Ballerina Farm influencer says she ‘couldn’t love’ her life ‘more’ after backlash
A Mormon woman dubbed “queen of the trad wives” has seemingly responded after a controversial interview with her made headlines.
Lifestyle
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A Mormon woman dubbed “queen of the trad wives” has seemingly responded after an interview with her sparked extensive, heated discourse across the internet.
Hannah Neeleman is an American homemaker, influencer and mother of eight more commonly known by her social media handle, Ballerina Farm, which boasts a following of almost 20 million across Instagram, TikTok and YouTube and is also the name of the business she runs with her husband, Daniel.
Last week, The Sunday Times published a profile of Ms Neeleman, written by reporter Megan Agnew, that painted a somewhat unsettling portrait of her life on the family’s 328-acre farm in rural Utah. For many readers and Ballerina Farm fans, the main takeaway was that Ms Neeleman had sacrificed her dreams of becoming a ballerina for a controlling husband and an isolated, oppressed life in which, as one TikTok user put it, she “is slowly working herself to death to do multiple jobs, take care of these children, (and) perform as influencer online, without any additional help”.
If the 34-year-old’s social media activity is anything to go by, however, the criticism and concern over her lifestyle since The Times story has been water off a duck’s back – making a pointed statement with her latest post.
“When we started to farm, I was swept up in the beauty of learning to make food from scratch,” Ms Neeleman said in a new video posted on Sunday. The footage showed her and her husband kissing in a paddock, with a baby in her arms.
“It’s the world we created, and I couldn’t love it more.”
Agnew, the journalist, also reflected on the furore in The Times on Monday after the “global social media debate” her original article prompted.
“Before I left to interview her, the main question I had from friends, family and colleagues was whether it was all true,” Agnew wrote.
“One of the most watched people on the internet, her children looked chaotic and happy, homeschooled and free-range. How did she keep it all together? How was she always so calm? Was it really like that?
“I was also desperate to know how she felt about all the controversy and anger which followed her around the internet.”
After visiting Ms Neeleman, Agnew concluded that she leads a “life of contradictions”.
“Where Neeleman wanted to be a New York girl and professional ballet dancer, Daniel had always imagined this enormous, daring life for himself, despite growing up in the Connecticut suburbs without a single animal, the son of an airline founder,” she said.
“He had staunchly traditional views, combined with unmistakably 21st-century business acumen. He expected his wife to stay at home with the children. He was a ‘firm believer’, he said, that men ‘make stuff work’ and women ‘beautify’.”
Ms Neeleman also “seemed detached from the politicisation that surrounds her”, namely regarding the view that she upholds the “trad wife” movement, which glorifies women’s return to the traditional role of mother, homemaker and homesteader.
As Agnew put it: “This was her life, she told me, and she posted about it online. It was that simple. Daniel had more opinions, leading the way when I asked about their stance on abortion, marriage, feminism and the label ‘trad wives’.”
In her initial story on Ms Neeleman, Agnew is careful to note multiple times that it was difficult to speak to her “without her being corrected, interrupted or answered for by either her husband or a child”, and that she often looked to Mr Neeleman for help in responding to questions.
She also revealed that she doesn’t “necessarily identify” with the trad wife movement she’s been labelled the leader of.
“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,” Ms Neeleman said.
“So for me to have the label of a traditional woman, I’m kinda like, I don’t know if I identify with that.”
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Originally published as Ballerina Farm influencer says she ‘couldn’t love’ her life ‘more’ after backlash
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