Anyway, a lotta ink has been spilled about the lie of Ballerina Farm/Hannah Neeleman and her JetBlue-heir husband pretending that a small farm is financially viable without significant outside income. She sells that pioneer myth by actually selling something called bone broth hot cocoa at $46 a bag. (Gross.)
But in all the outrage about Neeleman, I haven't seen anyone compare her to the original tradwife liar, Laura Ingalls Wilder.
I'm not referring to the Little House on the Prairie children's book series, which were actually pretty open about how poor the Ingalls family was and how many times they almost died through illness/extreme weather/starvation on that homestead stolen from Native Americans. Those novels include plenty of nostalgia and manifest destiny and libertarianism, but Ma Ingalls clearly hates being out on the homestead isolated from their neighbors. That's not trad-wife content. Maybe trad-child content.
No, long before Wilder published her first children's book in 1932, she had a regular column in papers like the Missouri Ruralist and Farmer's Week in the 1910s/20s, where she would write 500-word pieces such as:
"The Wanton Destruction of Trees"
"Kinfolks or Mere Relations?"
"Let's Not Depend on Experts"
"The Hidden Cost of Getting What We Want"
"Don't Call on The Government All of the Time"
Those are all real essay titles -- I've read them; you can too -- and the content is exactly what you'd expect: folksy, gently humorous, self-effacing, lite-Christian inspirational, suspicious of city life, glorifying backbreaking physical labor, full of housekeeping tips. Any single one of them could be easily repurposed into a Ballerina Farm IG caption or a TikTok voiceover with a quick edit: nothing new under the sun.
And just like Neeleman lies by omission about how their farm books are balanced, Wilder lied by omission about her own account books. Her husband Almanzo Wilder was partially paralyzed by diphtheria after their marriage and couldn't physically manage a farm alone. Caroline Fraser notes that Almanzo's parents (themselves wealthy farmers) had to pay off the mortgage on the Missouri farm or Laura and Almanzo would not have kept the property. Even with that financial help, they had a lot of rough years and it was Laura's side hustles -- selling eggs, clerking, writing columns lying about the rewarding joy of farming -- that kept them afloat. Eventually she started publishing full-length novels and their success finally put them in the black.
I don't expect every modern cottagecore critic to memorize the biographies of historical farmfluencers like Wilder. I do want an acknowledgement that social media is a new vehicle for a very old phenomenon. Tradwife farming content is part of the foundational myth of USAmerican culture, not late-stage capitalism brainrot or whatever. We have always been like this, and canceling Ballerina Farm or deleting TikTok off your phone won't solve it. We've got to address Christian patriarchal settler-colonialism at the root.
