The pioneer dream is deeply engraved in American culture and history. It’s simple but powerful: setting forth into the unknown, with just a few belongings and your immediate family, and creating a self-reliant, flourishing home in an unforgiving environment. As depicted in the (now resoundingly cancelled) Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, it’s a dream that required practical skills, physical strength and mental fortitude.
It was also, always, an easier sell to men than to women, which is why frontiersmen often had to obtain a wife by mail order. What for a man might be a pioneering adventure might be, for his wife, an arduous daily grind of growing and preparing food, making and mending clothing, laundry, animal husbandry and so on, all with no family help and multiple children underfoot.
Over time, though, a slew of innovations — from cars to ready-made foods to labour-saving home devices — have made it ever easier to live life in a seemingly self-contained way. Perhaps most of all, this has liberated women to pursue individualist dreams just like men. As the American antifeminist Phyllis Schlafly once observed, women were liberated more by the washing machine than feminism.
But what if something was lost, as the grind disappeared? This was the view of perhaps the most controversial modern critic of technology: the late mathematician and domestic terrorist Ted Kaczynski, commonly known as the “Unabomber”. In his manifesto, Kaczynski argued that as “industrial society” developed, it corroded human freedom, leaving behind enfeebled, inhibited and “oversocialised” individuals unable to exercise full agency in the “power process”. He was so vehemently opposed to this perceived degradation that he pursued a campaign of anti-technology vandalism and letter-bombing that killed three and injured 23 more.
Obviously I don’t condone terrorism. But there’s something to the idea that labour-saving devices have stripped us of practical skills, making us more dependent on their services and infrastructure, even as they relieve us of effort. But if you can’t separate agency from effort, what does this imply for all those mothers condemned to the grind? This tension supplies much of the power, and also the controversy, surrounding the very contemporary cultural figure of the “tradwife”.
Across social media, these influencers document their labours as wives and mothers. In doing so, they make a virtue out of adding the very domestic chores back into their lives that earlier generations of women rejoiced in escaping. And this invites reflection. With such a reactionary message, why is their content so popular? Was Kaczynski on to something, about the need to escape “oversocialised” industrial society? And if so, what does this mean for women?
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SubscribeIt’s some sort of law of social thermodynamics that, as society becomes more and more complex, it requires ever-greater integration with said society to become economically “independent”.
Also, no nanny?! Why, I bet she sends her kids to bed without their nightly Madeira, too!
These kinds of things are like reality television. Not a real reality.
They are not like reality tv, they are reality tv. No different than real housewives of Beverly Hills. A form of entertainment competing for eyeballs and engagement with high margin product pull-through.
I guess one difference is that it is more led by the couple themselves. One of the terrible things that turned me off regular reality tv was the way producers manipulate footage and scenarios to maximise conflict and create ‘villains’…which is fine, until you realise these people were almost always taken out of context (or caught at a low point) and are going to have terrible public reputations for the rest of their lives. Most also don’t actually see much financial reward for it.
At least with a YouTube channel people control the image they want to put out to the world.
It’s not just reality TV. I remember seeing an interview with an actor who was a “bad guy” on a long running US TV soap opera. He said he was regularly accosted in the street by people complaining about the “bad” things he had done whilst in character.
It seems that whether we are female or male the media tell us what we should do rather than letting us blunder through our happy and unhappy days. Just go away and leave us alone !
I’m old school, the wife tells me what I have to do.
But do you do it?
Your answer will indicate whether you are truly old school.
Through decades of experience I attempt to interpret the actual requirement and assign a timely basis to get to it.
I’d be happy enough to embrace the “Pioneer” life if I had 30 employees to do the actual work. I always thought that if I ever went into farming, I would want to be the sort of British farmer who wears a tweed jacket, and drives around in a Range Rover, checking up on the help.
That’s the “Gentleman” farmer who doesn’t, actually, do any work because he Inherited the land and the wealth. Dream on.
I have always had a sneaking respect for the British Upper Middle Class, despite being from an essentially working class background myself. I have a friend from the same home town as me (but from “the other side of the tracks”) who went to Rugby School. Even now (he is in his mid 70s), a mention of the place induces a look of horror on his face. No wonder building an Empire didn’t faze them.
I understand your thoughts Martin. I’m a hill farmer at the top of a glen. At the bottom of the glen is a large estate. His Lordship spends most of his time in London. The reality for his big estate though is that it’s now a very diverse set of businesses in order to make the money needed. The farm sends its organic beef to the best London restaurants, they have high end glamping pods, there’s history tours of the castle, a restaurant & coffee shop, walled garden tours, high end wedding venue. etc.
