Why I hate the Ballerina Farm egg apron
Tradwives, egg money, and the irony of SAHM influencers
I have watched and rewatched this video of Mormon homemaker and influencer Hannah Neeleman (Ballerina Farm) opening a birthday present from her husband, Daniel, more times than I want to admit .. and not because the gift is so great, but because the 53-second video is an absolute layer cake of symbolism:
Hannah: “This is my present from Daniel. Hoping they’re tickets to Greece. So … plane tickets? Oooh, a hat I can wear in Greece?”
It was not, as you may have guessed, a vacation. It was an egg apron — an apron with lots of little pockets across the front to help her gather eggs from their poultry coop.
Daniel: “It’s great; now you can gather eggs.”
Daniel: “You’re welcome.”
Hannah: “Thanks, Honey.”
There’s nothing inherently wrong with practical gifts for your spouse. But, in the context of Megan Agnew’s Times profile on Ballerina Farm, the apron symbolizes something more sinister:
That Hannah Neeleman — Mormon homemaker, influencer, and pageant queen — represents the tradwife movement in which women work their asses off while proclaiming to be stay-at-home moms and wives, glamorizing traditional gender roles in which men make money … and women depend on their men.
(I ruffled a LOT of feathers when I posted this Instagram Reel about tradwives in February 2024).
Egg money
Like Hannah, I’m a working mom and a farmer. Every morning I feed our chickens and ducks. Every afternoon, I collect eggs. Every night, I restock them at our farm stand.
Unlike Hannah, this is not my “day job,” but it is deeply satisfying to make money from the food we grow and animals we raise. And it is, literally, “egg money.”
What is egg money?
“Egg money” is a term for when, not too long ago, women — unable to have their own bank accounts or property — were entirely financially reliant on their husbands and maintained some autonomy by doing “small” gender-appropriate jobs like selling eggs.
“Gyda, like other farm women in the early 1900s, sold chickens and eggs to “city folk” for cash or in exchange for credit at the local grocery store. Men were often unaware of how much money the hens brought in.
As Deborah Fink wrote in Open County, Iowa, ‘Being associated with women, poultry carried a certain stigma for men. The current slang association of the word chicken with cowardice conveys some of the disdain men felt toward poultry.’”
—
, The Incredible, Edible Egg Money
Egg money symbolizes our culture’s long history of traditional gender roles, the ones very much alive on Ballerina Farm. The ones that dictate that women live under the thumb of the patriarchy and men get to call the shots.
The dark underbelly of Ballerina Farm
Part of the undeniable draw of Ballerina Farm’s content is that it is delicious mashup of wholesome, analog farm life. Who doesn’t want to lose themselves in a video of a woman making lasagna from scratch?
But, as Agnew’s profile makes clear, Ballerina Farm isn’t just beautifully-curated escapist content. There’s a real dark irony in the midst of the gingham and porcelain, and, for me, it all comes back to the damn apron:
Egg money symbolizes a time before women had the right to financial independence.
The Ballerina Farm egg apron symbolizes how the tradwife movement boomerangs us back to the past.
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Wahooo for telling the truth. My mother was an "egg selling" woman. She kept the money in a jar on the top shelf of the kitchen cupboard. When I needed something for school or activities or to look "cool" mom would pay for it out of the stash. She also lied to my dad and said it had been a gift, or she found it on sale etc. I vowed when I got married we would tell the truth and be full partners. Must have worked. We have been married 60 years and are about to take our children and grandchildren on a cruise to Alaska. Judy Helm Wright