The tradwife trap: Why everyone is reading ‘Yesteryear’
On a lazy Sunday morning, I turned the last page of “Yesteryear,” the crazily popular book by Caro Claire Burke. And while the wind blew peacefully through the trees and the birds chirped cheerily outside, inside my head, I felt anything but calm.
Ironically, against the very social media culture that the book satirizes, I posted the book cover on my Instagram story. When I next checked, I had close to 400 views (and mind you, I have a small number of followers) and over two dozen little glowing hearts. Apart from being shocked that so many friends had read it, I suddenly understood why Fully Booked’s shelves had sold out of the book for the past couple of months.
I also noticed something else. Most of the people reacting to my story were women. Which made me wonder, what exactly is it about “Yesteryear” that has this particular corner of the internet so obsessed?
Parallels and religious undertones
I don’t think this collective fascination is an accident. Social media is filled with “tradwife” influencers: women baking sourdough, hair slicked back with impeccable makeup, donning 100 percent linen dresses—all the while romanticizing a simpler, more traditional life in front of millions of followers.
“Yesteryear” turns this phenomenon on its head, drawing direct parallels to the rise of Christian tradwife influencers. Remember when the “Book of Mormon” became a cultural phenomenon? I did a little digging and for the ladies, you don’t have to preach to evangelize. But showing how you keep a beautiful home as a housewife and many little children skittering about the house, all the while quoting Bible verses, can be a form of proselytizing, too.
The novel’s popularity has also caught Hollywood’s attention. Shortly after its publication in 2024, Anne Hathaway quickly acquired the film rights alongside Amazon MGM Studios, where she is set to produce and star in the adaptation.
And once you fall into the plot, it’s easy to understand why.
The tradwife dream’s dark turn
Burke pulls at the tradwife thread through its fictional protagonist Natalie Heller Mills, an eight-million-follower pioneer icon selling a pastoral, Christian domestic fantasy from her Idaho ranch.
To her screen-bound audience, Natalie is an avatar of serene submissiveness. But behind the warm Instagram filters lies a heavily staged empire financed by her political, right-wing in-laws—complete with hidden nannies, industrial-grade kitchen appliances, and hired producers. A hate-filled, Harvard-educated woman herself, she hooks us by immediately cracking open this illusion, laying bare the sheer amount of modern wealth required to simulate “simpler times.”
The plot takes a dark, psychological turn when Natalie’s curated world shatters with an explosive public scandal that eventually fractures her mind, made worse by severe postpartum depression. Major spoiler here, as she “wakes up” believing she has time-traveled to 1855.
Burke then strips away Natalie’s romanticized visions of the pioneer aesthetic, subjecting Natalie to the violent, cruel reality of actual 19th-century domesticity, from grueling manual labor to bone-chilling winters without central heating.
The big reveal? Natalie didn’t time-travel at all. In a desperate bid to physically manifest her lost online persona, she spent decades forcing her family into off-grid isolation, becoming both victim and jailer of her own delusional performance, to the point of even forgetting she gave birth to four new children.
While “Yesteryear” humanizes the tradwife phenomenon, Burke doesn’t absolve her delusions. Instead, she grounds Natalie’s flaws in human vulnerability, as she buckles under the many pressures of the overwhelming world around her.
The mirror behind the screen
Like all good fiction that makes you self-reflect, “Yesteryear” hits a raw nerve because it turns the camera back on society.
Staring at the growing views and glowing hearts on my own Instagram story, the irony was hard to shake. Burke’s sharpest critique isn’t just for the influencers who sell an impossible, whitewashed version of womanhood, I realize, but for regular gals reading from the Philippines, too. All of us are equally pulled in by an obsessive digital culture, whether we tap through these feeds out of hate-watching (the “angry women” as Burke calls them), guilty pleasure, or genuine interest, we all feed the algorithm that rewards performance over truth.
And whether we like it or not, by consuming this content, we push creators—fellow human beings—into ever-more extreme caricatures of themselves.
By stripping away the cozy aesthetic of linen aprons, Burke writes a haunting cautionary tale for our hyper-digital times. While a biting satire of the tradwife boom, it’s also a psychological thriller about what happens when the boundary between a curated brand and an authentic soul vanishes entirely, while also raising questions about politics, feminism, and family to the surface.
A woman’s work is never done
The book brings to mind the age-old proverb, “A man may work from sun to sun, but a woman’s work is never done.” And oh, how a woman’s invisible labor never seems to cease! Especially in modern times, when women are expected to keep jobs, with pressures doubling down when one becomes a wife, and increasing exponentially with children.
All this said, the promise of a “simpler” past (one where you have to milk cows at dawn and scrub clothes with skin-burning lye) sings to Natalie like a siren song. But through her twisted example, readers see that when you build a gilded cage out of nostalgia, fortified by algorithmic approval, you can eventually lose sight of reality.
And this is what makes “Yesteryear” so unsettling and captivating—that even after reading hundreds of pages and watching Natalie lose herself to this fantasy, we close the book and return to the very screens that helped make her possible.
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