In January 2024, just under two weeks after giving birth to her eighth baby, Hannah Neeleman took to the stage of the Miss World pageant in Las Vegas, spray tanned and shimmering in a tiny swimsuit. The previous year, in August 2023, not long after having her seventh baby, Neeleman had been crowned Mrs American at the same Las Vegas casino. It was that initial appearance that cast the pint-sized beauty queen into the international spotlight.
Looking impossibly beautiful in a flowing white gown, Neeleman was asked whilst on stage what had made her feel most empowered.
“I have felt this feeling seven times now as I bring these sacred souls to the earth. After I hold that newborn baby in my arms. The feeling of motherhood and bringing them to the earth is the most empowering feeling I have ever felt,” an emotional Neeleman said to applause.
The message, to those who approved, was wonderful and moving. Many said that it was a ‘pro-life’ answer, a message that life is a miracle. That being a woman is a miracle. that despite tumbling birth rates and less marriage, motherhood and family life is good and beautiful.
To others though, the ‘Ballerina Farm’ story (the name of the 10 million strong Instagram account Neeleman, a former ballerina, runs with her husband) is underlined by something they describe as close to sinister. Her critics, many of them on the political left, have decried the fact that Neeleman, a talented dancer who was trained at the prestigious Juilliard school in New York, gave up her career and her dreams to become a stay-at-home mother to eight small children. She is only 34, after all. They go as far as to say Neeleman is something of a baby-making machine, ‘love bombed’ by her wealthy husband into marriage and babies when she was barely out of her teens.
Last year, an article penned by a young female journalist at The Times newspaper went viral. The journalist had spent a day with Neelman, who she dubbed the ‘queen of the trad wives’ and was giving her observations. The op-ed quickly rocketed to virality all over the world, further increasing Ballerina Farm’s reach. Reflecting on her visit to the Neeleman’s sprawling ranch in the mountains of rural Utah, where she and her husband farm, employing more than 30 staff to manage the production and marketing of various goods they sell on their website, like flour, meat and protein powder, the reporter, Megan Agnew said: “As a woman, I think this way of life has been mis-sold to us. I think she’s really tired, and what really struck me is just quite how little time that either of them have for themselves. But I suppose that is parenthood.”
It is indeed parenthood. And I would hazard a guess that to many women in my generation, who have spent years wrapped up in a world of convenience and entertainment, our twenties occupied by spa days and cocktail nights, parenthood will come as a shock. After all, it’s a head-on collision with the tendency many of us have developed to live our lives purely for ourselves. I recently spent the weekend with a friend barely older than me and who has three very small children.
I was genuinely a bit shell-shocked by the noise and the chaos and the endless workload of it all. “Do I ever want to get married and live like this? Does it get easier?” I honestly thought to myself as I pondered the entirely sacrificial nature of motherhood, the severe sleep deprivation, and the way that every waking moment is filled. It likely says more about me and my own selfishness that my immediate response was to call into question everything I thought I wanted. Yes, motherhood is exhausting, but it is a universal truth that there is fulfilment in the tiredness. Have we been running from that truth?
Living in London, I often see ads on the tube for sperm banks. How sad, I thought, that these relentless adverts are likely targeted at corporate women returning from a busy day’s work in the city, packed into claustrophobic carriages like sardines. Many of them have likely devoted themselves to their careers, meaning maybe the ‘girl boss’ kinds we so idolise have not had the time or interest to find a suitable spouse to start a family with.
Things have gotten so bad that now sperm banks are promising to fulfil the dreams of women who have left it too late to settle down. There is something profoundly tragic about that. It’s worth noting that the number of children born from sperm donors more than tripled over the last 15 years in the UK, with the increase partly driven by women who have chosen to become single parents.
Will the corporate ‘girl boss’ class end up happy in the future? Or will many women my age be facing a lonely future, because we want to continue living for ourselves, and ourselves alone? Maybe not on purpose, but because we have become so accustomed to it. Because society and culture has conditioned us to act like falling pregnant in our thirties is akin to a crisis teenage pregnancy. There are some things we just don’t want to give up.
The reason Ballerina Farm has been thrust back into the spotlight in Ireland is because the Neelemans have relocated to Cork to attend a 12-week cookery course at the popular Ballymaloe cookery school. Hannah, already an accomplished cook, posts daily about the family’s ‘dreamy’ Irish adventure,’ sharing videos of the intensive culinary course and the children exploring the surrounding rolling green fields. For all of the supposed controversy, the wealthy family (her husband Daniel’s father owns three airlines, including JetBlue) look happy.
