The Neelemans, from left: Lois, 5, Daniel, 35, Flora, 6 months, Hannah, 34, Mabel, 2, Martha, 3, Henry, 12, George, 9, Frances, 7, Charles, 10

Hannah Neeleman was pregnant with her eighth child and she had two due dates. The first was for a baby, obviously. The second, just under two weeks later, was for a beauty pageant.

Neeleman had been crowned Mrs American in August 2023 at a Las Vegas mega-casino and resort, so she was invited back to the city to compete in Mrs World, parading around the stage in a swimsuit and 5in heels, shoulders back and hip popped, spray-tanned, glistening — and 12 days postpartum. Obviously.

“I had known it was coming,” says Neeleman, 34, sitting in her kitchen in rural Utah, two of her children literally swinging off her long golden hair. “So I had prepared.” During the pregnancy it took brute strength, guts and bravery to make sure she could eventually look so perfectly pretty. She kept fit, weightlifting before her children woke up. She had ice baths, lowering herself into the irrigation ditches on the farm. And she took iron supplements to speed up the healing.

On January 2 this year Flora was born in the upstairs bedroom, without pain relief. “A one-push baby,” Neeleman said on Instagram. In the first days she “laid low”, not leaving the house. On the fifth day, she says, “I looked at Daniel” — her husband — “and I said, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to be able to go. This is a lot.’ I was bleeding and swollen, and milk was coming in.”

Nursing her newborn daughter Flora at Mrs World in Las Vegas in January

THE NEW YORK TIMES

On the seventh day she rose from bed, doing her barre exercises in the bathroom (a former ballerina, she trained at the Juilliard School in New York). By day nine she was trying on outfits, zipping herself into a pair of leather trousers and skin-tight white ballgown. Day ten: spray tan. Day eleven: a two-hour flight with a newborn to Las Vegas, her husband and seven children following behind, along with other members of her family. And by day twelve she was on stage. Luckily, she says, she had stopped bleeding.

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She made it through to the second round of the competition, her social media following exploded (as @ballerinafarm she has nine million followers on Instagram, 7.4 million on TikTok and 1.5 million on YouTube) — and people went berserk. Was this the ultimate act of empowerment, Neeleman doing what she wanted, or the ultimate demonstration of oppression, her tender body encased in spiky sequins? Neeleman, whether she liked it or not, was declared leader of a new and controversial group of the internet: the “trad wives”.

Throughout the maelstrom she has remained — publicly at least — steadfast. She never explained, she never complained, a silence I had interpreted as defiance. But is it? Well, I have flown across the breadth of America and driven through the mountains of rural Utah to ask her. If, that is, I can get her alone.

The Neelemans and their children — Henry, 12, Charles, 10, George, 9, Frances, 7, Lois, 5, Martha, 3, Mabel, 2, and baby Flora — live on a 328-acre farm just outside the small town of Kamas, a pioneering existence beneath a big sky and up against the brutal elements. “Welcome in,” says Daniel, 35, opening the door, baby in his arms. He is part of the family brand (@hogfathering — 490,000 Instagram followers), an all-American steak of a husband, square-jawed and denim-clad.

A pregnant Hannah Neeleman, winner of Mrs Utah America in 2021, with her husband, Daniel BALLERINA FARM / INSTAGRAM

“Hannah will be out in a minute,” he continues, walking into the kitchen. It is photogenic chaos. The antique wooden counters are stacked with Le Creuset pans and mismatched pottery. There is an Aga, installed by the only man in the west who knows how. I count 28 pairs of shoes by the door. “It’s so good to meet you,” Neeleman says, walking in, a tiny blonde beauty queen, her hair wet and cheeks flushed, impossibly pretty. She takes the baby from her husband. She will not leave Neeleman’s chest for the four hours we’re together.

Even before pageantgate, Neeleman was one of the most popular influencers in America, famous online for depicting her family’s wild, earthy existence. Her followers have included the actresses Jennifer Garner and Hilary Duff. A devout Mormon who was raised in a Mormon family, she bakes perfectly scored sourdough loaves, milks cows straight into her coffee cup and gives birth by candlelight with no pain relief.

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Living out here, it must be hard to envision all the millions of eyes watching them. “I feel like we’re doing what God wants,” Neeleman says. “We’re on His errand a little bit,” Daniel adds. “We’re on His errand a little bit,” she repeats.

