The Longing and the Loathing Inspired by Ballerina Farm

The following first appeared in Public Square Magazine. 

I remember my sister once telling me about a family she followed on social media who took their milk cow on a camping trip because the cow still needed to be milked while they were gone. She thought it was the cutest thing and it confirmed her desire to someday have a milk cow. I heard that story and it reminded me why I never want a milk cow. Their choice to have a cow and to bring it camping didn’t threaten me as someone who chooses a life free of milk cows. It was just a funny little curiosity that came and went in our day’s conversations.

That was my first introduction to Ballerina Farm and the Neeleman family, though my sister could remember neither name at the time. Hannah Neeleman is the poised and beautiful face of their social media, which presents in idyllic, almost nostalgic colors, the homespun adventures of her life with her husband Daniel, and their eight children living on a 328-acre farm just outside of Kamas, Utah. Though the details of their life on the farm should, like the cow on the camping trip, present no threat to anyone with a different life and different choices, her 10 million follower count on Instagram means that their life, as it plays out on the social media stage, garners the attention and criticism of many. A July article in The Times on the family went viral after it made some strong and fairly offensive inferences about their marital dynamic, which were based on the author spending a single day with them and likely coming in with an angle presupposed.

The author, Megan Agnew, filled Hannah’s dialogue in the article with halting pauses and was sure to persistently describe the interrupting children and a lurking, domineering husband never out of earshot. She talked about Neeleman’s background as a Julliard-trained ballerina and took every opportunity to show the reader how those dreams had been squelched by the demands of husband and children and livestock, never acknowledging that most people’s lives look different by their mid-30s than they dreamed in their early 20s. In fact, a joint study from the Strada Institute and Burning Glass found that 52% of college graduates end up in jobs or businesses that don’t utilize their collegiate credentials at all.

That particular aspect of the author’s analysis struck a personal chord with me. I went on my first date with my future husband the week before I moved to New York to pursue acting professionally and even as I landed in this bustling city dragging my luggage through Harlem looking for my new address, I could already feel that I might one day love that man more than this place. I flew back and forth from New York to the UK for a Master’s degree in writing and dreamed about various kinds of success. Now, I have three little children, live in a home far from any iconic metropolis and my big, beautiful writing desk is often blocked by giant hot wheel tracks and unfolded laundry, and sometimes I’m the one that puts them there. Hannah Neeleman’s would-be ballet studio becoming a school room for their homeschooled children sounds like an indication of practicality not patriarchy.

Agnew described Hannah Neeleman as a woman who “milks cows, gives birth without pain relief and breastfeeds at beauty pageants” and asked an interesting either/or question, though I think was unwilling to give both apparent answers equal possibility, “Is this an empowering new model of womanhood—or a hammer blow for feminism?”

The quiet query that follows such a question is what is feminism? It is only a hammer blow if it flies in the face of what feminism actually is. I naively thought feminism was a movement that fights for the rights of women to freely pursue any life they want, including raising a large family, cooking sourdough from scratch, and drinking milk straight from the cow. From the rhetoric surrounding the most recent election, however, it would seem feminism only includes a woman’s right not to have a child, even if it is the natural consequence of choices she has made. Those same people fiercely fighting for that apparent right do not rally quite as vocally around a different woman’s right to raise a large family.

It was clear from the article in The Times that the author believed, consciously or unconsciously that no woman could possibly choose this life, happily and freely. “I want to ask her about birth control”, the author says, “but we are surrounded by so many of her children and Daniel is back in the room now too.” Finally, the author gets some semblance of that question in: “Do you—I pause and look at her fixedly—plan pregnancies?” Agnew says, describing the interaction as though the subtext is ‘blink twice if you need help.’

“But Agnew (and the online chorus of Hannah’s detractors),” author Sarah Baird points out, “never meaningfully addresses why the Neelemans’ life might be inspiring; she doesn’t really seem curious about that.”

This author, and many other voices online, do not even leave room for the possibility that Hannah may love and value her country life and her meadows of bright-eyed, wild, and capable children as much as she claims to online. And that, at least some significant portion of her 10 million followers, are there to watch because they too see the appeal.

I am exactly Hannah’s age and though it is common for anyone to long for their childhood as a simpler time, those of us who came of age as technology advanced in unprecedented ways at the turn of the 21st century literally grew up in a simpler time. Now we have young children growing up in a frighteningly complex one while we attempt to navigate it with noisy, crowded, and conflicting technology as both our instruction and destruction. At times, I feel towards smart phones not unlike J.R.R. Tolkien felt towards the invention of the combustion engine:

It is full Maytime by the trees and grass now. But the heavens are full of roar and riot. You cannot even hold a shouting conversation in the garden now, save about 1 a.m. and 7 p.m.—unless the day is too foul to be out. How I wish the ‘infernal combustion’ engine had never been invented.