Some people say she is trapped and unhappy, but she looks fulfilled. She is s successful business woman in her own right with a fierce work ethic and strong values. Most importantly, she says she’s happy and she clearly loves her family. The content is wholesome and earthy and idyllic, a far cry from most of what we see on the internet. Neeleman’s videos, showing her making the perfect sourdough starter, soup from scratch, and milking her cows straight into coffee cups, while her children run free in the backdrop, has earned her the title of ‘trad wife’ – a cultural phenomenon which has taken off on the internet like a rocket.
Her life may look unrealistic to many of us, but it is not harmful, despite the implication that it is. A mormon who has conservative values, she was always going to be deemed controversial when the celebrities of the day always have to be left-leaning and progressive.
Neeleman and her content is entirely harmless, I would argue, in comparison to the hyper-sexualised, hollow content produced by the Kardashians and Jenners cramming social media feeds with constant nonsense. It is a refreshing break from the stuff bordering on soft core pornography that seems to rule the internet these days.
More than being harmless, a lot of women feel the Ballerina Farm life is actually aspirational. That is a reality hidden in her 10 million strong following. Neeleman has a legion of fans – on my own Instagram, almost 100 of my friends follow her, many regularly liking her content. I suspect it is the case that she is popular because a growing number of women actually want to live the way she does. Young mothers make no secret of the fact that they would like to have more children but can’t afford them (the studies show this). A great number would probably love to have the luxury of staying at home perfecting loaves of sourdough and spending more time with their children. This is sadly unrealistic for most since having to go out to work full-time is a financial necessity, with many parents unable to have more children because of suffocating childcare costs and the mounting cost of living.
I follow Neeleman, and not Kim or Kourtney Kardashian or Taylor Swift, because there is something aspirational, on a very counter-cultural level, about her. She is a breath of fresh air in contrast to the cultural icons many young women have so blindly followed and tried to emulate. Yes, she is an influencer for a reason – she is stunning and accomplished and money is no object. It goes without saying that the vast majority of us will not marry a billionaire, or flounce about on a pageant stage looking like a goddess two weeks after giving birth, but Neeleman does represent some things that are still important to young women. Things like being in a loving marriage and motherhood, and being able to provide a loving and stable environment for children. Being able to cook and multitask and having a regular exercise routine. I don’t see why any of these things are bad.
But she’s married to the heir of JetBlue, and her life is completely out of reach, the detractors say. However, many of us have followed the likes of Kardashian-Jenner since our teens. We’ve bought the Kylie lip kits and the overpriced Skims. So many young girls have sought to emulate a family who made their fortune through a leaked sex tape, and whose lives promote dysfunction, having multiple baby daddies, living your life with absolutely no moral boundaries, and expensive surgeries and tweakments that will leave you looking like an inflated plastic doll.
All around us, we can see the impact of a popular culture, through music, social media and reality television, that has conditioned people into trying to live like they are celebrities, through things like elaborate, overpriced, glitzy weddings, relationships that are disposable, and the explosion in lip fillers and botox.
No one ever says people like Kim Kardashian or Kylie Jenner or the multitude of Love Island stars who make their living through influencing are unrealistic or artificial, even though they are. The impact of their huge followings is that they have influenced people, mainly women, for the worse. They have made things we should detest into aspirations. We are more superficial and detached from reality and the things that truly matter because of it.
One reason Ballerina Farm has amassed such a following is that her life is full of meaning and purpose. She is presenting, in an albeit impossibly pretty way, a model of something else. She is a sign that you can choose a different life for yourself, a traditional life, and that’s ok. The growing influence Neeleman has is an indication that women are realising they don’t all want to be the ‘corporate queens’ pedestalled by our culture, and that getting married and staying at home to raise children is no bad thing.
Years spent on the corporate feminist treadmill has exhausted many women, who are now searching desperately for something else. For meaning and love outside of yourself. Maybe the sugar-coated cult of self-love is not all it’s cracked up to be? It has left many of us feeling empty, that’s for sure. For some, it is too late. Feminism has, for a very long time, taught us that we should want to be like men, we should climb the corporate ladder and be as sexually ‘empowered’ as possible. It is an ideology that teaches us it is perfectly fine not to want children until we are past child-bearing age, or not to want them at all. Aborting your children is fine, because you should come first. Modern feminism has normalised a path which, sadly, will leave many feeling lonely. A lot of young women feel used, not loved.
Motherhood, on the other hand, for all that we may suppress or delay it, and regardless of how hard it is, remains a deep-rooted, biologically-driven aspiration for many women, who likely don’t want to admit this. We are made for love and for purpose beyond just loving ourselves. Hannah Neeleman, or ‘Ballerina Farm’ and what she represents has been problematic for the powers that be because she is an anomaly. She does not qualify as a modern feminist by the standards set by the culture, and that’s what so many women like about her.