On the question “how are we to live in an atomic age?” the writer C.S. Lewis declared, in a 1948 essay, that we think “a great deal too much” about atomic annihilation. Referencing this on her podcast, Homemaker Chic—dedicated to “rescuing the art of homemaking from the daily grind with red lips”—the homesteader Shaye Elliott describes taking comfort from Lewis whenever she feels overwhelmed by the state of the world. “If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things,” Elliott quotes, audibly moved, “not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs.” Her voice quavers as she slows to emphasize Lewis's final resolution: “They may break our bodies…but they need not dominate our minds.”
Elliott is just one particularly public figure within the growing network of contemporary homesteaders who have embraced some form of subsistence farming. With 84.5K followers on Instagram and over 290K subscribers on Youtube—not to mention the podcast, a blog, and five cookbooks, in addition to selling photography of the farm and The Elliott Homestead branded apparel—Elliott also epitomizes the group of largely women homesteaders, most of them homesteader wives, who have simultaneously cultivated and capitalized on this growth by documenting their lives on social media. On Instagram, the 4.4 million posts hashtagged #homestead still comprise only a small slice of the 17.1 million #farmlife posts, though they likely perform better because of their distinctly romantic aesthetic: in this idealized pastoral, the grain of a hand-crafted kitchen table complements that of a hand-shaped sourdough loaf; linen-clad children roam free-range amongst the livestock, cheeks rosy and feet bare; milk is unpasteurized, eggs are pale blue, and pie crusts are kneaded from scratch, always with love.
The term “homestead” itself has a far longer, more complicated history in the Homestead Act of 1862, which granted 160-acre parcels of land to “American citizen[s] willing to settle and cultivate their plot for five consecutive years. Legislated during the Civil War, the act was an effort of the new Republican Party which, unconstrained by the succeeding South, aimed to empower independent “yeoman farmers” rather than wealthy, slave-owning planters, following Abraham Lincoln’s belief that “the wild lands of the country should be distributed so that every man should have the means and opportunity of benefitting his condition.” Under the act, 270 million acres—or almost ten percent of American land—was parceled off for applicants. While much of this was distributed to those who could not afford it otherwise, including poor European immigrants and formerly enslaved people, the act did not exactly democratize land ownership. On the prairie, settlers faced biblical conditions—winds, fires, swarms of locusts, and devastating droughts—in addition to the persistent threat of debt foreclosure: though land was free, resources like livestock, tools, and fertilizer were costly to acquire in remote locations, conditions which banks exploited by offering high interest loans. As a result, only forty percent of settlers managed to develop their homesteads within the required timeframe, most of them land speculators, cattle owners, miners, loggers, or otherwise equipped with start-up capital and experience; many of those for whom the act was ostensibly intended were forced to declare bankruptcy or simply abandon their land claim altogether.
In spite of this history, the prospect of owning a farm of one’s own has remained alluring to Americans, who have periodically returned to versions of homesteading particularly in the aftermath of paradigm-shifting events: the Great Depression, the Vietnam War, the anticipation of Y2K, the Great Recessions, and now the pandemic. As a balm to these crises and their various upheavals, homesteading offers the material security of self-sufficiency, namely access to food and shelter that is unmediated by supermarkets or landlords. Though it might also be said that our culture’s enduring interest in homesteading points to the more chronic, all-encompassing crisis of capitalism, to which homesteading offers not only material but also spiritual transformation: an opportunity to shed the requisite role of consumer, by effectively seizing the means of production and exiting the capitalist economy altogether. “Fresh bread & homegrown veggies are great,” tweeted “Homestead Mentor” Jill Winger earlier this year, “but the part I love most about homesteading are the transformations: From consumer to creator/From passive to active/From industrial to intentional/From sedated to alive.”
This kind of promise seems to have resonated particularly in recent years, as the American population reconsiders its relationship to work. While the pandemic exposed how “essential work” and the people who perform it are critically undervalued, the vacuum where the long-fallen girlboss once stood is now occupied by “quiet quitting” and actual quitting, amounting to what others have called “The Great Resignation.” In the absence of viable solutions to this widespread discontent, online homesteaders like Hannah Neeleman, better known as the face of @ballerinafarm, have supplied the next best thing: seemingly attainable fantasy.
