Earlier this year, influencer and businesswoman Hannah Neeleman made headlines after taking part in a beauty pageant just 12 days after giving birth to her eighth child.
Her instagram account, Ballerina Farm, has 10 million followers who enjoy snapshots of her life farming, baking and tending to children.
She’s stunningly beautiful and her home, with its cohesive colour palette, facilitates an aesthetically pleasing social media feed.
Last month the Sunday Times profiled the 34 year-old dubbing her the ‘queen of tradwives,’ seemingly lifting the veil on a family business of which she is the face.
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Neeleman’s former career as a ballerina was truncated so she could leave New York City for Utah and spend the next 13 years having babies.
She and her husband observe a traditional Mormon lifestyle. That includes no birth control and no elective abortions. The recent interview raised many feminist eyebrows.
Notably, that Neeleman’s husband frequently answered for her, that she has forgone pain relief during all but one of the births (when he wasn’t present) and that he doesn’t want nannies raising the children.
Though she does not self-identify as a tradwife - a niche online subculture promoting a patriarchal lifestyle - Neeleman has been embraced by the movement for her apparent adherence to traditional gender roles. Not to be confused with stay-at-home mothering, self-identified tradwives tend to espouse a political agenda.
DCU professor of gender and digital culture, Debbie Ging, explains the origins of the tradwife community and its roots in white and male supremacy ideology.
‘This phenomenon fits very well with a whole raft of men’s rights rhetoric which also overlaps with far-right anti-immigration talking points. A lot of this fits around the “great replacement” theory; white supremacists and make supremacists are equally invested in traditional gender roles. The tradwife imagery is the palatable point of view, it seems innocuous and innocent. But there are a lot of hidden messages.’
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