Missing from much of the tradwife discourse is the power of the cowboy aesthetic. Even if a content creator doesn’t live on hundreds of acre of sweeping cattle pasture, the trappings of cowboy culture are everywhere. The hats, obviously. Enamelware, Lee jeans, and jaunty neck kerchiefs proliferate. But you really see the influence of both cowboy and pioneer lore in tradwives’ steadfast commitment to rugged individualism and self-reliance.
See, for example, the merch page over at The Conservateur 1, a spiritual little sister to Evie magazine.
Conservatives’ have long utilized the cowboy and the pioneer as exemplars of how to make America great again. Both figures are direct callbacks to a time of grit, determination, and the glory of a single nuclear family (or single cowboy) conquering the wild west by dint of innate superiority and white Christian destiny. The fact that American pioneers were largely impoverished and relied on government subsides for survival, or the fact that American cowboys learned everything they knew from Mexican vaqueros doesn’t really factor into American dream mythology!
While Ballerina Farm is primarily famous for being the capital of trad culture, they are leaning more and more into cowboy mythology in their branding. In this New York Times profile, for example, Hannah Neeleman specifically references ancestral pioneering examples, and very much owns her status as an entrepreneur making a living from working the land.
Nothing in Ballerina Farm’s oeuvre, however, has ever been quite as cowboy-centric as this. Let’s dig in to the Neeleman’s romanticization of a life “rooted in hard work and simplicity” and how it’s in lockstep with the right’s successful propaganda machine. A machine that sells the lie of freedom and meritocracy even when publicly tamping down on more personal freedoms than any administration in recent history.
The example Ballerina Farm as cowboy paradise is a fascinating look at how storytelling matters so much more than policy.