WHEN AMERICAN INFLUENCER Hannah Neeleman agreed to do an interview with The Times newspaper at home in Utah, she no doubt believed it would be a great chance to show what life is really like in her seemingly ‘perfect’ world.

The mother of eight young children, 34-year-old Neeleman runs a TikTok account called Ballerina Farm that documents life at the large ranch she shares with her husband Daniel.

If she’s not making homemade butter using milk from the farm’s cows, she might be baking pies, feeding animals, or spending time with her growing family.

While her home is a minimalist mix of wooden furniture and plain decor, she doesn’t try to make it look perfect. Instead, Neeleman mixes the vibe of a homesteading housewife with the modern attitude of a gentle parenting mother who understands that her kids will make a mess. 

That Neeleman (who has 9 million followers on both TikTok and Instagram) is a former ballerina and a pageant queen means that her feed is even more palatable and aspirational – as a slim blonde she fully fits the most basic beauty ideals. She even participated in the international Mrs World competition in January, just two weeks after giving birth to her eighth child, a fact that seems almost unbelievable. 

Here she is making an asparagus tart in TikTok.

Tradwives

She also fits the ideals of what’s called a ‘tradwife’, a term that really took off on social media from around 2020 and which is said to have its roots in an online rightwing community.  

But who is a tradwife? Well, she’s a woman who shares a traditional view of family: dad goes out and works to provide for his family, mum works in the home, multiple children are desirable, and all of this means she is guaranteed a better life.

While women should be free to do whatever they want, there’s a clear emphasis with a lot of tradwife content online that presumes that reversing to a time when ‘men were men and women were women’ will somehow be better for women and society at large.

There’s a sense too that in tradwife world, opinions around contraception, abortion, and female independence are at odds with modern society.

You won’t be surprised to hear that America is the heartland of the tradwife movement. Neeleman and her family are all Mormon, and while Mormons are more likely than the average person in the USA to have traditional views on gender roles, the church appears nonetheless to be experiencing some changes.

But she doesn’t necessarily identify herself as a tradwife, she told The Times, because she recognises the paradoxical fact that she makes money from her day-to-day life. While she might be tacitly promoting being a stay-at-home mother, she’s a stay-at-home mother who works in social media. And here we find just one of the major contradictions around the tradwife movement in 2024.

Another contradiction? That while the family’s lifestyle appears simple and bucolic, Daniel’s father owns several airlines. That could certainly make raising eight children and running a farm a whole lot easier than it would for the average person. This isn’t something that’s discussed on the Ballerina Farm account (for understandable reasons) but feeds into some people’s perception that there’s a lot going on behind the surface that people don’t know.

New debate

The tradwife lifestyle alone is a lightning rod for discussion and debate, and that’s fully leaned into by some influencers. What better way to get attention than to rile people up?

While Neeleman stays away from doing this deliberately, others trade on it. Some influencers, like Estee Williams, build their brand around telling women that their natural place is in the home. Others, like model Nara Smith, trade on the tradwife aesthetic and make a song and dance about making things like bubblegum from scratch. But it’s hard to tell if Smith is being ironic or actually appropriating the tradwife vibe, which shows how normalised elements of the subculture have become.

Over the past week, the Times article has unleashed a whole new and even bigger level of debate about Neeleman’s life and the tradwife subculture.

For starters, there was concern about the fact journalist Megan Agnew wrote – in a balanced piece that was clearly not trying to poke fun at the family - that it was incredibly difficult to speak to Neeleman on her own, and that her husband often interjected to answer questions.

The details of how Neeleman gave birth without pain relief to most of her eight children, and how she gave up her dream of being a ballerina in New York, rankled people too. Of particular concern was the line: “Still, Daniel says, Neeleman sometimes gets so ill from exhaustion that she can’t get out of bed for a week.” 

Soon, people began making TikTok videos responding to the article, pointing out moments in Ballerina Farm videos that disturbed them and making presumptions about how Neeleman must have been feeling at certain times.