The family gathers for dinner at Ballerina Farm, where ready meals are off the menu COREY ARNOLD FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE

How does she respond to the social media storms? There was one after she said at another pageant that she feels most empowered after she has a baby. There were others when she encouraged the use of natural remedies over traditional medicine, and another when she said Daniel had drop-kicked a cockerel across the yard after it attacked one of their children.

“Daniel is so good about that,” she says, looking to her husband. “He says you can’t lean into what people are saying or the titles people are putting on you. You just have to live your life and shut that out, because if not it will overtake you.” It doesn’t have an impact on her at all? “I mean, it does. I’ll hear things. It’s no fun, like ” She pauses, looking up at Daniel, who is now standing behind her. “What do you think upsets us the most?” she asks him. “For whatever reason I’m kind of numb to it,” he says.

Trad wives are an internet phenomenon; women who have rejected modern gender roles for the more traditional existence of wife, mother and homemaker — and who then promote that life online, some to millions of followers. Their lifestyle is often, though not always, bound to Christianity. They film themselves cooking mad things from scratch (chewing gum from corn syrup, waffles from a sourdough starter), their faces glowing in beams of sunlight, their voices soft and breathy, their children free range.

Getting ready for the natural birth of her seventh child, Mabel, 2022 BALLERINA FARM / INSTAGRAM

In order to explain trad wives — and their popularity — we need to look back 15 years or so, when the fourth wave of feminism was breaking. This was the “girl boss” era, when women were told to be bolder in the workplace, to lean in further, to break glass ceilings. The poster woman for the movement at the time was the Facebook boss Sheryl Sandberg. But as the years went on women realised they’d been sold a lie: this individualistic feminism didn’t resolve anything unless you were a millionaire. For normal working mothers the girl-boss era achieved virtually nothing.

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After years of silence there also began a very public purging, women talking about how mind-numbing weaning is, about the isolation of maternity leave, the challenges of everyday life with irrational toddlers. Paradoxically this made it harder for women to be honest about any of motherhood’s joys. Those who succeeded were seen as smug — or saboteurs.

And so, as a reaction to both the girl bosses and the frazzled mothers, along came a group of women who didn’t seem to care about any of that. They advocated for a life that rejected the drive for money, public power and success, and elevated gentle domesticity and hands-on motherhood to an almost divine state. Enter the trad wives.

One of the most influential trad wives is Nara Smith, a 22-year-old Mormon model (four million Instagram followers) who talks in a voice so soft she sounds as though she has been brainwashed by a cult, and is constantly pregnant and draining something fermented through muslin. “Keep up your beauty,” says Estee C Williams (120,000 Instagram followers), who gives off more of a submissive Fifties housewife vibe. “You and your husband will benefit.”

Fresh milk for the family

Fresh milk for the family

COREY ARNOLD FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE

COREY ARNOLD FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE

Many women I know, who have and want a life that looks totally different, are addicted to watching all this, though others are served it by an algorithm as if it is grooming us into submission. Some watch it as a sort of thrilling escapism, others simply find it soothing. And others still use it as a sort of rage-bait, taking pleasure in being annoyed by it all.

“Trad wives are seen as a counterculture against the ‘rot’ of low birth rates,” says Leslie Root, a behavioural scientist at the University of Colorado. “This isn’t isolated, it is part of a wider political anxiety that I am worried might ultimately end in attempts to circumscribe women’s lives.”

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Neeleman is the most well-known trad wife, despite having never attached herself to the movement or even used the term. How does she feel about it? “We were already together, doing what we were doing,” Daniel replies instead. “And then ‘trad wife’ came along. We can’t help it. This is what we are. If we’re trad dad, trad wife, so be it.”

Neeleman, however, thinks otherwise. “I don’t necessarily identify with it,” she says, “because we are traditional in the sense that it’s a man and a woman, we have children, but I do feel like we’re paving a lot of paths that haven’t been paved before.” That is the biggest paradox: in selling the life of a stay-at-home mother, Neeleman and the other trad wives have created high-earning jobs. They are being paid to act out a fantasy. “So for me to have the label of a traditional woman,” she continues cautiously, “I’m kinda like, I don’t know if I identify with that.”

Is the husband the head of the household here? “No,” Daniel answers. “We’re co-CEOs.” “Yeah,” Neeleman says. “We are.”

Charles shows off his riding skills COREY ARNOLD FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE

Is she a feminist? “I feel like I’m a femin-,” she stops herself. “There’s so many different ways you could take that word. I don’t even know what feminism means any more.” She “absolutely” feels as though she has become politicised by other people. “We try so hard to be neutral and be ourselves and people will put a label on everything. This is just our normal life.”