The world of social media is noisy and the overstimulation of motherhood is made worse by screens that constantly notify us of equal parts calamity and opportunities for overconsumption. We struggle to healthily navigate it ourselves and don’t know how to begin to teach our children to do better than we can. Enter a little glimpse into a simpler world. Ballerina Farm may be performance art, but the reason we’re still talking about it is because it’s so well done. The wholesomeness at the center of its aesthetic is something many of us are deeply craving. Maybe somewhere off in the rolling rural hills, a world still exists where kids have dirt under their fingernails and run through pastures and make lemonade out of a fistful of dandelions and rhubarb they found in the yard instead of fighting over iPads. Maybe I can’t have the farm, but it’s possible I could turn off the TV and let my 3-year-old help me feed our very first sourdough starter.

Perhaps some women just look at “former professional ballerina” now “mother of eight” on paper and can’t help but write the story of a life that took a left turn. But their perception of what fulfilled womanhood looks like doesn’t matter. It’s Hannah who gets to decide if she’s happy. “When I first started dancing … I felt like dance was a part of me, a part of who I was meant to be,” Neeleman said in a clip from nearly a decade ago, while pregnant with her second child, “and later on, as I’ve become a mother, I felt that same connection to this calling—that it’s a part of me, that it’s who I was meant to be. I really feel like I was meant to be a mother.”

Hannah’s calm and joyful embrace of her small children brings hope to the rest of us struggling through the sometimes helpless moments of young motherhood. Her children sing and chatter in the background as she cooks and sometimes even interrupt what’s she’s doing in her videos and she reacts with calmness and though, of course, it is curated content, it is still a good example of cultivating patience and kindness for the little souls whose number one source of emotional safety in the world is you.

There is a place for vulnerable, relatable mom-content that makes you feel less alone as you sit in a bathrobe at 4 p.m. in a wrecked house with the TV as your only salvation. There’s also a place for content that distills the magic of what motherhood could be and sometimes really is.

I saw a brief clip of her teaching the candidates at the latest Mrs. American pageant some interview skills before the event where she would hand over her crown to one of them. She is in full glam make-up, high heels and has her baby carrier strapped to the front of her. She seems completely unencumbered by the presence of her baby and later wears her Mrs. American sash right over the top of the baby for photos. She made no attempt to downplay or hide the baby’s presence nor did she seem to be flaunting it. It was just a beautiful little fact of her current stage that she brought along for the ride.

That normalization of having a baby with you in public or even a professional setting is in stark contrast to the growing number of social media posts that say “babies shouldn’t be allowed on planes” or “people, stop bringing your kids to restaurants” and the growing popularity of the “child-free wedding”.

The alarming extension of the societal inclination represented in that article from The Times that says no woman could be freely choosing to have so many children, is a growing public disdain for children in general. What’s so strange about that growing impression is that we were all children ourselves. It’s not some annoying hyper-niche hobby that a tiny portion of the population disruptively dabbles in, it is an essential stage that every single human on this planet goes through. And every one of our childhoods involved an exhausted adult somewhere in the background rooting for us and raising us at great personal expense.

It was, in fact, that same baby’s attendance at the original Mrs. American pageant, with her mother competing 12 days post-partum, that skyrocketed Hannah Neeleman into public conversation. Though perhaps it was the combination of a baby and a ballgown that kept people talking and brought on Megan Agnew’s original question about whether this was a new model of womanhood or a hammer-blow to feminism.

My frank answer to that question is why does it have to be either? I attended the most recent Mrs. American pageant in Las Vegas, where Neeleman was passing the torch, to support a close family member who was competing. It felt very clearly like something I would never be interested in participating in. But I also sat in the lobby afterwards with that family member hearing about all the ways the experience had inspired and empowered her and felt so happy that she got that opportunity. That is feminism. Women supporting women in pursuing excellence and actualization in every sphere and not always rushing to say one form of excellence threatens another by its very existence.

I can watch someone take a cow on a camping trip, and not come away saying, ‘is she redefining the very rules of camping?’ ‘Is she saying that those of us who go camping without cows are less than?’

I can see that someone else was breastfeeding in a ball gown 12 days postpartum and be happy for her and also be happy that 12 days postpartum found me in my own bed snuggling my baby in a bathrobe. I can be overwhelmed with my three children and see someone else enjoying eight and not assume that must mean she’s under someone’s thumb and can’t possibly be choosing that life freely. It’s her right to love the feeling of hands covered in flour and lots of faces to wipe.

But somehow, the more loudly society purports to fight for women’s rights, the less likely they are to include ‘raising a large family and finding joy in homemaking’ as being among them

The Battle Over Human Rights

The following was contributed by Cristina Cevallos.

If someone were to ask you to provide a definition of the term “Human Right,” what would be your response? It’s a question that continues to be debated internationally and domestically as politics, advocacy, and culture attempt to interject their favored position into the dialogue on Human Rights. The Nuremberg Trials, apartheid South Africa, and the Rwandan Genocide, these historic events might seem very far from our reality. Whereas free speech, the right to work and praying in a temple may be more familiar. Although it may not seem so, both fall under the same umbrella: that of human rights.

The right to life, equality, religious freedom, as well as all other human rights can manifest themselves in different ways in time and space. This variation complicates the task of establishing a clear definition of what a human right truly is.

