Yesteryear Is Not Just a Book About Tradwives

Warning: this article contains Yesteryear spoilers. Read at your own discretion.

A woman wakes up in a house with no electricity. The children in the next room are filthy, and she does not recognize them. Her husband appears in a cowboy hat, brandishing an ax. It appears to be 1855. And the first explanation that occurs to our main character, before God, before Satan, before time travel, is that she is on a reality show. Somewhere in the rafters there must be a camera.

Caro Claire Burke gives this tell to the reader early in Yesteryear, long before the twist. Natalie Heller Mills, a tradwife influencer with eight million followers and a ranch in Idaho whose industrial fridges are barely hidden from frame, has lost her entire world, and her mind’s first move is not to escape. It is to look for whoever is still watching, and perform for them.

Yesteryear has (allegedly) sold over 1.4 million copies, an incredible feat in a media environment where people expect information to be delivered for free and in seven-second intervals. To cut to the chase, I liked the book. It is a page-turner written for a mind warped by TikTok (it me!). It takes on gender roles and mythologizes Ballerina Farm, a favorite topic of mine. And yet I have struggled to give my take.

That’s because I think a LOT of the coverage from critics was downstream of the same assumption: that Yesteryear is a book about tradwives. In Slate, Rebecca Onion called the ending a gamble that doesn’t pay off and something I’ve seen generally as the consensus objection: “Most tradwives are not suffering from psychotic breaks.” The Los Angeles Review of Books complained that the final turn “reframes all that precedes it as a matter of private pathology.” The (conservative) Washington Examiner ran the headline “’Yesteryear’ is a cartoonish, simplistic look at tradwife movement” and wondered “how many tradwives the author befriended before trying to portray one.” Julia Yost, in Compact, coined a name for the genre: tradsploitation.

And yes, it is a book that takes on the hypocrisy that has been driving us all nuts, that the women extolling the virtues of subordinate womanhood are themselves beneficiaries of everything feminism has wrought. Many of us wanted the book to deliver a full flaying of that institution. Instead, the final twist makes Natalie’s fall look like a personal foible rather than an institutional one, and the critics have treated that as the book wriggling out of its own argument.

I want to argue that people see the ending as a disappointment because they are missing what the book is about. Tradwifery gives Burke a way to comment on gender and motherhood, but it is a means to talk about something far more prevalent in all of our lives. Yesteryear is a book about