The Ballerina Farm Take Nobody Asked For
We don't get to dictate to others how and where they find joy.
I had a front row seat to a religious community that tried to emulate the Trad Wife Life all the way back in the 80s and 90s, so for me, The Trad Wife trend on TikTok is nothing new. Decades ago my mother won an award from Phyllis Schlafly for “Homemaker of the Year”, an award that she proudly displays to this day. As a former conservative, I also used to preach a watered down version of this myself but as a person who doesn’t resonate with womanhood, I wasn’t good at it. So I feel like I have enough receipts on the Trad Wife model to share a few thoughts on finding joy, inspired by the family that owns Ballerina Farm.
I’m sure by now you’ve read the article - for which some clickbait editor decided to use the melodramatic tagline “a hammer blow for feminism?” - but the gist is that this ranch life-ing, young Mormon woman named Hannah is a beauty queen with eight kids and a billionaire husband. According to the internet, she homeschools her kids herself (she actually hires a tutor), milks her cow directly into her coffee cup (for photoshoots, no mother of eight has time to just “run to the barn real quick” for a cup of coffee), and has no help from a nanny or screens, or really, her husband.
Photo by cottonbro studio
The husband Daniel, a billionaire scion, seems to me, terrifyingly unaware of the harms his wife is experiencing being in this position without sufficient support, even while he expounds on those harms to a reporter.
Hannah has become crowned unofficial queen of the Trad Wife TikTok, which I don’t think is entirely fair. She does not come across as an ambassador for her lifestyle in the article, rather she claims she is doing what God wants for her family specifically. Honestly, I think that’s fine. She claims she’s never used the term Trad Wife, and while I refuse to wade through her Insta searching all her hashtags, I think she’s being honest. She seems to have fallen into this life as opposed to setting out with it in mind. But that’s beside the point. The point, for me, is that despite having this sometimes glamorous life and more than enough financial resources to meet her needs, she seems to have very little agency and autonomy in her own life. And even if my perception is wrong (and it very well could be), her mental health is, by her husband’s own admission, abysmal. He does not seem in the least bit concerned by this fact??
Screenshot from the article reads “Still, Daniel says, [Hannah] sometimes gets so ill from exhaustion that she can’t get out of bed for a week.”
The rest of Trad Wife TikTok are a group of women who take to the internet to prove that you can be so much happier and more fulfilled if you follow their lifestyle of not having a job, staying home with your kids, and homemaking all day every day. It’s based on historical fiction and corporate marketing from the 1950s and 60s in the US more than reality. Additionally, “the nuclear family is the basis of society” is revisionist history that ignores and dehumanizes people all over the world, for most of history, and in most socioeconomic positions. [We can’t get into it now, but read Marriage: A History for receipts.] Nonetheless, the dream of the 50s is alive on TikTok, with marketing repackaged for Millennials and Gen Z, and being sold by sexy, skinny, wealthy, stay at home moms rather than frumpy, out of touch, old white people like James Dobson and Phyllis Schlafly. Yet the Trad Wives online are running the same errand and promising the exact same “happy wife, happy life” outcomes.
As I have moved farther left politically and become more feminist/womanist in my views - with the benefit of hindsight, therapy, and life experience - I have begun to realize that I was only carrying water for the patriarchy by preaching One Size Fits All Wives nonsense. The problem is not that staying home is disempowering to women. It can be very empowering if it’s the right choice FOR YOU. The problem is that patriarchy will only protect you if and when you fall in line. There is no acceptable reason to deviate from Trad Wifing, not even your physical and mental health. Even if abandoning the cause will keep you safer. Even if you need additional income.
The problem with patriarchy is the problem with all forms of authoritarianism: the system is always more valuable and important than the people within the system.
If you are no longer capable of performing your gender role, you’ll be demonized, mocked, and thrown to the wolves. You are no longer worthy of protection if you can’t play the role.