The estate manager who went to school with me, tells me it all just about washes its face financially.
I’m guessing the image of the Lord of the manor has met the harsh reality of the 21st century
Well, sure. Things have a habit of doing that. Still, I suppose the Upper Classes have realised it by now (those that have rural holdings, rather than city holdings anyway). I read a biography about a guy called Nubar Gulbenkian a few years ago. His father was Calouste Gulbenkian, one of the first people to make money in oil 130 or so years ago. He was famously called “Mr 5%” because of his habit of taking a 5% share of every oilfield development he brokered, realising that he could only run a few of them directly, but he could have a 5% interest in hundreds of them. They family lived in a ritzy part of London surrounded by the city residences of the aristocracy, all of whom were astounded that Gulbenkian Senior went to work at his office every day (not realising that he could have bought most of them a dozen times over).
Aaaah, the Tradwives…live and let live, I say.
Watched an interview with one of them, Estee Williams, a few weeks ago because I was writing something about the phenomenon. Was quite suspicious, as the woman really does look like some kind of cartoon – but she was very nice. She was articulate, settled, happy and well explained why she has chosen to lead the life she has. While that kind of dependence on my other half is not for me, I get it. And good for her (and her husband) for making the life they want together.
Being a tradewife sounds like a much more appealing deal. We spent the weekend daydreaming about growing all our own veg in a garden out in the country, far away from the city and the people who stand outside my bedroom window at night in summer, playing awful Arab pop music, bashing each other’s heads in and screaming (I live in a pedestrian zone in a fairly “colourful” area – no wonder I don’t have a TV, I just need to look out the window and I have more entertainment than Netflix).
In the meantime, I make my jams and mess around with micro-gardening projects on my windowsill. Currently: a pot of forget-me-nots that are expanding like some kind of monster green sourdough and 5 little lemon trees from seeds I planted just for fun after I made lemon chicken several months ago. It’s all good fun.
I hope you get your dream one day if it hadn’t had a new town,future slum plonked on it.
Sounds very creative, actually. Making the best of it.
Anyone who pursues a career as a social media influencer while claiming to be “traditional” is obviously full of it.
Did you really need to dig any deeper than that? I dread to think how many hours of this lady’s content you watched to prepare for this article.
Indeed. The young woman’s life is so obviously hypocritical and fraudulent that only a very slow thinker would need to write a whole article to work it out.
It takes a shallow thinker to read such a superficial interpretation into the far wider perspective that MH invariably includes within her articles.
I usually find her wider perspectives to be either glaringly obvious, or verbose piffle.
I guess you’re not understanding them; some insights are beyond narrow minds.
The use of the word “piffle” is revealing, in that respect.
Ooh!
Then why read them?
I believe she wrote “a whole article” to a) explain it to others, and b) pay the bills.
I don’t think many people here would need the general principles explained, although I suppose there’s some interest in the details.
Having never heard about any of it I found it interesting.
But it sounds enjoyable to me,even with all those adorable kiddies,it may not be Little House etc but it’s defo The Waltons.
A good and interesting analysis, thanks.
Well, yes. Respectfully, I would submit that it’s two mediocre analyses, one of the show, and another of the actual traditional lifestyle. The two keep getting tangled, to no good effect. Little House on the Prairie (the show, although the books were better) was entertainment. It did little to illuminate the debate about the pros and cons of modernity. Same with this show.
The question “Where, we are invited to wonder, does this beautiful, gifted woman get to be a person, over and above being a dutiful wife and mother?” made me lose interest. It is unserious.
Well,try being an ugly old spinster that nobody likes,has ever wanted to have sex with and gets shouted at by the black kids in the nearby house “it’s the idiot,it’s the idiot” when you’re outside gardening . Since their Mum is single,got 5 so far and just had a new baby maybe her sprogs should revise their definition of ‘idiot”. I don’t have ANY kids to feed,clothes,laugh with,read to,have about the place,I don’t have to cook and clean if I don’t want to,I’ve got no man to beat me up,but the older of the black neighbour kids seem quite keen on the idea in theory at least so I guess I could get that equality too. God,my life is WONDERFUL. I MUST BE THE SUCCESS!
You definitely sound eccentric.
You should be a writer!
Don’t worry – if many women adopted a tradwife stay at home lifestyle they wouldn’t be earning money and paying taxes. That would never do. The State has an endless appetite for revenue and doesn’t care to be thwarted.
Yes. No one really cares if you have a career or not. CEO of Virgin media or shelf stacker at Tesco,it’s all one to them so long as you pay tax they can spend on things you don’t approve of.
