is this viral novel’s time travelling tradwife really ‘perfect at being alive’?
- Written by: Rachel Williamson, Lecturer in English, University of Canterbury
The film rights for Caro Claire Burke’s buzzy debut novel were sold to Amazon MGM Studios before publication. Adaptation plans are well underway, with Anne Hathaway, cited in the acknowledgements as “instrumental in bringing Natalie to life”, set to star and produce.
Yesteryear follows self-professed “flawless Christian woman” and tradwife influencer Natalie Heller Mills, who wakes up one morning to find herself mysteriously transported back in time to 1855 pioneer America. The house and children look similar to her own, but something is off. Her top-of-the-line kitchen appliances have vanished, her husband Caleb treats her with barely contained simmering violence, and the food tastes awful.
Part satire, part dystopian horror, Yesteryear shifts between this uncanny version of the past and the present-day. Is this time travel, Natalie wonders. A reality TV show? Or maybe even a test of faith set by God Almighty himself?
Review: Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke (4th Estate)
Unsurprisingly, the book’s sensational premise combined with its zeitgeisty topic, has generated hype and anticipation, including praise from both BookTokkers and critics.
Hathaway has lent her star power to the book’s marketing campaign, posting glossy videos of herself unwrapping and reading from it. This leveraging of social media celebrity seems particularly apt, given Burke’s interest in womanhood, performance and fame within the queasy and hypocritical world of Instagram tradwives.
Yesteryear is her thought experiment into what happens when we push the tradwife phenomenon to its seemingly inevitable, deeply unsettling conclusion.
‘America hates women’
The word “tradwife” first appears in the opening pages, when Natalie’s teenage daughter asks what it means.
A combination of “traditional” and “wife”, the tradwife is a hyperfeminised retrograde social figure, embracing a 1950s aesthetic and return to traditional gender roles. She is a loving wife and doting stay-at-home mum. She bakes her own bread, preserves fruit from her garden and delights in cleaning the house with homemade organic products. And she does it all in glamorous gowns or vintage-inspired dresses, baby on her hip and beatific smile on her face.
In short, as Natalie points out, the tradwife is “perfect at being alive”.
At first glance, Natalie appears to fit the bill effortlessly. Raised according to devout Christian values, she is smart, beautiful, married rich and has millions of followers online. Her Instagram feed features videos of her dancing with her cowboy husband and photos of the couple picnicking with their five children on the family ranch in Idaho.
While Burke says she didn’t model Natalie on any particular tradwife, the parallels to leading influencer Hannah Neeleman, of Ballerina Farm fame, are hard to miss.
The online world tradwives inhabit may be fantastical, but the conservative gender ideology that created them is not.
UN Women suggests we are in a global wave of “gender backlash”, cautioning that when democracies backslide and global crises worsen, so do the rights of women and girls.
Reversal of feminist gains has been especially pronounced under the Trump administration, which has overseen the overturning of Roe v Wade, restrictions on federal funding of childcare, and reduced access to reproductive healthcare for women.
At the same time, the administration has sentimentalised motherhood to cajole women into having children. Last year, vice president J.D. Vance declared he wants “more babies in the United States of America”. And Donald Trump’s Mother’s Day proclamation a month later described “America’s mothers” as “the heart of our families, the light in our homes, and the stewards of our Nation’s future”.
While seemingly positive, this pro-natal rhetoric positions motherhood as the correct – indeed, the only – choice.
Limited options see Natalie channel her ambition into motherhood, and her sister keeps miserably having children. Both women experience profound disappointment and dissatisfaction, despite having followed the socially sanctioned script written for women.
The yoking of maternity with the far right’s nationalist ideology is explicitly evoked when Natalie’s father-in-law, Doug, runs for president. He not only bribes Natalie to have more children, but tries to leverage her family and fame in his campaign.
Little wonder Natalie scathingly concludes: “America hates women. What a comfort to remember.”
Men’s violence, women’s rage
Keenly aware of the disjuncture between her online and offline personas, Natalie’s acerbic observations expose the artifice of her carefully curated online life.
It’s no surprise to learn Yesteryear Ranch relies heavily on an extensive staff of nannies, producers and immigrant farm workers – or that the organic vegetables and milk they sell at local farmers’ markets are grown with the help of chemical pesticides.
Nor do Natalie’s disclosures of undiagnosed postnatal depression and maternal ambivalence shock us quite as much as they might have ten years ago. This is likely due to the recent surge in fiction foregrounding a maternal point of view. Novels like Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch and Ariana Harwicz’s Die, My Love (both adapted for the screen) have helped normalise the distress and overwhelm many women experience in early motherhood.
More startling is just how deeply unlikeable Natalie is. Exhorted again and again by her mother to “be kind”, Natalie dismisses her husband as “an idiot”, is cruel to her sister and veers between either exploiting her children or neglecting them entirely.
Feminists (“The Angry Women”) become the target of especial vitriol, scornfully imagined as bitter and lonely. The irony, of course, is that Natalie herself is “very, very angry”.
Female rage has become a popular subject in contemporary women’s fiction, signalled by the trendy #weirdgirllit moniker. Protagonists like the unnamed narrator in Miranda July’s All Fours or Therese in Emily Perkins’ Lioness find ways to tap out of the oppressive patriarchy they keep butting up against.
Natalie’s solution is to smile more and monetise it. Her complicity is uncomfortable. If Serena Joy, the religious and conservative wife of the Commander, had narrated The Handmaid’s Tale instead of the novel’s rebellious protagonist Offred, her voice might have sounded something like this.
And Natalie isn’t alone. Shannon, her 19-year-old producer, initially comes onboard due to the (misguided) belief that all Natalie’s “homesteading and the farm-to-table and keeping your kids away from technology shit” might offer a “way out of the maze” imposed by neoliberalism and patriarchy.
Rise of the femosphere
In the real world, research shows increasing numbers of young women are embracing conservative gender roles. This helps account for our cultural fascination with tradwives and the rise in the “femosphere”, a corner of the internet that urges women to inoculate themselves from men’s violence by “harden[ing] their hearts and learn[ing] to manipulate men”.
We may not like Natalie or agree with her politics. We may even feel “a sort of satisfaction to witnessing Natalie’s distress”, as Vox critic Constance Grady says. Arguably, however, we can empathise with her.
Haunted by “a sad, quiet thought” that “none of this had gone the way I thought it would”, Natalie’s disappointment will likely resonate with many readers, especially those familiar with choice feminism.
Similarly, the gendered inequities and violence Natalie experiences across both timelines is all too familiar. In 2026, “nice, dumb rich kid” husband Caleb spends his days going down the manosphere rabbit hole and watching porn online. Despite his incompetence, Caleb controls the finances, limiting Natalie’s access to money of her own.
1855’s Old Caleb hits Natalie, dictating what she does, where she goes and who she sees. Her observation that “he didn’t hurt me again, he can always hurt me again, he will hurt me again” acutely captures the ever-present threat victims of intimate partner violence navigate daily.
While Natalie’s experiences of gender-based violence help close the gaps between readers, Yesteryear’s ending may divide them further. Some critics have rightly expressed discomfort at the leveraging of childhood disability as a plot device, and the punishment of Natalie herself is morally grey.
Irrespective, Yesteryear is a compulsive, pacey read. I gobbled it up in large chunks, finishing it at 1am. With its explicit reference to the manosphere, tradwives and Instagram influencers, Burke has clearly hit a collective nerve.
Authors: Rachel Williamson, Lecturer in English, University of Canterbury