We head outside and into the truck, Daniel driving, me in the front, Neeleman and the toddlers in the back. The other kids are being home schooled in the barn, where they learn a Mormon-Christian syllabus, taught by a woman who lives down the track. I am told I will sit down with Neeleman, one on one, later in the afternoon.

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We pass the family’s minibus — a 15-seater. Is the aim to fill it? “Some day, yeah,” Daniel says. “We are getting old and worn out,” Neeleman says, baby Flora strapped to her chest, sounding less sure. “So we’ll see.”

Online the Neelemans sell meat boxes from their cows and pigs as well as branded sourdough starters, rock salt, copper measuring cups and beeswax candles. They have three full-time employees on the farm, thirty at the warehouse, more than ten in the office, and a creative director who manages the website visuals.

We drive past the dairy cows, looking out across a river valley and the arid mountains beyond. Was this what she always wanted, I ask when we get a moment alone, while Daniel checks on the animals. “No,” she says. “I mean, I was, like —” She pauses. “My goal was New York City. I left home at 17 and I was so excited to get there, I just loved that energy. And I was going to be a ballerina. I was a good ballerina.” She pauses again. “But I knew that when I started to have kids my life would start to look different.”

Neeleman and Flora tend to the dairy herd COREY ARNOLD FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE

Neeleman was the eighth of nine children born to Mormon parents in Springville, near Salt Lake City. The family ran a florist and the children were home schooled. Neeleman gravitated towards ballet. At 14 she went to summer school at Juilliard, returning for her undergraduate degree, which she paid for by competing in “scholarship pageants” — beauty pageants that offer academic scholarships or sometimes tuition money to winners.

Daniel also grew up in a Mormon family, one of nine, in Connecticut, the son of David Neeleman, billionaire founder of a number of commercial airlines, including JetBlue. His upbringing was moneyed and suburban. Was this what he always wanted, I ask him when he walks back over. “Yes,” he says. “I expected Hannah to be more at home with the kids, but she said, ‘I watched my parents working together and so whatever we do, we got to do it together.’ ”

He was 23 and she was nearly two years his junior when they were introduced by a mutual friend at a college basketball game. “I saw her and I was ready to go,” he says. “Sign me up. I was thinking, ‘Let’s get married.’ But she wouldn’t go on a date with me for six months.”

COREY ARNOLD FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE

One day she mentioned to Daniel that she was getting the five-hour flight from Salt Lake City to New York, back to Juilliard. She didn’t realise his dad owned the airline. “So Daniel was, like, ‘I’m on that same flight!’ ” she says. “I remember checking in and them saying, ‘You’re 5A and you’re 5B.’ I just thought, no way, that’s crazy!” Daniel smiles: “I made a call.” He had pulled strings at JetBlue. And so began their first date.

“Back then I thought we should date for a year [before marriage],” she continues. “So I could finish school and whatever. And Daniel was, like, ‘It’s not going to work, we’ve got to get married now.’ ” After a month they were engaged. Two months after that they were married, moving into an apartment Daniel rented on the Upper West Side. And three months after that she was pregnant, the first Juilliard undergraduate to be expecting “in modern history”.

Daniel got a job as the director of his father’s security company, moving their young family to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where before long she had three kids under four. At first she was still dancing professionally. The family eventually settled in Utah.

“Our first few years of marriage were really hard, we sacrificed a lot,” she says. “But we did have this vision, this dream and —” Daniel interrupts: “We still do.” What kind of sacrifices, I ask her. “Well, I gave up dance, which was hard. You give up a piece of yourself. And Daniel gave up his career ambitions.”

Performing in China, 2010 COURTESY OF HANNAH NEELEMAN

I look out at the vastness and don’t totally agree. Daniel wanted to live in the great western wilds, so they did; he wanted to farm, so they do; he likes date nights once a week, so they go (they have a babysitter on those evenings); he didn’t want nannies in the house, so there aren’t any. The only space earmarked to be Neeleman’s own — a small barn she wanted to convert into a ballet studio — ended up becoming the kids’ schoolroom.

Daniel wants to take me to see the new dairy farm buildings, while Neeleman goes back into the house to make lunch for the “kiddos”. We stop at an irrigation ditch (which he explains); the offices (which he explains); the milking stations (which he explains). I check my watch, feeling edgy. I want to talk to Neeleman.

“Just one more stop,” he says. Neeleman calls him. “OK,” he says to her. “We’re just heading your way,” he adds, driving in the opposite direction out into the fields to show me another ditch.