In a TikTok from last year, Neeleman forms and fries buttermilk sourdough donuts to a breezy Ella Fitzgerald tune, exhibiting in the process the various accouterments which comprise her signature style: copper utensils and unbleached parchment strewn over a wood-slat table; the kelly green AGA stove that her “family treasures'' adorned with a spray of artfully wilted wildflowers; an audience of flaxen-haired children, perched on a stool, on the table, on her hip. To appreciate the true impact of this scene, one might look beyond the sheer quantity of Neeleman’s 9.8M TikTok and 10M Instagram followers, which indicates less than the kind of reaction represented by the top comment on this video: “I do not want a career. I want this life.”
From that phrasing arises the question: what exactly is “this life”? Ostensibly, a life of sourdough starter and adoring children and twenty thousand dollar stoves that is crucially liberated from the treachery of professional striving. Though this translates, more broadly speaking, into a life contained within a little house on a prairie, removed entirely from professional existence or responsibility for anyone outside of the immediate family unit— in other words, tradlife.
Certainly, homesteading shares with tradlife a nostalgic orientation, especially when practiced by figures like Winger, who, in her work as a “Homestead Mentor,” encourages “ambitious people to return to their roots.” It is telling, too, that a disproportionate number of homesteader wives on social media are white, conventionally attractive women married to white, weather-beaten husbands, with whom they share a growing brood of children and some form of religious devotion. Elliott described this arrangement in The Atlantic as “the natural form of things in this lifestyle”—a welcome return, she added, to the traditional gender roles with which men and women were “designed,” but that society has “spent so much time and energy fighting.” When expressed as just one part of a broader, free-range lifestyle, this conservative vision becomes obscured beneath its mainstream, palatable packaging—packaging that particularly appeals to the disillusioned career woman looking for some alternative to the maw of capitalism. But how much of that appeal, given its entanglement with tradlife’s conservatism, paradoxically aims to repackage capitalism for her consumption?
Concealed by the pastoral idyll is the fact that the Homestead Act displaced Native Americans for profit. The earlier 1830 Indian Removal Act had already forced Native Americans in the east onto reservations, which enabled the government to seize and sell their homelands. Continuing this effort, the Homestead Act—together with legislation that incentivized the construction of railroads and universities—rapidly razed the grasslands and forests occupied by Native Americans west of the Mississippi, allegedly to benefit independent farmers and, in the process, democracy. Although the “yeoman farmer” symbolized the republic’s departure from Old World aristocracy, he also ushered in a new kind of social hierarchy: if his industriousness made him the ideal American, it also made him the ideal capitalist.
Like all capitalist schemes, then, homesteading looked to maximize its profit margin by devaluing certain kinds of labor. With the condition that applicants “improve” their land in order to secure their land claim, the Homestead Act discredited any form of labor that did not demonstrate its narrow definition of agriculture. Though Native American farming typically enriched ecosystems, it was deemed a “waste” of land by settlers eager to monetize it. This logic later justified the Dawes Act of 1887, which further disenfranchised Native Americans by carving up reservation land into 160-acre homesteads, and imposing upon them an industrial system of agriculture.
The Homestead Act also subjected pioneer women to exploitation, where their domestic labor, romanticized as a “labor of love,” was not recognized by any proprietary right but instead, rewards like “pleasure,” “pride,” and “purpose,” which transcended quantification. If second-wave feminism worked to expose this narrative, then contemporary homesteader wives have renewed its purchase by framing their domestic labor in neat squares and 280-character anecdotes: portrayed in videos like Neeleman’s and photographs like Elliott’s, cooking isn’t a “chore,” as Winger recently retweeted, but “an amazing daily opportunity to tap into a sensory experience, to be creative, and to nourish yourself and loved ones.”
That style of rhetoric approaches defensiveness in one of Neeleman’s more recent posts, a vague non-response to a Times profile that disturbingly pulled back the curtain on Ballerina Farm. In the profile, Neeleman reflected that she “[gave] up a piece of [herself]” with her first pregnancy, which marked the end of her Juilliard career, and a gradual shift toward her farm-bound existence: one in which she abstains from birth control, delivered seven of her eight children without pain relief (she indulged in an epidural on the one occasion when her husband wasn’t present), and competed in a beauty pageant twelve days after birthing her youngest; put simply, an existence that requires week-long spells of bedrest to combat exhaustion-induced sickness. In the aftermath of the controversy that ensued—with comments urging, "Girl, run”—Neeleman posted a video to her account on July 29 in collaboration with her husband’s, @hogfathering. It shows the couple kissing, in cowboy boots, with their cattle field as background and newborn as prop. Through a disembodied voice over, Neeleman describes how they “snuck over” to their new dairy for date night, presumably built to supply the Ballerina Farm store with an expanded arsenal of artisanal goods. “When we started to farm, I was swept up in the beauty of learning to make food from scratch,” she continues. “It’s the world we created, and I couldn’t love it more.”
