The Tradwife Trap

How Ballerina Farm, the Duggars, and Quiverfull families perpetuate an illusion of domesticity

One winter my mother boiled the toothbrushes.

We had been sick for six weeks. With two parents and seven kids, the virus mutated enough as it ran through the family that the first person to fall ill was struck down again in a few weeks. We sprayed the doorknobs with Lysol and drank nasty-tasting aloe vera, but there were just too many people stuck inside that small house during a cold winter.

So we boiled the toothbrushes. It wouldn’t even cross my mind to sanitize toothbrushes today. Toothbrushes multiply like rabbits in my house—the dentist gives you a free one every six months and I buy my own bamboo ones anyway because I like them better.

But growing up, we didn’t go to the dentist. No dentist, no free toothbrushes. And even though toothbrushes were cheap, it was still almost $20 to buy new toothbrushes for 9 people. So we didn’t buy new ones. We boiled the old ones.

Sometimes when I stand in front of the bathroom mirror with my toothbrush and bougie toothpaste, I think back to those days of boiling toothbrushes and picking blue mold off food pantry bread.

My Quiverfull family worked hard to keep people from realizing how poor we were—and no one worked harder than me. As the oldest daughter, I shined my brothers’ hand-me-down shoes and photoshopped the perfect family pictures for Christmas cards. I thought it was a fairly harmless scam, as scams go.

Then I grew up and started talking to the women who escaped my abusive childhood cult. Several moms told me they tried to hold themselves to an impossible standard because they thought my family was frugal but comfortable. One woman recalled that her abusive husband used my mom’s inadequate grocery budget as justification for withholding household money.

They didn’t know that our grocery budget was artificially low because of government assistance programs and well-meaning family members who gave us free eggs and grass-fed beef. Sure, we looked wealthy when we brought steak to grill at a church picnic, but the reality was that we couldn’t afford meat that wasn’t gifted to us by my grandfather’s beef farm.

A few months ago, I found my 2007 application for college financial aid. This was my father’s income for a household of 10 people—not exactly the income he projected in public.

The New York Times recently published a nauseating puff piece on Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm. Setting aside Neeleman’s problematic politics and cult membership, her brand sets an impossible standard for other women. It’s a scam. Families like the Neelemans and the Duggars use their vast financial resources to maintain the scam, but most moms with large Quiverfull families don’t have that option. The Quiverfull ideology mixes patriarchy, homeschooling, and unlimited children to serve up a toxic cocktail of faux domestic happiness. It’s impossible to keep up the facade unless you have oodles of money or exploit the free child labor in your house.

Since the Quiverfull movement demands a stay-at-home mom, these large families depend on one income. Unless the dad’s income is substantial, the mom is left with one option to manage the cooking and cleaning and teaching and spanking: homeschooled children who offer 24/7 free labor.

I was that free labor. And I can tell you that exploiting your children to promote a facade of domesticity doesn’t end well. Eventually, Neeleman’s children will grow up. And I suspect they’ll have something to say about their childhood.

I certainly do.