only men can hold leadership positions. So this framing also is criticized as simply an excuse to withhold leadership or any real decision-making power from women, and replacing it with an "equivalent" role that involves caregiving and domestic work.
Well, and isn’t this part of the propaganda too? Don’t they deliberately emphasize motherhood as a noble and beautiful calling as a way to say, “See! Women have power too!” It feels very “separate but equal” to me.
Well yes, it’s a logical fallacy. Many critics have pointed out that one is a parenting role, and one is a leadership role with the power to make decisions over large groups of people. It’s apples and oranges–a false equivalency that’s used to justify women remaining subordinate to men, who have all the leadership and decision-making power over them within the church organizational structure. Can you imagine in any other setting if women were told: “You have a uterus that can make a baby, so you can’t be in charge of anything.” What? But a version of that has pretty much created a glass ceiling for women everywhere!
I think as women, as soon as we hear some version of “You’re so powerful because you can make a baby…” followed by an excuse to use that as a way to withhold some other opportunity, or power, or personal rights from us, that should get our hackles up immediately.
I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention here that Black men weren’t eligible for the priesthood until 1978, so using priesthood to withhold and consolidate certain kinds of power has a long and complicated history in the church.
It’s wild (and also completely not sob) how easily false equivalencies pass in a culture dominated by the very people those false equivalencies benefit.
This notion that motherhood is equivalent to priesthood also puts a tremendous amount of pressure on motherhood! Motherhood becomes your only role in the church, and it becomes the only "power," albeit soft power, that you have as a woman. Therefore, to not produce children is unthinkable--it would be to forfeit whatever social capital, spiritual capital, and status is available to you as a woman. Micka is exercising and signaling this status--as well as her personal righteousness--with her large family and pregnancies. I will say that she's an extreme version within modern Mormonism--Mormon families are typically smaller now, around 3-5 kids. But having a large family is a flex spiritually, financially, socially. She's asserting her status, and in some ways she's also asserting that she's a real "woman."
As you can imagine, in communities that emphasize motherhood this way, it creates a lot of pain for women who can't have children, especially because unlike "priesthood," motherhood is not something that women can achieve simply by being and being assigned a certain gender. For many Mormon women who experience infertility or don't get married (there is a shortage of available Mormon men to date, so there are many Mormon women who can't/won't marry Mormon men, or marry at all) this is very painful. These women often experience serious crises of self-worth, and can lead to severe depression and anxiety.
Interestingly, the church has created a way to address this--but not by creating a role that's not motherhood. Instead, the term "metaphysical motherhood" has been introduced to create space for women without children. This was popularized by Sheri Dew--a popular female figurehead in the church who never married but was called to be a high-profile church-wide leader of the church's women's organization. She was the female role model in the church while Micka and I were coming of age--she is a household name in the church. Dew gave a popular talk (speech) called "Are We Not All Mothers?" in which she addressed child-free women by saying that "Motherhood is more than bearing children...it is the essence of who we are as women." She goes on to say that "righteous women were endowed premortally with the privilege of motherhood. It defines our very identity, our divine stature and nature, and the unique traits our Father gave us." Basically furthering the idea that motherhood is the only role for women--indeed, even if you don't have children.
This makes me mad because it’s still basing a woman’s work entirely on the gender essentialist fallacy that to be a woman means being a caregiver.
To say that Mormonism is gender essentialist is an understatement. On one hand, this can feel very validating to many women who would like to have their care work acknowledged and validated--which our society does a very poor job of. On the other hand, of course it keeps women in a subordinate position of service, but never gives them real organizational leadership or decision-making power.
Interestingly, Dew has gone on to become the most powerful woman within the multi-billion-dollar corporate arms of the church. She has served as CEO of the church's book and publishing arm, and is currently a director of Bonneville International Corporation, the church's massive media arm that owns a major metro newspaper, broadcast news channel, radio stations, and numerous media holdings. She’s a big deal.
However, in her major talks and in her books, she is always careful to first mention that what she really wanted was to be a mother, and she only has taken this career path because it was never meant to be because she never married. This follows a pattern that women in the church always seem to follow like a script, no matter what their role is, they always lead by saying that their most important and best job is that of being a mother. You never hear the male leaders lead with fatherhood, though.
It reminds me of the Katie Britt SOTU performance in which Britt presents as a mother, in her kitchen, even though she's a sitting U.S. Senator, which I wrote about and compared to Mormonism here.
It also reminds ME of women like Phyllis Schlafly, who claimed that they only worked in politics because they were called upon to do so. It wasn’t that she was ambitious for work outside of the home; it wasn’t that she wanted power in the professional sector (the very thing she was actively protesting against); it was just that she cared SO much about her motherhood and womanhood that she simply HAD to speak up. This is a pattern over and over again with white women whose influence stems directly from the protections offered to them by white supremacist patriarchy, right?
Yes! I almost mentioned Shlalfly here, too. It’s a pattern, and specifically a pattern when women are addressing other women to keep them in their place, right? And, often these messages are meant to threaten that stepping outside their place will have consequences if they lose whatever crumbs white patriarchy has to offer them (which is also why people point out tradwife content as problematic, of course!)
I mention all this because within pronatalist institutions, women's roles as anything besides mothers has to be justified by motherhood being not accessible for reasons that are beyond that woman's control, and anything else–whether it’s being a senator or a CEO–is framed as being a distant second choice to motherhood. For women like Micka, it also allows them, as stay at home moms, to feel like they are in the enviable and aspirational position with the most status. Any woman--no matter how successful--would give it all up in a heartbeat to have the husband, the brood of kids, and all that comes with it.
See almost every big momfluencer’s bio for an example of this “but being a mother is my most important job!!!!” phenomenon. They always list their roles as moms before any of their professional accomplishments. But yeah, it seems crucial for patriarchal institutions like Mormonism to have women’s buy-in. They HAVE to emphasize motherhood as the key to a woman’s power in order to maintain THEIR power. Which is obviously far harder and more far-reaching than a woman’s maternal power is.
It’s also how they sidestep a lot of criticism too, in my opinion. Like, it’s totally fair game to criticize a woman who is a politician or a CEO, but it’s not equally valid to critique a professional tradwife influencer. This is part of the pitch that Mormonism has successfully made to women for a long time. And now it seems pronatalist movements (like the Collins), and alt-right groups are running with it, too.
And I think for women like Micka Perry, the belief that she's literally doing god's work and gaining status in the process feels important (although the amount of laundry alone is head spinning!). And it also has a democratizing effect–Micka’s sister married a billionaire, but she, too, has a brood of babies and in a way that's where the most status lies.
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This is such a great conversation. I really loved your observations about why tradwife content is so appealing -- there is no "having it all" and lots of commentary about the ways that balancing paid work and having kids is totally under-supported by our systems.
I really just can't get over baby #11! at 46!! I'm 42 and I'm tempted to take to my bed just thinking about another baby.