As an opportunity for tradlife to further its own anti-feminist cause, these idyllic depictions of domestic work are pitched to, as well as against, the disillusioned career woman. It is through this “gloomy figure of the working woman,” writes Zoe Hu in Dissent, that tradwives conflate “their rejection of both capitalism and feminism.” By suggesting that a woman’s fulfillment might be found beyond the home, feminism has, to the tradwife, degraded homemaking as a form of drudgery, as well as those women who find fulfillment from being wives and mothers. There is no possibility of peaceful coexistence from this perspective, notes Rebecca Klatch in Women of the New Right, only a zero-sum game in which traditional values and the wives that uphold them have either defeated, or been defeated by, feminism. As such, the disillusioned career woman might provide affirmation to the homesteader wife while supplying crucial ammunition to the tradwife seeking her vindication; cast in stark relief against the burned-out career woman, the tradwife’s domestic existence is rendered not only as an alternative, but as the only solution to the abasement of capitalism. “It was such a transition going from working in finance to sahm [stay at home mom],” begins one comment on a TikTok video posted by @gwenthemilkmaid, whose content revolves around “homemaking,” “homesteading,” and “holistic health.” “I don’t wake up anxious anymore, I wake up grateful to make brekky for my family.”
Yet despite her comprehensive retreat, not only from the workplace but also market pressures in general, the tradwife ironically becomes the ultimate capitalist subject by insisting that her labor is priceless. This dynamic is further complicated by the current wave of homesteading wives, many of whom enjoy profitable careers through social media, ironically by selling the idea of unpaid labor. In a recent post, Elliott mused that “if all of this went away, the phones, the computers, the videos, the microphones, the noise…our life would still be what it is”—“our life” meaning the curated version “of gardens, of sourdough, of lambs each spring.” But this post, which exists alongside others promoting the efficacy of geranium oil for a duck’s infected foot, lemongrass for pest control, and Roman chamomile for hives, belies the fact that Elliott became her family’s breadwinner within a year of being recruited by a fellow blogger to sell essential oils for the multilevel marketing company doTerra. With a similar sleight of hand, Neeleman has framed her Instagram profile in the following terms, as a candid record of one ordinary family’s journey: “With the ink still wet on the real estate contract for our new little farm, we drove to the nearest farm goods store…we had zero experience. Zero background in farming. Didn’t own a shovel or single animal ... .Already short on sleep, we did the only thing we knew how to do: tell our story and document the journey for all to see.”
While this version of events nicely lends itself to the sponsored #FedExSmallBusiness campaign to which it was attached, it patently glosses over the fact that Neeleman’s father-in-law is the founder and former CEO of JetBlue, as well as four other airlines. This inheritance is particularly relevant given the fact, as Anne Helen Peterson has identified, that there is no possible way for the Neeleman’s 328-acre farm to cover the costs of its own operation, let alone break a profit. Listing the variety of goods available for purchase through the Ballerina Farm website (everything from vacuum sealed “mountain raised meat” and baggies of “high protein farm flour,” to gingham aprons and clogs photographed with a smattering of grass), Gaby Del Valle has observed in The Baffler that Neeleman’s content functions as advertisement for these wares, as well as for her life—in other words, that homespun fantasy and the commercial reality are two sides of the tradwife’s coin.
Like the social media influencer, the conservative woman activist relies on image-making as a crucial tool, though in her case, specifically to resolve an oxymoronic existence. Because her role in the public sphere violates the traditional gender roles to which she subscribes, the conservative woman activist promotes her politics, not by setting out on the campaign trail, but by influencing—a strategy uniquely suited to the age of social media. “When female political activism is conceptualized as the power behind the throne,” writes Klatch, again in Women of the New Right, “[or] women altruistically working for the benefit of a larger cause, the seeming paradox disappears.” With some social media savvy, the highly influential and in some cases, breadwinning homesteader wife can benefit from being read as “the power behind the throne” of her husband, whose work serves the “larger cause” of serving her family.