Agrarian back-to-the-land social media influencer? The hypocrisy is obvious in the description.
Lighten up,it’s fun to watch,if it’s not fun to live thats not your problem
The faux-traditionalism masks a very contemporary hyper-individualism. Narcissism dressed up as wholesomeness and monetised. This is a media business not a farm.
All the better then,it’ll actually make a living
Oh dear, it seems that even nostalgia isn’t as good as it used to be! Personally I can think of no period in history that I would prefer to have been born in – even as a king.
Indeed. Even kings could die (in our terms) prematurely of influenza or tetanus or…
A creepy doctor.
There is everything to be said for subsuming one’s ego into family, duties and chores, meanwhile rejecting the absurd progressive, identarian version of personhood, but if it is not symmetrical, involving the man as much as the woman, then it becomes merely an exercise in power
I got about five paragraphs in and realized I just can’t be made to care. Everyone has some sort of social media gimmick. It’s tedious.
It’s stunning to me how the media can take a glance at something and think they know it. In this instance, bias, envy and worldly drench has blinded them. Ballerina Farm is a mail-order business so, like any other business, they have workers to execute. But anyone who imagines the home is a photo studio doesn’t have an iPhone nor conceived of a tripod, which is how 99% of BH content is created, by the Neelemans themselves. Just one of 500 details the media has gotten dead-wrong in recent write-ups.
“And the light shines in the darkness and the darkness comprehendeth it not.” John 1:5
They’re not working for The Man so got to be brought down.
It’s their narrative glasses that trouble them.
A very insightful article. I always look forward to hearing from Ms. Harrington. Check out this wonderful series on life on a Tudor era farm.
Tales From The Green Valley Series – YouTube
Everyone worked and contributed to the household economy. What you had was two intersecting worlds of men and women; worlds with their own hierarchies and duties. Camille Paglia has often noted this reality.
It reminds me of when I worked for five years as an interpreter at Plimoth Plantation, a living history recreation of the early Plymouth settlement in Massachusetts.
Well, yes, but Hannah is professionally occupied in the full-time business of playing Hannah. That kinda limits the time available for the kids. Who are probably getting lots of attention from their own directors and coaches for acting like themselves. 😉
A lot of hubris and ignorance in the word “probably.”
It’s hard to live on one salary anymore. Eight kids? How can any women watch all of them at once. I suggest you try it.
Why do you need to watch your kids all the time or even know where they are all the time. In my 1960s childhood,and my Mum was a careful and strict Mum.but nevertheless I could go off for hours,my siblings could,other kids had even more freedom than us. Your parents felt no need to know exactly where you were all day or what you were doing.
By the late 1990s I was totally fed up with lady writers publishing books or writing TV series about how much they disliked their children and how objectionable and inconvenient to they found them.
No surprise to learn that Daniel and Hannah are actors playing the roles of Daniel and Hannah in the make-believe reality show called Ballerina Farm. Everything that makes the cut for viewing release must be carefully scripted and scrupulously edited, including the apparent inequality of the marriage relationship. Making Hannah appear to be overworked and oppressed is part of the show, because it’s catnip to the self-righteous viewers and the producers know it.
An utterly pointless boring article written by a vacuous nobody about another nobody.
Joanna and Chip Gaines started all this 20 years ago. In that situation, the husband plays the doofus, in this one, the boor. It’s entertainment, and its vicariousness is fun till it’s not. I know a “tradwife,” who doesn’t have a camera crew logging her every breath. She’s gorgeous, smart, industrious, focused, vivacious, and always pregnant. She’s going to be moving within the year, and I’m heart broken because she’s a breath of normalcy in a sea of idiocy.
Always pregnant? Yuk!
Reminds me of a spicy moment back in artschool- the communal kitchen was in a mess by the end of the day so I nobly decided to clean up before going home – and in walked the sculpture teacher who happened to be midwest American. « That’s what I like to see! But it would be better if you were barefoot and pregnant » . Of course the joke was on him for embodying all our favourite hillbilly stereotypes, and I could not be offended in the face of such silliness.
There is a saying about the level of flak being taken and one’s proximity to the target. Perhaps the trad wife thing is extreme. Is the litany of videos from 30ish professionally successful but personally empty women where they insist, through bitter tears, how happy they are better?
Also, the only thing real about reality tv is that actual people are involved in the production. It’s not the only thing in common that reality television has with its dramatic and comedic cousins.
I’ve heard that some tv production companies are already looking into AI,then they wont even need unreliable real actual people.
OK, rich people cosplaying an “authentic” traditional family and the life on a 19th-century farm… Not that original as an idea, I would say.