Finally we get back into the kitchen, sitting at the table surrounded by an ever-changing number of children. One is clattering a can opener next to my tape recorder, another is pulling a whole roast chicken from the Aga, three more gather around it with forks, eating it from the pan. Another spills a pail of milk over the floor. We have half an hour to talk before Neeleman has to take some of them to a ballet class.

I notice there’s no TV. “We watch some stuff on the computer,” one of her daughters says. YouTube videos? “No, just Little House on the Prairie.” How about iPads? “No,” another little girl says. “Except we can play ring-a-ring-o’-roses and jump on the tramp and play lacrosse and that’s everything.” How about phones? “No,” says eight-year-old George, one of the older kids. “Sometimes if we go with our cousins and we play [on a phone], then we’re, like, addicted to ’em.”

They have a cleaner but no childcare; Neeleman does all the food shopping — kids in tow — and cooks from scratch (they “don’t do” ready meals). Despite the more traditional aspects of their relationship, Daniel is a hands-on father, taking the kids out to the farm and doing all the laundry. The children appear to look after each other quite well too — there are so many that they seem to have become an almost self-sustaining entity. Still, Daniel says, Neeleman sometimes gets so ill from exhaustion that she can’t get out of bed for a week.

Daniel pulled strings at his father’s airline to secure his first date with Hannah COREY ARNOLD FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE

The bedroom is also where she had her children, with the exception of Henry and Martha, who were born in a hospital (a fact that did not escape some of her followers). “After that I was, like, I’m ready to go back home,” she says. “I just love having them at home. It’s so quiet.” She also gave birth to them without pain relief. None at all? She shakes her head. Why? “I don’t know, I just have never loved taking it.” She stops herself. “Except with Martha — I was two weeks overdue and she was 10lb and Daniel wasn’t with me ... ” She lowers her voice. Daniel is currently out of the room taking a phone call. “So I got an epidural. And it was an amazing experience.” Where was Daniel that day? “It was shipping day [for the meat boxes] and he was manning the crew.” But the epidural was kind of great? She pauses — and smiles. “It was kinda great.”

I want to ask her about birth control, but we are surrounded by so many of her children and Daniel is back in the room now too. Do you — I pause and look at her fixedly — plan pregnancies? “No,” Daniel says. “When he says no,” Neeleman responds gently, “it’s very much a matter of prayer for me. I’m, like, ‘God, is it time to bring another one to the Earth?’ And I’ve never been told no.”

“But for whatever reason it’s exactly nine months [after a baby] that she’s ready for the next one,” he says.

“It’s definitely a matter of prayer,” she says.

“It’s a matter of prayer but somehow it’s exactly nine months,” he says.

The Neelemans have strongly held Mormon beliefs, which they mention far more in person than they do online. The Mormon church emphasises heterosexual unions and sexual purity. It opposes elective abortions, allowing for exceptions only when the pregnancy results from rape or incest, or when there is a threat of life to mother or foetus.

Does Neeleman agree with the stance on abortion? “The church is a lot more lenient than a lot of states in the US,” Daniel says. “The church is against ‘I’m going to get an abortion because I’m not happy I’m pregnant’. We see the joy of having kids.”

“And the sanctity of life,” Neeleman says.

“Absolutely,” he continues. “And that’s probably why the church tells you, ‘Don’t have sexual relations, get married’ — because if not you might have a kid that you regret having and all of a sudden you get an abortion and that’s not good.”

COREY ARNOLD FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE

And they would see that as a sinful act? “Yes,” Daniel says. “You need Jesus,” Neeleman adds.

“Mom-mom-mom-mom-mom!” a little girl cries. “I want to go to ballet now!”

I can’t, it seems, get an answer out of Neeleman without her being corrected, interrupted or answered for by either her husband or a child. Usually I am doing battle with steely Hollywood publicists; today I am up against an army of toddlers who all want their mum and a husband who thinks he knows better.

Why, I ask before I leave, did she do those pageants in between babies? “Well, my sister called me and said, There’s a Mrs Utah, let’s do it together.’ Just to —” she gestures at the children around her —“break things up.”

And the sequined gowns? Well, they used to be in her bedroom cupboard, but with all of her stuff — and Daniel’s and Henry’s and Charles’s and George’s and Frances’s and Lois’s and Martha’s and Mabel’s and Flora’s — the cupboard got so full that there wasn’t any more room. So Daniel put them in the garage.
Listen to Megan Agnew discuss Hannah Neeleman and the trad wives movement on Monday’s episode of The Story, wherever you get your podcasts

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