What the Controversy Over Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farms Misses

Hannah Neeleman is thirty-four years old, has nine children, 23 million Instagram followers, and a husband whose millionaire father founded JetBlue. She milks cows, gathers eggs, bakes bread, competes in beauty pageants for fun, and just opened a retail store in Midway, Utah, that draws crowds. She is, by any social media metric, a phenomenon.

The internet has spent considerable energy debating whether her “trad wife” lifestyle, the philosophy of returning to traditional values where women stay home, find fulfillment in domestic life, and support their husbands as primary breadwinners, represents an empowered choice or a step backward for feminism. Both sides argue with confidence.

I keep asking a different question. One that seems to have gotten lost entirely.

Did Hannah Neeleman actually have a choice?

I grew up Mormon. Hannah Neeleman is a Mormon. I am also the great-great-grandniece of Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon faith. I know this story. I grew up in a version of it. And when I read about Ballerina Farm, I am not watching a woman who chose the traditional life. I am watching a woman who was raised to believe it was the only life that mattered, one that guaranteed her eternal salvation.

THE COMMENT THAT SAID EVERYTHING

Hannah’s off-hand comment to a reporter, “this is just what we do,” is the line that told the truth. It carries the flat, unremarkable weight of someone describing the weather. This is just what we do.

That sentence is the language of someone who never fully understood she had options to weigh.

The Mormon Church, officially the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has always maintained that a woman’s highest calling is the home. Wife. Mother. Helpmate. The more children the Lord sends, the greater the blessing. These are doctrinal positions delivered from the pulpit and reinforced in every Sunday lesson, every Young Women’s meeting, every Temple ceremony. A Mormon girl grows up hearing, repeatedly and in the most sacred contexts her culture possesses, that her eternal salvation is tied directly to how well she fulfills this role.

With that much at stake, is there really a choice to be made?

I am certain Hannah would find my question insulting. I am certain she believes she is capable of making her own choices and has made them freely. I believed the same thing. Until I left.

Only with distance did I recognize how completely I had absorbed the idea that a woman’s place was in the home, submitting to her husband’s patriarchy, not because someone forced me to believe it, but because it was the only reality I knew. The indoctrination does not feel cruel, but like truth, and it is constant, persistent, and everywhere.

MY MOTHER’S VERSION OF THIS STORY

My mother’s trajectory mirrors Hannah’s with an eerie precision. She trained to be an opera singer. She was accepted to Juilliard on a voice scholarship. She turned it down to marry my father at nineteen, a Smith with a royal pedigree, at her own mother’s urging. Marrying into the Smith family would secure the highest levels of exaltation in the hereafter.

My father wanted ten children. She gave him nine, one after another, until the doctors said no more. My father expected her to stay thin, feminine, and attractive while simultaneously raising nine children, maintaining a large garden, baking bread, cooking every meal from scratch, and supervising her children in managing the chickens, cow, horses, and goats that populated our family property.

She put on a happy face at Church and in the community. But we kids knew better. She struggled with migraine headaches and depression, overwhelmed and exhausted, blaming herself for not measuring up, for not being cheerful enough, grateful enough, faithful enough. Being the star soloist in church services was the only crumb left from her dream of an opera career. Church doctrine suggests that unhappiness is a personal spiritual failure and always instructs its members to project warmth and positivity. Her suffering was invisible to anyone outside our walls.

But my mother’s unhappiness planted my first seeds of doubt. When she developed nodules on her vocal cords and couldn’t sing anymore, I became angry at God. Why would He give her this talent and then take it away? Didn’t God want us to be happy? She had been faithful, obeyed every doctrine, and this happened?

I stumbled into her bedroom after the doctor delivered the news of her vocal trauma, interrupting her kneeling in prayer. She motioned me in. Tears streaked her cheeks.

“I’m too proud of my voice. God is humbling me,” she said. The one solace she had left from giving up her dream was now gone. She blamed herself. My heart broke for her. I remember my fury and helplessness at the unfairness, but how do you defy God? But my anger led to the courage I found just a few years later to question the Church’s dogma and ultimately, leave.

“This is just what we do.” Hannah’s words. Did my mother have choices? Does she?

And this is the norm in Mormon culture, not an anomaly in my family alone. And I see it playing out in real time on Ballerina Farm. Just backed with millions of dollars and assistants to make the life look romantic, glamorous.

