Why Is Everyone Mad About Ballerina Farm Now? [Video]

Over the past few years, a prevailing narrative has emerged. Neeleman, they say, is a business designed not only to sell us a product, but a political operative intent on convincing young girls to give up their agency to bake bread pregnant and barefoot in their kitchen and cede all authority to their husbands. She’s been dubbed the “queen of the trad wives”—an increasingly large group of young women aiming to return to a subjected marital life, even though Neeleman herself has never used the phrase.

After Neeleman shared her experience earlier this year competing in the Mrs. World pageant mere weeks after giving birth to her eighth child, the internet exploded with women decrying Neeleman as a traitor to her gender, a mother actively hurting other mothers, and perhaps most memorably, “not a person.”

But as I wrote at the time, Neeleman, let’s say, exists in the context of all which …