You may acknowledge Halfway, Utah, because the storybook backdrop to Hallmark Christmas motion pictures like “Christmas on Obligation.” When you’re from Utah, you may acknowledge it because the village that appears transplanted from the Swiss Alps, full with a glockenspiel clock warbling hourly from the city corridor.
However if you happen to’re a girl with any diploma of susceptibility to gingham aprons, hand-hewn sourdough knives, milk cradling a thick layer of cream, enamel candlestick holders or extremely real looking, extremely cute asparagus-shaped candles to go within the candlestick holders, you may know Halfway for an additional motive. You may realize it as the house, nevertheless reluctant, of the Ballerina Farm Retailer.
Ballerina Farm, which provides the shop, is a working farm about half an hour’s drive away from Halfway by way of the snow-frosted mountains and cow pastures of rural northern Utah. Nevertheless it’s additionally a girl — the incarnate creativeness of 35-year-old Hannah Neelemana Juilliard-trained ballerina who gave up dancing to turn out to be a farmer and mom of 9.
Ballerina Farm is the model she constructed atop warmly lit movies of herself pulling off healthful culinary feats, like feta from milk she milked herself, typically in a prairie costume, often with a number of blond youngsters underfoot, all the time close to her vintage-looking cast-iron Aga range.
And, pretty or not, Ballerina Farm has turn out to be a byword for a sure form of influencer on the heart of an impassioned debate over what a girl must be. She has 23 million followers throughout TikTok, Instagram and YouTubeand plenty of of them appear to roundly dislike her. Her, or what they suppose she stands for.
Settled by Swiss converts to Mormonism within the 1800s, Halfway doesn’t do nicely with change. When Primary Road’s first and solely stoplight appeared some years in the past, “it was just like the world was coming to an finish,” stated Jennifer Mangum-Whaley, 56, an inside designer who additionally owns Halfway’s year-round Christmas retailer.
When she heard the Ballerina Farm Retailer was coming to city, Ms. Mangum-Whaley checked out the corporate’s farmstand. “There have been teenagers in line prefer it was Disney World,” she stated. “I used to be like, ‘What is that this?’”
For some in Halfway, Ballerina Farm Retailer’s opening final July has been nothing wanting one other traffic-related apocalypse. Droves of younger girls in lengthy clothes and cowboy boots started lining up for comfortable serve made with Ballerina Farm’s signature vanilla-flavored protein powder and strawberry whey lemonade, treats many immortalized on TikTok or Instagram earlier than consuming. Automobiles jammed the streets. Neighbors fortified the block in opposition to interlopers with visitors cones and indicators warning, “Resident Parking Solely.”
Because the nationwide birthrate declinesTrump administration officers and their allies have attacked feminist positive factors and urged girls to embrace household over profession. To liberal feminists involved that “translator” influencers exalt so-called conventional gender roles, Ballerina Farm is to such regressive household values what Halfway is to Christmas: an embodiment so picture-perfect, Hallmark itself couldn’t do higher.
But round Halfway, a trajectory that dumbfounds some faraway viewers — she danced at Juilliard, and now she’s milking a sheep? — stands out a lot much less.
Many households, just like the Neelemans, are Mormon. Loads have a farming connection. Mercedes Sprinter vans loom from some driveways. They will seat households of as much as 15.
“Rising up right here, it’s like, you’re alleged to need to be a mother, you’re alleged to need to be a spouse,” stated Ella Eggertz, a Utah Valley College freshman from Halfway, who, with out husband or child, feels “like a spinster” at 19.
However Utah, and its expectations, aren’t without end. “We’ll get out sometime!” she stated, laughing. “I desire a profession.”
Neither is it uncommon in Utah to parlay one’s household and home expertise into an influencing careerafter which a brick-and-mortar retailer. Halfway can be residence to the Dainty Peara country-chic emporium stocked with French soaps, gourmand tinned fish and Bibles, owned by the native influencer Sarah Clark. The Meals Nanny, by Lizi Heapsone other Utah meals influencer, can be opening a Halfway location.
“For positive, the per-capita tradwife numbers have gone up,” stated Lindsey Leavitt, 45, a co-owner of Folklore, a progressive bookstore in Halfway.
However for all of the visitors (which Ms. Neeleman denied was attributable to Ballerina Farm), Ms. Leavitt stated, the shop has helped draw vacationers and day-trippers. “They’ve made me a crapload of cash, and I’m very grateful for that,” she stated.
Among the many many criticisms of Ms. Neeleman is that she sells younger girls on a imaginative and prescient of stay-at-home motherhood that solely a skinny, white, stunning lady may glamorize, and solely a girl of means may attain. Her husband’s father based JetBlue, as her detractors are fast to level out.
In an interview, Ms. Neeleman stated she and her husband, Daniel Neeleman, had obtained no monetary assist from household, saying they’d labored exhausting, by way of “extraordinarily tough” years, to construct their farm.
But if her content material is supposed as pronatalist propaganda, which she denies, many of the girls interviewed across the retailer had been no converts. They stated they’d no illusions in regards to the work and additional assist 9 youngsters in all probability required behind the scenes, the film magic enhancing her movies or the truth that, regardless of appearances, she had a paying job.
Some followers weren’t positive in the event that they needed youngsters. Those that did stated they wouldn’t increase them full-time, wanting not less than a part-time job. And whereas a number of of these with youngsters stated she made them really feel insufficient by comparability, most stated they admired her for being not solely a mom, but additionally a businesswoman — one who used content material creation to remain residence whereas working.