The Problem of Defining Human Rights

According to the United Nations, human rights are entitlements we have simply because we exist as human beings. While this basic notion is widely accepted, debates persist regarding how they should be interpreted and implemented.

Some criticize that they are not universal, since they are applied very differently depending on the context. For example, North Korea’s approach to the right to property varies significantly from Finland, but both have signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Moreover, activists label issues they wish to draw attention to as human rights to make them demandable and enforceable.

The Role of International Law

The modern concept of human rights gained significant prominence after World War II and has since inspired numerous international treaties designed to promote and safeguard these rights globally.

Some of the most relevant ones are the following: the UDHR, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention of the Elimination of All forms of Discrimination against Women, the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Geneva Convention.

Treaties have also created international organizations that bring states together to monitor their compliance on different issues. Nowadays most of what is being said about human rights can be found in these international bodies’ work as they review, judge and make recommendations regarding “human rights” for the nations of the world.

Almost every country in the world is part of the United Nations, created to promote peace, security, and cooperation between countries. At a continental level, the Organization of American States, the European Union, the Council of Europe, the African Union, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation promote regional cooperation and the development of human rights issues.

There are also several international courts with jurisdiction over human rights, such as the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, the Interamerican Court of Human Rights, the European Court of Human Rights, and the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights.

Private Entities Shaping Human Rights Discourse

Private institutions play a crucial role in advancing human rights claims. Many of these organizations have a global influence due to the information they share and the funding they provide for initiatives worldwide. They can be non-governmental organizations, think tanks, institutes, and foundations and be focused on research, advocacy, court cases, statistics, social projects, etc.

Some promote a progressive approach: Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Oxfam, American Civil Liberties Union, Open Society, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Ford Foundation, National Organization for Women, International Planned Parenthood Federation, Guttmacher Institute, Population Council, Aspen Institute and the Institute for Policy Studies.

Others defend a conservative perspective: The Heritage Foundation, Family Research Council, the Center for Family and Human Rights, Concerned Women for America, the Acton Institute, the Cato Institute, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the Federalist Society, Alliance Defending Freedom, the Religious Freedom Institute and the National Center on Sexual Exploitation.

Current Human Rights Issues

Dealing with contemporary human rights issues means finding different, and most of the time, opposite points of view. For example, in terms of women’s rights, many will speak out against sexual harassment, female genital mutilation, child marriage, and sex trafficking. However, opinions vary as to recognizing prostitutes as sex workers or allowing transsexuals in female competitions.

Likewise, there is latent pressure to recognize LGBT claims as human rights. For example, allowing same-sex marriages and adoption by these couples, sex change surgeries, gender quotas, recognition of transsexuality in IDs, and criminalizing hate crimes.

Regarding the prohibition of racial, ethnic, and religious discrimination, there is tension between those who promote the rights of refugees and migrants and those who see problems in the loss of security, loss of national culture, and the illegal component of immigration.

Also, while some claim that there is discrimination against African Americans and Indigenous people in North America, others point out that attention should be focused on abuses that are truly systemic, such as those occurring against the Uighurs in China and the Rohingya in Myanmar, who are being killed by authoritarian regimes.

As for freedom of expression, some support fact-checking initiatives and blocking of accounts, or of social networks altogether (such as China and Brazil). Others consider this to be censorship as people are forced to be politically correct or not to question the regime.

Concerning religious freedom, one perspective supports the prohibition of conscientious objections and the limitation of worship for public health reasons. In contrast, the opposing viewpoint highlights that religious persecution can manifest in various forms, from compelling individuals to act against their beliefs to outright violence, as seen in Nigeria and Pakistan.

Issues such as vaccines, euthanasia, abortion, surrogacy, in vitro fertilization, contraceptives, genetic modification, and transhumanism (the enhancement of human capabilities through technology) create moral challenges and pose risks to the dignity that is meant to underpin the concept of human rights.

What Should We Do?

The difficulties that arise from the “Human Rights” discussion are significant. Those in positions of power and wealth are utilizing global governance through organizations like the UN and the World Economic Forum, along with other strategies, to shape outcomes to their advantage. Additionally, the shortcomings and loopholes in international law, as well as monopolies in technology and media, complicate the pursuit of a true understanding of human rights.

Human rights efforts can be agenda driven if there is not a clear focus and understanding of what constitutes a human right. It is not enough to simply say, “I think the issue I am most passionate about deserves to be elevated to the position of a “human right” (abortion, women’s rights, education, healthcare, even leisure). One clarifying point might be, “If another person is required to write a check to pay for my “human right,” can it truly be classified as a human right?” Education, healthcare, social security, etc., are all things to which a society could rightly aspire to provide, but should they be classified as a “right?”

However, as mentioned earlier, true human rights are a matter of daily life, and it is our responsibility to uphold human dignity and promote justice. Therefore, we must actively combat violations of these rights, educate ourselves, and stay informed to support not only local causes but also those that may seem more distant. By backing institutions that advocate for our values, we can make a meaningful impact and save lives close and far from home. Fighting for your rights and the rights of others is a natural obligation, don’t be afraid to fulfill it.