Reminds me of stories about some young men from rich families who, just for the thrill of it, spend a couple of years as beggars in the street. Now maybe such young men also have their dedicated channels on social media where they present the “authenticity” of their beggar’s experience to broader audiences.
Bristol the city I live in is stiff with Trust Fund beggars. There is a whole alternative street scene with its own rules,laws and etiquette.
Ah, that’s very interesting, thank you. Things are getting organised and even codified, as it seems, in this particular group 😉
Peoples Republic of S…. C….for one…active Class War cell…etc
Good point. It seems JD Vance thinks we should cosplay minor characters on “Happy Days”.
“Obviously I don’t condone terrorism.”
Actually, nothing is obvious any more; so thanks for clarifying.
Is there really anything ‘as it seems’ on social or broadcast media? This isn’t new. I recall many years ago seeing David Attenborough being the first ever human to enter a cave, filmed from the inside; soldiers raising the Stars and Stripes on Okinawa (?) were posing. “Reality” entertainment is not real, but it can be entertaining!
Neil Armstrong driving a sand buggy on the moon while singing hippity hippity,a profound moment for mankind.
30 employees doing the filming, packaging and homeschooling? No wonder they have time to film mealmaking and cow milking.
sounds like a jealous writer mad that they did not think of this idea first…
Strange level of resentment here. These people have a successful family business. They make good money, employ a bunch of other people and seem to be working very hard at it. An important part of it is Hannah’s PR work. Truthfully, if she enjoys starring in her own short films I can’t imagine objecting. A bit of pride, even vanity, is a sign of a healthy human psyche. I’m sure the kids will look back very fondly on their life at Ballerina Ranch. And no marriage is quite what it seems; the Neeleman’s included, we can be certain of that.
Mary herself has written about the empowerment of the life of pre-Industrial, working class households. In fact I could swear I once heard her presenting an argument that women were better off in the Middle-ages. Ballerina Ranch is like that except with internal combustion engines, central heating, anti-biotics, etc.
I’m kinda envious.
It sounds lovely to me.
BS There is a camera everywhere, which means she is a poseur.
Don’t think a trad wife knew her best angle, lighting or had a photographer.
I grew up on a small family farm where the traditional life was more a matter of necessity than a hobby. It is hard but it is also gratifying. Men and women work equally hard just in different roles. Men more physical labor and women more detailed work requiring planning and often multiple stages of processing. Look at the process for canning peaches for instance. It is not glamorous or romantic, I took great pains to wipe the cow-shit off my shoes after morning milking so not to be teased at school. There is something to be said for knowing how your food got to the table though.
This tradwife nonsense is just incel wish fulfillment. No wonder you guys love it!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGrnOREeIBo
I appreciate Harrington actually making the distinction between a 1950s-style “tradwife” and the more practical “tradewife” who engages in something akin to the home economies people have nurtured for centuries. Such things are not often discussed anymore, but everyone has a home economy, even if most just mirror the global economy’s dependence on disposable commodities and cheap outsourced labor. I personally welcome people trying to reclaim a few of these forgotten arts, even if I find the highly selective and sanitized portrayal a little ridiculous (and the haters predictably flooding their comment sections with cries about “privilege” and “problematic” and “eww nature has bugs!” even worse). But that’s just social media for you. Actual homesteaders do still exist, but most of them would not touch Instagram or TikTok with a 10-foot-pole, or at least not the manic world of short-form content.
The discourse around Mrs. Neeleman’s choice to live this lifestyle reminds me of the years I used to work for a Muslim fashion brand that catered to the hijab-wearing market. Although neither Muslim nor hijab-wearing myself, I was no stranger to the frankly endless conversations about choice, and particularly the feminists who insisted that my colleagues only wore what they did because they were brainwashed and oppressed by male relatives and a patriarchal religion. (An argument which was of course returned in kind by more modest-dressers asserting that *actually,* it was the bikini wearing women who were truly brainwashed and oppressed by secularism and the Western male gaze.) It’s true that none of us makes our own choices in a vacuum, but it’s a little too convenient to project that analysis only onto those who make choices we personally wouldn’t. All the more reason to take people at their word, as long as everyone also knows to blink twice if they need rescuing.
“Mrs. Neeleman? We say Ms. nowadays. Or do you feel she’s definitely a Mrs?
Eight kids? A baby born every 18months? With no pain killers? I would sleep with a gun and tell my husband I’d use it if he ever came near me. (My mother-in-law, after nine kids, told my father-in-law she’d kill him if he came near her only she had a knife.)
Exactly!