“I feel it’s nice,” stated Lori Rutland, 57, the proprietor of the native Rocky Mountain Chocolate Manufacturing unit. “It’s the American dream, and she or he doesn’t even have to depart her home.”
However, she added, “it’s not attainable for the typical individual.”
Abbey Wooden, 29, a barista at a close-by restaurant who left the Mormon Church as a young person, stated she understands the liberal critique — fueled by a 2024 Instances of London profile that depicted Ms. Neeleman as submitting to her husband’s each want — that Ms. Neeleman is “entrapped, and it’s like indentured servitude,” Ms. Wooden stated.
Ms. Wooden was personally “very dedicated” to working till retirement. Nonetheless, one thing about Ballerina Farm spoke to her, and never solely the nice costs on the grass-fed floor beef she buys there.
“I stay my entire life on a time clock,” she stated, so homemaking “has turn out to be a really massive fantasy or a dream for me.”
She added: “It does appear to be a luxurious, too. Virtually form of fanciful, on this economic system, in 2026.”
Her ambivalence was mirrored in a King’s School London survey final 12 months of younger British girls, a uncommon tutorial examination of tradwife reputation. It discovered that younger girls watched such content material not as a result of they embraced conventional gender roles, however as a result of it provided an escape from the impossible-seeming grind of juggling work and household.
Bridgett Sorto Ayala, 23, who was visiting the shop from Las Vegas, doesn’t need youngsters. However she stated the pressures of a full-time profession, particularly with a household, hardly appeared higher than stay-at-home motherhood.
“Possibly neither facet has a superb reply, as a result of there isn’t one,” she stated.
Ms. Neeleman says she discovered a superb reply in her husband, and in farming.
Ballerina Farm mixed her husband’s ardour for agriculture with hers for wholesome meals and uncooked milk, she stated, and allowed them to spend their time collectively as a household as a substitute of getting separate careers.
“We’re equally yoked in parenthood and enterprise,” she stated.
Ms. Neeleman stated she thought girls ought to pursue no matter path God set for them: work, motherhood or each. She herself identifies “at first” as a spouse and mom, she stated, one who has written“I need to put meals on the desk that makes my youngsters comfortable and retains my husband giving me the wink.” However, she stated, she and her husband had been each “going 1,000,000 miles an hour” realizing their enterprise ambitions.
“It’s an thrilling time for girls,” she stated. “If you wish to do a number of issues, I feel there may be alternative for that now, the primary time actually ever, which is superb.”
It’s actually an thrilling time to be a girl within the enterprise of analog, bucolic nostalgia. Submit-pandemic, pre-MAHA America was quickly smitten with Ms. Neeleman’s live-off-the-land way of life, seemingly unadulterated by ultraprocessed snacks, a microwave or perhaps a Entire Meals.
If Los Angeles has Erewhon, the well being meals retailer famous for its $20 smoothies that includes “colostrum, lucuma and tocos” and different meticulously curated meals which might be natural, biodynamic or merely exhausting to pronounce, Utah has Ballerina Farm. The Ballerina Farm aesthetic — all polished, just-so sweetness, like an American Woman doll play set for grown-ups — is perhaps totally different, however they share the identical zeitgeisty fixation: Purify your meals, purify your life.
In early Could, the shop was providing a particular, the Pirouette, a “purposeful” twirl of cherries, ginger, beets, strawberries, dates and entire milk from Ballerina Farm cows “layered with Vanilla Bean Farmer Protein yogurt and marbled with a shot of extra-virgin olive oil” ($11). Tubs of beef tallow sat close to housemade ketchup, a $150 wood egg tray and 2020s gourmet-grocery staples like chili crisp and harissa.
Kelsea Palmer, 29, who was visiting with two of her sisters, home-schools her 4 youngsters, makes natural tinctures, cooks from scratch and goals of off-the-grid homesteading. The sisters, who grew up in Arizona, stated they liked that Ms. Neeleman had forsaken big-city life for farming. In an individualistic tradition that they felt discouraged having youngsters, they stated, it was inspiring to look at Ms. Neeleman increase hers.
“I feel that trad life must be glorified extra,” Ms. Palmer stated. “Let’s see some positivity in being a mother.”
For some Mormon moms, raised to worth stay-at-home motherhood, Ms. Neeleman and influencers like her had succeeded in making their unpaid, unseen labor paid and seen.
“It’s the primary occupation the place girls can out-earn males,” stated Tiffany Rosenhan, a Utah novelist who had 4 youngsters by 29 earlier than turning to writing. “It’s the best factor to occur to girls in a really very long time. It provides them freedom to depart their husbands and feed their youngsters.”
However, she added, “the phantasm that ladies do it with out assistance is the place the hurt is completed.”
It’s a imaginative and prescient of particular person empowerment that a few of Ms. Neeleman’s critics say does nothing to vary the percentages stacked in opposition to American girls, together with the shortage of paid depart insurance policies and affordable child care.
When requested, Ms. Neeleman declined to debate how a lot family assist she has. A public relations consultant intervened to say that Ms. Neeleman, whose posts recurrently function her youngsters, needed to maintain particulars of her youngsters’s lives personal.
The airbrushing of on a regular basis challenges was what made Gabby Doe, 25, a trainer in close by Park Metropolis, reluctant to buy at Ballerina Farm.
“It’s all publicity and branding and units an unrealistic expectation of what farm life is,” stated Ms. Doe, who has skilled the unpicturesque dust of her sister’s natural farm firsthand. “It actually will get me.”
But there she was with a buddy, looking the shop’s farm-grown greens. “I’m responsible of it, too,” she stated, laughing. The meals, in spite of everything, was native. It was contemporary. And it was good.
