BAD FEMINISIM

WHEN IT COMES TO WOMEN’S CHOICES, THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL. WHERE’S THE LINE BETWEEN BUILDING A LIFE “FOR YOURSELF” AND FOR THE WORLD’S APPROVAL?

By Allie Rowbottom

“Get this, there’s a lactation room in the train station,” my father tells me. I’ve just picked him up at Grand Central where he’s visiting me for the purpose of discussing my reproductive future. “So what’s the hold up?” he asks once we’re seated at a cozy bistro.

I sputter something vague about being afraid, which is not untrue but is also not the truth I had been planning to serve today—namely, that my husband and I have spent the past two years making the agonizing choice not to become parents. I know my father does not want to hear that truth. “Be brave,” he tells me. “Get ’er done.” I am not, in this moment, brave enough to tell him I don’t want to. It’s never easy to buck cultural norms. Even harder as a woman, conditioned from birth to be “good.”

I’m a writer and believe my work to be as important as that of raising a child. I did not choose to remain childfree because I felt I couldn’t write and mother, as many of my friends and colleagues do. Rather, I knew it would be harder to do both well—not to mention the financial burden—and after many years of caretaking my mother and my husband’s mother, both of whom died, I simply did not want to take on more caretaking. This, to my mind, is a rational choice, one I might have made differently were my mother alive. And yet, were she alive, she would almost certainly champion my choice to remain childfree, as she would were I to choose motherhood. No question, some will see my choice as dishonoring her memory. I choose to see it as the opposite, particularly here in early 2025, post-Roe v. Wade, with a sex offender in the Oval Office. My birth control is my human right, one that very well may be under attack, and I intend to continue using it and fighting for my right to do so until they pry it from my cold, dead hands. Or uterus, as it were.

Theoretically, choice, when exercised by a woman, is an inherently feminist act. And it would be a mistake to conflate the feminist act of choosing with the choice itself. A woman can choose to be a right-wing pundit or a Christian mother of eight or a childfree novelist and she will still be committing a feminist act. That said, holistically speaking, statistically speaking, if feminism is, in essence, a movement for equal rights for women, it has not yet prevailed. Women remain significantly less empowered than men, and not solely because we have been stripped of our right to legal abortions. Women working full time in America earn 84 cents to a man’s dollar, an inequity that in turn affects social security and pension payouts. Twenty-nine percent of American women will experience rape, domestic violence, or stalking during their lifetime; 40.5 percent of all mothers with children under 18 are equal, primary, or sole income earners for their family and spend 40 percent more time caring for their children than their mothers and grandmothers did 50 years ago. The US has a staggeringly high maternal mortality rate: In 2021, 32.9 women died per 100,000 live births, compared to three or fewer in the Netherlands, Norway, and New Zealand. These numbers become even more dramatic in reference to women of color.

Reactionary or anti-feminists might chalk these numbers up to liberal feminism’s refusal of biological truths such as: Men are hypersexual brutes and women, without the protections of seemingly retrograde or religious safeguards like saving sex for marriage, monogamy, or motherhood itself, are men’s victims. We struggle because we refuse to acknowledge this simple fact. Even sneakier are the self-proclaimed Marxist arguments asserting that troubling economic stats about women are the unfortunate side effect of capitalism, masquerading as women’s lib, and that abortion and easy divorces are simply means of keeping more women working and parenting, doing too much simultaneously to our own detriment. Liberal feminists might then say that these numbers are the result of the Republican war on women, the manosphere’s unchecked privilege, fake news, and our failing educational system, stripped of sex education. Either way, these numbers are so sobering that American feminism, like American politics, has become increasingly polarized in the face of such high stakes. It is a heresy punishable by X pile-on (the modern-day equivalent of public stoning) for liberal feminists to acknowledge any truths in the arguments of reactionary or anti-feminists, or choice-feminists, and vice versa. Which helps no one.

I’ll admit that, until recently, I’ve had but a passing familiarity with Ballerina Farm, the Utah-based brand, Instagram and TikTok presence, and family-run compound helmed by Hannah Neeleman—wife, Mormon, mother, 2023’s Mrs. World pageant winner, and former aspiring ballerina. But after lunching with my father, I find myself ensconced in an hours-long content binge during which I watch her every Instagram Reel and read a handful of think pieces that run the gamut from purely factual to laudatory to confused to judgmental. A viral story in the Sunday Times by Megan Agnew portrayed Hannah as submissive to her husband Daniel, who kept hijacking her interview to give Agnew a tour of the irrigation ditches around their compound. Then came a slew of corrective puff pieces. Most recently, I learn from the Salt Lake Tribune, Hannah and her family have relocated to Ireland where she and her husband will attend culinary school. My familiarity has deepened but remains, in essence, superficial, as it does with any influencer or online personality. There’s only so much you can know about a person by following their Instagram. This is because influencerdom—the conservative kind in particular—hinges on the performance of non-essential labor (beauty, flying private, making Oreos from scratch) as a means of signaling wealth, which in turn separates the influencer in question from the masses, elevating their platform to aspirational (because we live in a capitalist society).