One of the most discussed videos is a clip where Neeleman is filmed receiving a birthday present from her husband, and saying she hopes it’s a trip to Greece. It turns out to be an egg apron (yes, an apron with multiple pockets for eggs).

On the comments to her videos, people are now referencing that trip to Greece, the apron, and telling her exactly what they think about her husband. The vibe is distinctly at odds to Neeleman’s laidback, almost shy approach to making her videos.

Here’s Neeleman doing some work on the farm, posted on TikTok.

Real life vs social media

The Ballerina Farm debacle gives us an insight into several of the difficult, knotty elements of social media. It shows how quickly someone can become the ‘main character’ of the day, being bombarded by people telling you exactly what they think of you and your family; how easy it is to be the subject of reaction videos that you have no control over; and how the story of your life can be written by others.

But the other side to this is that, by presenting her life in the way she has, Neeleman has done exactly what social media has asked of her – and made money out of it. She’s been able to promote an aesthetic that isn’t simply a way of life but sends a clear message about what her family believes is the ideal way for women to live.

She’s fully entitled to believe what she wishes, but do we know what sort of impact her videos, and indeed the tradwife movement as a whole, can have on young people in particular? 

Social media isn’t reality – it’s a portrayal of reality, a staging of real life. And yet at the same time it is real. Neeleman will have to read comments about her and her family that are entirely real, and the impact they will have on her is real.

The concern over accounts like Neeleman’s is because of real things too: the wider tradwife subculture, and its tentacles which reach into the far right, racism, anti-feminism and the ‘discipline’ of women. While individuals like Neeleman might have absolutely nothing to do with those, on social media it can be a slippery slope towards users unwittingly consuming content about the darker side of tradwife life.

Short video clips also don’t provide any context or background for tradwife behaviour – the subtext is all there, but it’s up to the viewers to figure it out. Some could take on tradwife behaviour without realising its roots. 

What is threatening to get lost in the Ballerina Farm debate is the wider zooming out, away from the individuals and into tradwife subculture as a whole.

This feels all the more important at a time when women’s rights are being attacked in Neeleman’s home country, what with the rollback of Roe v Wade, comments from presumptive Vice President JD Vance about “childless cat ladies”, and the Project 2025 plans by a group called the Heritage Foundation for if Trump comes to power, which would see a particularly extreme conservative approach to governing the USA.

This darker side to the ideals that underpin the tradwife movement doesn’t feel so nebulous when you place it against all of the above.

We know that globally women still face many issues, from gender-based violence to lack of access to education and contraception. We know that here in Ireland, gender-based violence is as big a problem as it ever was. We know that the world is not an equal place at all – and this is why for many of us the tradwife movement feels scary and retrograde.

It appears to glamourise a way of life that determines there is only one way for women to live, a way that removes much of the rights and opportunities that generations of women fought very, very hard for.

And so we return to Neeleman, who has – perhaps unwittingly – become the focus of people’s concern, confusion and anger around tradwife subculture. It’s far easier to criticise one person than an entire movement, and so people are using her as the focus of their ire.

Some critics are simply worried about her wellbeing, though that has a certain parasocial tinge to it. After all, the only person who really knows how Neeleman is is herself. 

What content like Neeleman’s offers is the chance to escape from the pressures of real life for a few minutes. You can watch her calmly make a protein smoothie with a raw egg and yogurt while her children flit about the kitchen, and wonder what it would be like to live a rural life free of major stresses, with plenty of time to spend with your kids.

Of course this is appealing in a world built on conflict and a cost-of-living crisis, where the cost of parenting is financially high and where mothers often bear the brunt of parenting. But no wonder, too, that people are concerned about the reality behind the glossy Ballerina Farm videos, and the impact her lifestyle has on Neeleman.

Because for all of the calmness her videos can bring us, the more we learn about Neeleman’s life the more questions we could have about what it all means. And by asking questions, at the very least we can begin to untangle what we individually think about the ‘tradwife’ subculture, rather than unquestioningly accepting content about it with open arms.

Aoife Barry is the author of Social Capital: Life Online in the Shadow of Ireland’s Tech Boom, published by HarperCollins Ireland.