Hannah Neeleman/Instagram
Inside the Controversial Lives of Trad Wives: Why Hannah Neeleman Says It’s Just a ‘Normal Life’
She was ambitious and talented enough to become a professional dancer. “My goal was NYC. I left home at 17, and I was so excited to get there. I was going to be a ballerina,” Hannah Neeleman, a graduate of the prestigious Juilliard School, admitted in a recent interview. “But I knew that when I started to have kids, my life would start to look different.”
It’s now almost unrecognizable. Hannah — better known by her social media handle, Ballerina Farm, which is also the name of her family’s 328-acre Utah homestead — has become a world-famous influencer, devoted spouse and mother of eight who’s at the center of the polarizing “trad wives” movement.
The cultural trend, which emerged in 2018, celebrates couples who promote ultra-traditional gender roles with men as the breadwinning head of the household and women who shun the workforce and stay home to cook, clean and raise children — think homemakers on steroids. Though Hannah, 34, doesn’t use the phrase herself (“I don’t necessarily identify with it,” she recently said), a new controversy-sparking interview with The Times of London declared her “the queen of the ‘trad wives.’”
According to Hannah, though, “people will put a label on everything. This is just our normal life.” But others see her “normal” as extreme — or even dangerous.
A Day in the Life of a Trad Wife
In January, the devout Mormon — who got engaged to husband Daniel, the 36-year-old son of billionaire JetBlue founder David Neeleman, after a month of dating and married him two months later, while still in college — gave birth to “one-push baby” Flora in their bedroom, without pain relief.
On a regular day, she makes her family’s meals from scratch with a huge green Aga stove (some models cost $30,000). They drink raw milk and sell boxes of meat curated from their cows and pigs, and a sourdough starter, aprons, copper measuring cups and beeswax candles are also available in their online store. The children are homeschooled (following a Mormon-Christian curriculum) in one of the family’s barns by a woman who lives nearby. The Neelemans, who employ a cleaner but no nannies, drive a 15-seat minibus Daniel has said they hope to fill “someday.”
Critics see the social media posts promoted by Hannah and others like her as a war on feminism or fuel for men who want submissive wives. Hannah remains unapologetic. In an Instagram video, she called the widely cited Times of London profile “an attack on our family and my marriage, portraying me as oppressed with my husband being the culprit.” That characterization, she insisted, “couldn’t be further from the truth.”