Hannah, the story goes, was raised Mormon but left home at 18 to study ballet at Juilliard. She was still in school when she met her now husband, Daniel Neeleman, son of JetBlue and Breeze Airways scion David Neeleman. She resisted, he persisted, she relented. He wanted a traditional life with a gaggle of children and had his sights set on Hannah as the woman to give it to him. First, though, she wanted to finish her studies and did, graduating as the first (and, as of this writing, only) Juilliard student to matriculate whilst pregnant. Then, the Neelemans moved to Utah and produced eight children before Hannah’s 34th birthday. Now, she churns her own butter, milks her own cows, and sells the products of her labor in the form of baked goods, branded aprons, sourdough starters, and so forth—in front of an audience of millions. Her social media belies none of the political debate raging in popular magazines like this one, a debate that goes something like this: As an institution, American motherhood is full of systemic injustices and failures, and Hannah, by portraying it as idyllic, is gaslighting other mothers. Or the traditional Mormon values she performs are regressive. Or, in sacrificing her dream of ballet stardom for motherhood and farm life, Hannah presents not only a bad example for other women, but one that disrespects feminism itself. She is a cipher for a domineering, misogynistic, right-wing-adjacent ideology otherwise known as the #tradwife. Even though Hannah has said she does not identify as one.

I first encountered the tradwife archetype in New York City, of all places. Early 2021, vaccines just making their way into everyone’s blood, a summer now memorialized as a bacchanal in Lower Manhattan. It seemed like every party I attended was packed with women in their early 20s wearing pigtails and prairie dresses and expressing longing for the red pill, support for anorexia, and conversion to Catholicism with what seemed like irony but, they would assure you, was not. “I want a baby so bad,” my 23-year-old friend told me that year, echoing what I’d heard from other women her age. I took her at her word and didn’t pry, but privately wondered why motherhood and the small, controlled environment of the anorexic body were what she most desired. Now, it seems obvious. The conservatism spreading among New York youth that summer, like the conservatism spreading today in the country at large, was the natural albeit unfortunate reaction not just to pandemic trauma, but also to hyper-liberal performativity and to technology itself—the ways in which tech and the lean-in mentality of the mid-aughts left many women wondering if they really could have it all. If what they were promised by the Sheryl Sandbergs among us was at best too taxing and at worst, a lie. Now, when I search the similarly tradwife-coded profiles of creators, I see our mutuals are all Gen Z women.

Progress is made in a one-step-forward, two-back rhythm. I say this not to encourage complacency, but rather to place seemingly regressive archetypes like the tradwife in a historical context. The 1950s housewife was the backlash to the active role American women played in the Second World War. The tradwife is the backlash to the girlboss. This in no way condones stupid arguments, like the “sexual revolution was bad for women” think pieces I’ve seen scattered around the internet of late. Only to say that with every social change comes other, unintended changes.

The personal is political. Thus goes the famous slogan. I know it’s true, and likewise believe that encouraging individuals to look to their own lives for examples of what they hope to dismantle clarifies resolve—especially in decades past, where mining one’s personal experience, as I am doing here, was more radical than commonplace. But if the personal really is political, we can’t dismiss the testimonies from a legion of young women taking to social media to express displeasure with hookup culture or the capitalist grind, and arriving at the conclusion that #softgirl (defined by slow living and #selfcare, rather than career) or tradwife lifestyles are the ultimate goal. We may disagree with that goal, or believe it is bad for women, but by reducing cultural moments to the good-bad binary and immediately dismissing them as right-wing lunacy, we miss the opportunity to explore what they might tell us about contemporary feminism and how it can best be of service. As I said earlier, it’s never easy to buck cultural norms as a woman. It behooves us to ask, without snark or judgment, why so many women see seemingly regressive lifestyles as radical and brave. The reality is, no matter how we might lionize homemaking and motherhood, we also live in a country that sanctifies procreation and then does little to support actual babies, let alone their mothers. Who funds the tradwife’s lifestyle? Certainly not her government.

When speaking with my father, I offer the abject dearth of viable help as a primary reason for dragging my heels to get pregnant. I am a motherless only child and so is my husband. No family is coming to help us. Perhaps I would have a child if my country provided universal childcare, I say, offering what I see as the next feminist frontier as an excuse. He rolls his eyes. My father is not only a full-blown Trumper, but a conspiracy theorist—QAnon, Pizzagate, the works. He would love to see me in an apron, milking my own cows, a herd of his grandchildren at my heels, mostly because he supports right-wing politicians who would have all women in this role. He wasn’t always so extreme. Yes, he voted for Bush, but he also voted for Obama. Now, like almost everyone, he exists in an echo chamber of radical ideologies, pushed to the far right by Fox News, Infowars, and YouTube. It’s become impossible to separate my father’s political beliefs from the technology that teaches them to him. The same might be said of contemporary feminisms, be they liberal-leaning or conservative or somewhere in a middle that seems to have disappeared.

Twenty years ago, when I took my first women’s studies course, we learned about intersectionality—the idea that issues of gender are inseparable from issues of race and class. This remains true, but I would add that issues of gender, race, and class cannot be considered outside the great contextualizing force of technology, social media in particular, where nuance and critical thinking go to die. Social media, a technology with the capacity to be a connective force (not unlike the internet itself), has instead rendered contemporary feminism more concerned with ostracization and moral superiority than meaningful change. Though I suppose finger-pointing and exclusionary rhetoric have always plagued feminist movements, theory is often harder to practice than it seems at first blush, and when dealing with large groups of people, contradictions abound—a frustration to proponents of totalizing theories. Social media has amplified feminism’s historical divisiveness because it’s an emotional, intimate technology—or at least masquerades as such. There’s a veneer of individualism and reality to apps like Instagram and TikTok that doesn’t exist elsewhere, which is partly why these apps are so addictive, so world-altering, and so taxing.

Watching Hannah Neeleman’s content is an affecting experience. In the course of a single Reel, I might feel admiration, jealousy, camaraderie, comparison, judgment. Such would be especially true were I a farmer myself, or an aspiring ballerina, or a mother. I might become so fixated on her as an individual, and the minutiae therein, that I neglect to notice the real issue is the larger cultural systems that make what she’s selling enticing (or enraging) in the first place.