WHAT THE CAMERAS DON’T SHOW

The reporter who profiled Hannah for The Times piece tried repeatedly to get time alone with her. Hannah’s husband Daniel kept intervening; answering questions directed at his wife, interrupting, redirecting. The reporter noted it. Most readers moved past it. I did not.

The epidural story is another detail that stayed with me. Hannah had delivered multiple children without pain relief. Then, two weeks overdue, carrying a ten-pound baby, with Daniel away, she got an epidural.

She lowered her voice.

“And it was an amazing experience,” she said. (Daniel was in the next room.) She didn’t want Daniel to hear.

She whispered about her own medical decision in her own home regarding her own body. That whisper contains everything this conversation has been missing.

Then there was the birthday gift. Hannah hoped for tickets to Greece, a brief reprieve for her and her husband, long postponed. She got an egg-gathering apron. For her chores. She tried it on for the family, working to hide her disappointment. When she didn’t express gratitude quickly enough, Daniel said: “You’re welcome.”

These are small moments, the kind that accumulate over decades into a life you didn’t fully know you were choosing.

THE LOOK THAT COSTS SOMETHING

The beauty pageants belong here too. Hannah competes in them “for fun,” the articles say. And she did, once just 12 days after giving birth. But pageants are not incidental to Mormon culture; they are deeply embedded in it. My mother represented her hometown in the Miss Wyoming pageant. The Church instructs its members to present a perfectly groomed, attractive, and wholesome image to attract potential converts. “Every member a missionary” is the Mormon Church motto.

Utah ranks tenth nationally in board-certified plastic surgeons per capita, with cosmetic enhancement rates much higher than the national average. Appearance matters in the Mormon faith.

Behind the carefully maintained appearance is a different picture. Utah has some of the highest numbers of antidepressant prescriptions, rooted in cultural pressures that have not disappeared. Utah women are encouraged to suppress negative emotion as a condition of faithful standing. Anger, sadness, and disappointment are not spiritually acceptable responses. The approved persona is warm, calm, and positive, always. The gap between that requirement and a woman’s actual interior life has nowhere to go. Except to try harder to meet the goal of perfection and blame themselves for coming up short.

Look at the Mormon Mommy Influencer landscape. All of them are strikingly, uniformly beautiful, impeccably groomed, radiantly happy, advertising a lifestyle of cheerful abundance. The sameness is not coincidence. It is the product of a culture that has very specific ideas about what a faithful Mormon woman looks like.

THE QUESTION FEMINISM FORGOT TO ASK

The media debate about Hannah Neeleman treats her lifestyle as a freely made choice that feminism either should celebrate or should challenge. Both framings miss the structural reality. Fish don’t question water. It is just their reality.

Feminism, as far as I’m concerned, represents the freedom for all women to have genuine autonomy over their lives, to achieve whatever they desire without institutional suppression. The Mormon Church has no role models of women in meaningful positions of leadership. Men hold the priesthood, the power to act in God’s name. Women are instructed to support their husbands’ aspirations and focus on motherhood. The institutional structure is not subtle about this.

Some women may find genuine fulfillment in a traditional domestic life. They have other options and freely choose it. That is real choice.

But for a woman raised in the Mormon Church, the calculus is different. The traditional path is the only path that promises eternal salvation. Every other choice — a serious career, having one child, remaining unmarried — carries the implicit threat of spiritual failure and diminished standing in the hereafter. When the consequences of deviation are eternal, the word “choice” requires some examination.

I left the Church at nineteen after discovering what historians and scholars reported about my famous relative, by reading books and research that had been forbidden to me. What I found was a founder who was a liar, a fraud, and a predator, and a religious institution built on the suppression of exactly the questions I was asking. It was shattering, but once I could see it clearly, I could not unsee it.

Distance gave me something I did not expect: the ability to recognize which of my choices had actually been mine, which of my mother’s choices had been hers.

I think about Hannah Neeleman, the girl who trained as a star ballerina, who had a body capable of extraordinary discipline and artistry, who whispers about her own epidural in her own home. I wonder what she would choose if the eternal consequences were removed from the equation. If the choice were simply hers.

I wonder if she’ll ever know.

Do you recognize this system in your own life? A system that shaped your choices before you were old enough to question them? When did you first recognize it? Leave it in the comments.