Imagine if a 2026 tradwife fell back into the 1850s: Would it be the life she always wanted, or is her nostalgic cosplay from a world that never existed? That’s the premise of Caro Claire Burke’s novel Yesteryear, which simultaneously attracts and repulses readers as much as the tradwife movement itself.
We feel some tug in our gut when watching women bake bread and hold the hands of half a dozen children on a farm with the setting sun behind them, while we also push against the images as reductive, fantastical, and sentimentally backward. “The goal of an influencer is not to be loveable,” the main character Natalie discovers, “and it is not to be unbearable. The goal is to be both at once. In other words: addicting.” Natalie has uncovered the secret to Instagram success, and her life becomes a performance, even for herself.
“We are what we pretend to be,” warned Kurt Vonnegut, “so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” As Natalie awakens to find herself no longer in the modern world but in the 1850s, she wrestles with the reality of life without electricity, without indoor plumbing, and without the basic human rights afforded to women. Very early on in the novel, her 1850s husband slaps her hard across the face for her hysterics, and she accepts it, as she must, given the time period. What Natalie has pretended — “playdough husband, playdough children, playdough life,” as she puts it — has become her reality.
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Without giving too much away, the book is predicated on a false either-or about the available options for women, pitting one vision (the Christian, conservative, traditional wife-mother domestic sphere) against the other (the Harvard-educated, ambitious, career-oriented single life of loneliness). Granted, that dichotomy is posed by the rather untrustworthy narrator Natalie herself. She predicts her Harvard roommate Reena will have a hard life: “She would have to work hard to get the job, and hard to keep it, and even harder to get promoted.” For Natalie, the only other option to Reena’s unhappy destiny as a working woman is to pour herself into an idealized home life, one curated for photos, funded by her wealthy father-in-law, and supported by leaning into the fears of the right-wing culture warriors.
While the novel spits out bits of truth at the reader, the caricatures of the woman who chooses motherhood and family versus the woman who chooses work play off a lie. Natalie is not wrong that “some women” compromise “every ounce of themselves in the name of building a life for themselves that they [don’t] enjoy.” The same could be said for men — for any human being who realizes that corner offices and winning senatorial races are no more than straw compared to things such as family or integrity. And, many wives likely nodded their heads at Natalie’s revelation that “there comes a point in every marriage when a woman realizes that the man she married is a freak. This is inevitable.” However, I would suggest the wife, too, unveils her freakishness in marriage. Not one of us is perfect.
The fact that Natalie’s husband must either be impotent when married to a strong woman in 2026, or abusive, aggressive, and virile in 1855, is a false dichotomy. It was in the 19th century that African American author and educator Anna Julia Cooper observed that a strong woman would promote a strong man, for women would no longer “cramp, stunt, simplify, and nullify” themselves to bolster men’s machismo; instead, the men, following the increased power of women, would strive to “reach the ideal of a generation of women who demand the noblest, grandest, and best achievement of which he is capable.” Natalie could have a strong husband, remain a strong woman, and have indoor plumbing.
Nor should her roommate, Reena, be relegated to a life of lonely ambition simply because she attempts to succeed in her career. That heresy sounds like novels of the mid-20th century. I’m thinking of Alice Curtayne’s House of Cards (1940), in which the main character Anne Farrelly is given an unhappy ending for choosing work over marriage: “Marriage is the only real haven. In debarring herself that, Anne had denied herself nothing less than life.” Why are we repeating the fallacies of previous centuries in insisting that women either have unsatisfied lives at home with babies and gardens, or pantsuits and paychecks accompanied by despair or drinking problems?
Yesteryear could have shown a way forward through the artificial dilemma we have fabricated for women in society, but instead, it devolves into parody. Natalie is supposed to be unlikable, but she is more than that — she’s unbelievable. We never comprehend why she desired the tradwife life. One wonders how many tradwives the author befriended before trying to portray one. For Christians, the attempts at showing Natalie’s faith will read like a cartoonish mix of evangelical bumper sticker truisms and New Age-style mystical feelings. In Burke’s rendering, conservatives’ desire for patriotic leaders who uplift family values sounds more like victims of brainwashing and undiscerning social media diets. Burke never jumps across the tribal barriers set up by the culture to understand the religion and politics that she depicts.
WOMEN DON’T WANT TO JUST BE ‘GIRLBOSSES’ OR ‘TRADWIVES’
In her final attempts to rectify Natalie’s failures, the author gives voice to a couple of characters to leave us with alleged words of wisdom. Natalie’s mother yells through the phone, “You think kindness is some silly frivolous side virtue, when it is in fact the whole damn thing!” The highlighting of kindness is weakened somewhat by the exclamatory context, and I have always hoped that life was about more than being kind. Meanwhile, Natalie’s daughter, Clementine, also tries to reason with her mother: “How much beauty you’ve missed. Because it really is beautiful.” Perhaps beauty will save the world? I’ve heard that before, too, and it’s more appealing than mere kindness.
Despite all the philosophical missteps, the book should make an entertaining film. Slated to be produced by Amazon MGM and to star Anne Hathaway, Yesteryear already has a winning premise, a creative plot, and a mystery that keeps readers from turning away too soon. The book engages your detective senses as you puzzle out how Natalie ended up in 1855. As Natalie’s backstory is unpacked — and it’s very cleverly written, with a feel for pacing and style — the reader keeps hoping for Natalie’s apotheosis, which never comes. The novel could have been so much more, so with apologies to my fellow literary nerds, I think the movie might be better.
Jessica Hooten Wilson is the Fletcher Jones Chair of Great Books at Pepperdine University and the author of several books, most recently Flannery O’Connor’s Why Do the Heathen Rage?: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at a Work in Progress.
