What's so scary about a tradwife?
"Yesteryear," Ballerina Farm, and influencing America's women into 1855.
We will be having a book discussion about Yesteryear, the tradwife thriller by Caro Claire Burke, in a discussion post next Tuesday, April 28th at noon Eastern. Pop in as you wish—can’t wait.
In the summer of 2024, a reporter from Sunday Times sent a reporter to cover America’s leading trad wife, Hannah Neeleman, on her Utah ranch known as “Ballerina Farm.” The interview went viral when the writer, Megan Agnew, portrayed a less-than-glamorous day in the life of the social media megastar. Was Neeleman living the wholesome tradwife dream on her Utah farm, or exhausted by a cycle of never-ending childbirth and work?
Ever since, the tradwife phenomenon has asked endlessly: Is this some new liberating form or womanhood that offers an escape hatch from late-stage capitalism corporate hell life, or something more…sinister?
At the time of the interview Ballerina Farm had 10 million Instagram followers, and 20 million viewers across platforms. Today, the Ballerina Farm brand has a $70M e-commerce company selling meat and home goods, and often boasts over 2 billion views on its TikTok hashtag, #ballerinafarm. Billion. With a B.
To say that Neeleman’s influence—and the tradwife movement in general—is a cultural juggernaut is an understatement. What does it all mean?
When this viral story broke, caro claire burke was feverishly writing a novel exploring the meaning of it all. Her novel Yesteryear, a tradwife thriller about a celebrity homesteading influencer who wakes up in 1855 and is forced to confront the harsh reality behind her curated aesthetic, came out earlier this month and is a runaway hit.
At the time, I also feverishly wrote an essay to attempt in my own small to explain what the tradwife movement means, through the lens of Mormonism (both Neeleman and I grew up Mormon, and I crossed paths with her briefly in New York City—more on that below), Christian Nationalism and right-wing politics. It would become the most popular thing I had written to date, and in many ways it launched what this newsletter has become. d
Needless to say, I have been obsessed with Yesteryear for obvious reasons (I have pages of notes, group chats, and a Marco Polo discussion to prove it.) All of it has reminded me many times of the essay that I wrote about Neeleman and the appeal of tradwives, so I’m sharing parts of it below, with some updates.
To be clear, the protagonist of the novel of course is not Neeleman, who is a real person with a real family whose personal life we can never really know, and is not really any of our business. But the protaganist of Yesteryear, Natalie, is largely inspired by Neleeman’s brand and its particular flavor of tradwifery, which is worthy of analysis.
From the beginning the Ballerina Farm brand made me a bit queasy, mainly because it essentially made Mormonism aspirational. Since when had Mormonism—which famously requires female subordination, and has a history of polygamy—been aspirational for women?
And this is not The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives version of Mormon womanhood, or even a glamorized 1950’s housewife aesthetic. Ballerina Farm projects something nostalgic—but something much further back than the 1950’s. It’s projecting an idealized 1800’s aesthetic: a frontier farm wife.
What does a megabrand that mythologizes the 1800’s, especially in terms of gender roles, mean in 2026, in the rise of anti-women authoritarianism?
A few months ago, the Heritage Foundation, architects of Project 2025, released a new plan to “Save the Family” that plans to make married families with a man and a woman the only ones that are fully legally protected (to the detriment of LGBTQ+ and single parent families), raise birth rates and even teen pregnancy rates through coercion, and limit women’s access to higher education. There have been those on the right at the highest levels of government who have started to question whether women should be able to vote. This doesn’t sound like 1950, it sounds like 1850.
I now understand, in ways that I didn’t fully get in 2024, that tradwife content is appealing because the current status for women in capitalist patriarchy is also not appealing. Women work too much at home, and too much at work. They get harassed at work too much, and don’t get paid enough—especially if they are women of color. Women, no matter if they identify as feminist or traditional or neither, are exhausted.
Doesn’t disappearing into a remote place, far away from it all, where your kids are safe and you can feed them organic vegetables and homemade sourdough bread sound good?
In many ways the book Yesteryear and the tradwife movement themselves ask: What is aspirational for women in 2026, given the options? And what exactly is a future based on a fantasy of idealized 1800’s womanhood selling us?
An earlier version of this essay ran here in August 2024.
I don’t know Daniel and Hannah Neeleman of “Ballerina Farm,” 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 just Daniel’s wife 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.
From the beginning, this was not the typical Mormon influencer vibe. Ballerina Farm represented a stark departure from the already-popular Mormon blogger phenomenon. Ballerina Farm appeared to be the country mouse answer to the typical influencer’s luxury life: it was 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 rode the rise of conservative Christian Nationalism, and a trad wife star was born.
When the Times profile came out, the incomparable Sara Petersen, 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 MAGA megafundraiser Turning Point USA:
Kirk’s Turning Point USA promoted Ballerina Farm as “The best social media page in existence,” giving the account an early big break.
I’m not saying that the Ballerina Farm brand set out to be patriarchal right-wing authoritarian propaganda, but it certainly has been co-opted as such. And Ballerina Farm’s affinity to that community set it apart from millions of other mommy bloggers, and launched 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, and supporters like the Kirks. Not unlike Erika Kirk herself, 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. Also like Erika Kirk, she’s a woman who holds a position of power and independence outside the home, while performing as though her only real job is wife and mother.
Daniel Neeleman, meanwhile, is more outspoken. He has come out against abortion as “a bad choice” 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 Sara Petersen 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 white 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 mutual sacrifices that she and her husband made to take up farm life.
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 Meg Conley and Anne Helen Petersen 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 and colonize it, to promote Christianity and capitalism. This helped justify the horrific genocide and removal of native people. 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.
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: he tried to re-introduce the ancient literal Old Testament practice 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. Many of these were clear examples of abuse and child abuse, including a girl as young as 14 years old.
She later testified: “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, with a mansion built to display his harem in the center of town for all to see.
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 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 girls 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. 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.
Below the paywall, I have a couple other anecdotes about 1800’s womanhood, and how Yesteryear does and does not capture the Mormon version of influencing.
