Hannah Neeleman, Taylor Swift, and Feminine Sacrifice
If you’re not terminally online, you may have missed the furore over the Sunday Times’ profile of Ballerina Farm, aka Hannah Neeleman.
Her aesthetically perfect depiction of rural life has made her the internet’s most famous ‘tradwife’, even though she does not identify with that label herself, and through her social media presence, she has amassed for herself a particularly large and fiercely loyal online audience.
Her twee depiction of traditional Mormon marriage and farming/family life has long been a lightening rod for commentary and criticism from both feminist and conservative quarters alike.
Valid criticisms, such as pointing out the couple’s undoubted wealth, the Neeleman’s unrealistic depiction of farming, and the fact that the couple are members of the Mormon cult, are oft dismissed by their admirers as mere jealousy.
The latest furore centres around the fact that Hannah Neeleman gave up a promising career as a professional ballet dancer despite winning a place at the prestigious Juilliard school.
So what? You might ask. Women are free to choose to be wives, mothers, and homemakers should they wish, says ‘Choice Feminism’.
An implication of the Sunday Times profile, however, was that Neeleman did not choose this life at all. The article made it seem as though the decision to become a dairy farmer was imposed upon her by her husband, Daniel Neeleman, who insisted they marry after three months of dating rather than a year of dating, like Hannah Neeleman suggested.
If Neeleman is not living her choice and was instead pressured into it by a combination of Mormonism and a controlling husband, the shine comes off their picture-perfect life very quickly.
The backlash prompted Neeleman to publicly refute the the Times’ profile. In the impassioned video, she declares that her priorities in life are God and family and that she has prioritised her marriage “all the way.”
But, if we take Neeleman at her word, and for the sake of this article I do, then she did not belong at Juilliard in the first place.
Access to an elite education is something so few people have and fewer still can afford. Access to elite artistic institutions such as fine art ateliers are also something that women have historically been barred from for no other reason than their sex.
As a result of the historical barriers to entry to elite institutions, there are those who believe women are simply incapable of attaining the same levels of artistic excellence as men. A belief that resulted in possibly the greatest twitter exchange of all time.
Anyway…
If Neeleman wasn’t going to prioritise being a ballerina over her relationships, then she was was wrong to take a coveted Juilliard space from a woman who was.
Juilliard only accepts twelve men and twelve women into their dance program every year, and there was a thirteenth young woman who may have cried herself to sleep because she did not get in.
Artistic, creative, and intellectual excellence require sacrifice. If Neeleman was not prepared to make sacrifices for her professional ballet career, she did not deserve to have an elite ballet education.
When it comes to women sacrificing their creative endeavours for home- and child-making, social conservatives, usually staunch defenders of Western civilisation including the classical fine and performing arts, suddenly become a gaggle of raging philistines.
For them, sacrificing one’s career or artistic and creative endeavours for her family is the only acceptable form of female sacrifice.
Don’t believe me? Look at how conservatives treat Taylor Swift, a woman who conservatives love to point out has sacrificed harmony in her personal life for her artistic career.
The antithesis of Christian life. Not serial killers, not child molesters, not the Islamic Republic of Iran. But Taylor Swift! Sure, buddy…
In the eyes of some, Taylor Swift’s decision to prioritise her artistic career makes her positively satanic.
What’s worse is conservatives have no problem with men delaying marriage, not marrying at all, or even being celibate in Holy Orders to pursue excellence in another field.
It is still sociably acceptable for a man to pursue his creative and intellectual endeavours at the expense of everything and everyone else in his life, but not women.
Considering how short a ballerina’s career is anyway, Neeleman would not even have had to sacrifice family for dance for long anyway.
In his now infamous graduation speech, Harrison Butker took a swipe at Swift (referring to her only as his teammate’s girlfriend) despite acknowledging that his sporting brilliance was possible only because a woman, his own wife, sacrificed her career prospects for his. It was Butker’s wife who made the sacrifices, so he did not have to.
It would, just once, be nice if men acknowledged that it has always been easier for men to attain artistic, sporting, intellectual, or career excellence because women were forced to sacrifice theirs to support men’s.
In the case of Swift, it still appears to be easier for men to find a woman who will make such a sacrifice than for a woman to find a man who would do the same, despite most of the physical demands and dangers of child-making falling on the women’s shoulders rather than the man’s.
There’s nothing wrong with a woman prioritising marriage and motherhood over artistic excellence, of course, but does a person with those values deserve a place at an elite conservatoire?
I say: no.
But I would, wouldn’t I? I value artistic excellence over just about anything else.
I’m currently studying classical drawing and painting at a classical atelier art school, and if I met a man who wanted me to quit to be a homemaker, the relationship would effectively be over.
I am not ashamed to admit that I value artistic excellence over pretty much everything else in my life. Over motherhood. Definitely over marriage. Over academic attainment. Over sporting excellence. Over girlbossing at a law firm or big corporation or whatever.
It is, after all, easier for any healthy young woman to have a baby than it is to paint a masterpiece, write a best-selling novel, perform in an opera, or dance ballet professionally.
If you do not think so, I politely request leaving the spots at elite art schools and conservatoires for those of us who do.
Thank you for reading — I hope you found my thoughts interesting. You can find links to my other work here: https://linktr.ee/sayde.scarlett