Patriarchy feels like the original Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party. You have to perform to be “on the team”. It requires outward, visible compliance and offers only conditional acceptance. It is a paradigm where maintaining the status quo is more important than the living, breathing individuals involved in the lifestyle. Your wellbeing is irrelevant. And the destruction of people who fail to comply with the system is guaranteed, because failure to comply with the model are grounds for dehumanization, exclusion, and violence.
Ultimately the Trad Wife life is only marketing. And kind of silly marketing at that. There is no lifestyle, religion, or family configuration that guarantees happiness for all humans. There are tradeoffs to working outside the home for many women and moms. There are also upsides to working outside the home for many of us.
But going back to Phyllis Schlafly and her fight against feminism for a moment. Part of Phyllis’s narrative was that feminism was trying to bully perfectly happy, stay at home moms into the workplace, which would then result in forcing all women into the draft. (???) Women from other socioeconomic backgrounds have also felt bullied by feminism “telling them that they have to” behave in a certain way in order to be real women. The issue is that the Trad Wives narratives, then and now, is saying the exact same thing back to feminism but in the inverse. “Actually, true happiness comes from rejecting feminism and Girl Boss mode in favor of staying at home to make pies and babies!”
I find both of these takes disappointing. Policing women’s lives - telling them they MUST stay home with children or conversely that they MUST Girl Boss in corporate America - will NEVER create joy, success, or inner peace for all women. Why is this a thing that needs to be said? Different kinds of people and families have different kinds of needs. This is not news. The prescriptive nature of Trad Wives and feminism are both incorrect. You know how humans are all wildly different, right? What on earth makes us think we all need to be doing the exact same thing in order to be happy? Stop that. All of you.
The absolute best thing we can all do is to understand that a wide spectrum of support benefits all of us much better than time spent (wasted!) preaching or policing, and produces better results. We don’t have to hate on Trad Wives for staying home and making videos. They are not going to destroy feminism, even if that is their intention. The economy couldn’t function if all women or even half of women disappeared from the workforce. There aren’t enough wages being offered to men for all women to stay home and care for kids full time. Our government allows corporations to extract wealth generated by workers and hand it to shareholders, which means there’s limited currency, capital, and opportunity across the board for ~99% of normal folks.
If you’re a traditional wife and stay at home mom and you love that? Great! Go with god. As long as you are experiencing joy, and you and your children are having your autonomy respected, I am cheering for you. But I also expect you to not dictate to me what I can or should do with my life and family and children and home and employment. Because you aren’t involved and it does not impact you. Right?
The Trad Wife trend is just beautiful, sexy marketing for the same old authoritarian patriarchy we’ve experienced for millennia. It is not the end of feminism. Being a homemaker is very fulfilling for many people at many stages of life! Sometimes it’s necessary. Often, it’s a beautiful choice! But it’s not a perfect solution to the harms of unregulated capitalism, domestic violence, rampant misogyny and misogynoir, or the stripping of bodily autonomy from women and pregnant people. Neither is the empowered feminism narrative, especially if some women are feeling disrespected by it.
Finding joy is at least in part a deeply communal pursuit. Hyperindividualism, be it the nuclear family or the empowered corporate mom, will never deliver on its promises, because we didn’t evolve in isolation to succeed on our own in the wild. Thriving in isolation is not real in the barnyard or the boardroom. We have decades of data demonstrating this. Thriving without autonomy is not real. Even if you enjoy normative gender roles and find value in them, it requires ongoing, enthusiastic consent.
Personally, I don’t aspire to be a Trad Wife or a kickass Girl Boss. I aspire to live in interdependent community, and to experience the sense of fulfillment, connection, and belonging with the many incredible humans I have the joy of knowing. I aspire to be less influencer online and more available for my kids and neighbors. I aspire to always find joy in others experiencing joy, and to create more spaces for people to do just that. Other people can and should find joy and thrive wherever they desire, so long as it does not create harm for anyone else. But we don’t get to dictate to others how or what joy and thriving looks like, whether we are Trad Wives, Girl Bosses, or anything else.