In this way, she represents a unique example of the alt-right’s weaponization of the internet, if only because her corner of cyberspace isn’t alienating, but widely appealing. Unlike the misogynistic incel, she appeals to women, and unlike the 1950s-styled tradwife, her appeal spans various demographics and political orientations. Another one of Neeleman’s Instagram posts, presumably crafted to assuage the ongoing Times fallout, is a particularly savvy example of this. It excerpts an abridged autobiography that depicts how her parents supported their nine children by running a flower shop: her dad was the customer-facing ”florist and creative mind,” while her mom controlled the books and the sales—if not “the power behind the throne,” then at least the power behind the bouquets. The comments on this post are mostly favorable—having largely abandoned any reference to the controversy—certainly a testament to Neeleman’s persuasiveness, as well as the power of her duality as both tradwife and breadwinner. This seeming contradiction actually provides her a crucial malleability, and with it the ability to temper her image toward attracting the broadest audience: just as her entrepreneurialism implies that she is more than “just a housewife,” her identity and wife and mother neutralizes her status as a capitalist subject.
With the “yeoman” as its model practitioner, homesteading’s reverence for hard work predictably lends itself to the bootstrapping mentality that undergirds fiscal conservatism. Like a series of manifestos which state her commitment to this position, Elliott’s Instagram captions often delight in her daily work and invite her followers to do the same. “What hard work do you love?” she asks in a post that describes how she spent the morning harvesting, preparing, transporting, stirring, cleaning, then finally chopping plums and cucumbers. Yet this kind of infatuation with, and fetishization of labor, is frequently pointed toward implicit critique. “Very rarely do I look at a situation and think, ‘Man, that’s a lot of work,’” she muses in another post, which happens to also advertise new photography for sale on her website. “Rather, I see a goal—an end that I want to climb towards.” This is an attitude that would rather persecute individuals than structural failure, and, in doing so, restates what the conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly wrote in The Power of the Positive Woman. “To the positive woman,” Schlafly wrote, as part of her defense of the traditional family, “her particular set of problems is not a conspiracy against her, but a challenge to her character and capabilities.”
But Schlafy’s “positive woman” is defined less by her character and capabilities than she is by the material circumstances that favor them. Online homesteaders work hard, of course, but it is their relative security—as mostly white, able-bodied, cisgendered women, often with multiple streams of income—that allows this group to engage with work that indeed feels like a series of goals, rather than a series of indignities. As an alleged alternative to the corporate workforce, then, the self-sufficiency promoted by homesteading shares much with what it appears to abandon, because it rewards only some at the expense of others. The career woman, hoping to swap her pantsuit for a prairie dress, will likely find in her new role another version of the same oppressive labor relations. Though she may feel empowered, rather than exploited, by these very relations, she inescapably propagates the patriarchal and racist system that sustains them: by continuing an arrangement ultimately designed to ensure that wealth accumulates between generations; and by projecting this arrangement as fantasy, a romanticized portrait of the domestic labor and historical violence involved. .
There should be healthy suspicion, then, of any solution that prioritizes individual gains over collective demands—like the specious kind of feminism espoused in Neeleman’s defense. “Seems like a lot of people claim they’re feminists until a woman chooses a life that doesn’t fit their narrative,” reads one of the most-liked responses on one of her Instagram posts, again in reaction to the Times profile. That framework equally validates the popular “soft life” content which promotes “divine feminine energy,” and a life that prioritizes personal comfort on the path of least resistance. At first glance, “soft life”—which frequently manifests as montages of candles and charcuterie boards, long showers and buttery activewear sets—shares nothing with the rustic rigor of homesteading. And yet, as aesthetic genres, both “soft life” and homesteading content dress up what is essentially a dictate for women to retreat from both the public sphere and each other, ultimately restricting the kind of solidarity required for more inclusive and meaningful solutions: wherein “choice” is not an endpoint for the most privileged women, but merely the outcome of conditions that equitably benefit women regardless of their race and class
In the face of the various crises which comprise contemporary life, Elliott and her co-host encourage their listeners to do the same. “If your world feels like you need it to be smaller, that’s ok,” they offer, alongside encouragement to shirk any obligation that falls outside of this realm—the obligation to know what’s going on, to contribute, or even to care. They recommend, vis-a-vis Lewis, to do “sensible, human things” instead, which in the Homemaker Chic universe, involves swapping the news for jazz music, a glass of wine, and getting a head start on folding laundry; a hermetic pursuit of individualism which they term “cultivating an intentional atmosphere.” But while this realm remains air-tight to the intrusions of others, it is certainly not impenetrable to their gaze—particularly when broadcast over multiple social media platforms. It is here that the homemaker can really make a difference, Elliott tells her listeners, within the walls of her home—or her “sphere of influence,” as she tellingly calls it. No wonder, then, that Elliott cites C.S. Lewis on her podcast as an instructive thinker for navigating our current moment: his impulse in the face of crisis is to think smaller, but also, to think less altogether.