I don’t know about this farm,this couple or their business but it sounds great to me. Yes, despite the high tech a return to the pre-industrial revolution family that could live and work in their traditional family home + land. Over the last 30 years I’ve seen on tv,read about in magazine features or heard on radio,people men and women who went to university,spent 10 years in the City,trading,working in IT and then on having saved enough money they’ve chucked it all in and established themselves as rare breed pig farmers,or chickens,or the Head Gardener at an NT property. Jobs that pre WW2 only ignorant thickos did because higher up careers were not available to them..No,I don’t think that. But you only have to know a bit of literature,watch some old British movies and have known a few old people in the 1960s when you were a little kid to know that was how it was thought of them. Now very clever people get to realize that sort of thing is what they really like doing. But they have the nous to make their money first and they are savvy enough to know you’ve got to sell more than a plain commodity. You’ve got to enhance value. Your actually selling THE STORY the sausages,or eggs or fresh veg is the added extra!
People like the binary, trad wife or career woman, in fact there is a spectrum. My daughter is a very happy stay at home Mama to two young children. Her husband works long hours in a start up. But Daddy helps a lot with the kids, and the cooking when he is not working. My daughter loves cooking, and they raise chickens and some vegetables and she enjoys that and feels privileged to be able to dedicate herself to home and babies, for now anyway.
Tradwife influencers are entertainment, and maybe inspiration, but the reality is that there is a huge spectrum. But what IS true is that many, perhaps most, women would love to be able stay home and take care of their kids for at least a few years or longer when the children are young.
You can count a lot of men in also.
Mary H. is a good and interesting writer. Gratitude.
Servants. Exactly. In the old days you either were a servant or you had servants. Think George Eliot’s Mrs. Poyser in Adam Bede. Of course, Mrs. Poyser’s servants were mostly teenage girls. And, wow, did they need a firm hand. As now.
> Just those with the skills, the money, the charisma, the space for a home office — and a spouse who shares the vision.
AND incredible luck.
Thanks for pulling the curtain on the Wizard of Oz. Now I have even more appreciation for her schtick. And, sigh, the pioneer dream has been my childhood fantasy even before Little House or the Waltons. And I’m neither trad or a wife.
Reality TV is big business.
Balanced presentation. I liked the punchline about envy. Yeah, it’s a clever show. Farming does not really pay that much. It’s the most essential thing to do and they get paid so little.
Which is why the farm produce is secondary to the product this couple is actually selling.
The untraditional of the self-consciously constructed “Trad” is an idea Harrington examines in her book and it is delved into even more deeply as a modern “idyll” (read idol) in RJ Snell’s most recent book—Lost in the Chaos: Immanence, Trancendence, and Despair in the Empire of Desire.
Hands off Hannah! I think what she and her husband are doing is fabulous and agree with equally wonderful MH – envy has a lot to do with the media storm surrounding her interview.
Back in the late 70’s my then husband and I ran a diary farm, had chickens and a pack of children and I basically did everything Hannah does- minus the Mrs America ♀️.
Plus. Its entirely normal to have help when you’re running a business from home.
I simply don’t know what all the fuss is about.
I don’t know what all the fuss is about, either! But you won’t find much cheer in the comment section here.
I’m glad you were able to enjoy the tradwife life! And even whilst tending to all those diaries.
Virtually every small business is what you describe as a ‘productive household’. Everyone has their own part and that is embedded in the daily rhythm of life. If not, the business will generally fail. As, unfortunately, most of them do anyway.
That Times fake so-called ‘journalist’ Megan Agnew has now apologized for many of the ideological lies and opinionation that she made up about this family. Please look at her mea culpa.
I heard my teenage children discussing tradwives, so I googled the term to see what they were talking about.
The mainstream newspapers and magazines were full of condemnation, which is usually a positive sign. I gave ballerina farm a miss as it sounded slightly odd, but found a site belonging to a woman living in Cheltenham. Her views were sensible, with no hint of the extremism hinted at by the feminist mainstream. Her story was that she grew up in a broken home, and dreamed of having a whole family herself. This matched what my son had said; tradwives tend to be women who want to create the happy home they wish they’d had themselves, but as they have no personal experience the outcome can be slightly odd.
My comment is that a tradwife is impossible without a “tradhusband”, and slightly pointless unless there are trad children, so this development might be better termed “tradfamily”. But it has to start somewhere, with a women who trusts a man enough to become dependant on him, and that takes real courage in contemporary society.
Thank goodness and phew. For a minute there judging by the headline I thought Mary Harrington was going to join the woke brigade of miserable feminists who excoriate the likes of the Neelemans.