The New Book That Treats Traditional Wives Like The Enemy

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

***

Reading a synopsis for the buzzy new novel “Yesteryear” by Caro Claire Burke put me on high alert. As an avid reader dependent upon an overwhelmingly liberal publishing industry, I’m used to disagreeing with most of the themes and insight of popular fiction. But this one seemed egregious.

The description says, “A traditional American woman, a beautiful wife and mother who sells her pioneer lifestyle of raw milk and farm-fresh eggs to her millions of social media followers, suddenly awakens cold, filthy, and terrified in the brutal reality of 1805 — where she must unravel whether this living nightmare is an elaborate hoax, a twisted reality show, or something far more sinister in this sensational debut novel.”

Despite my misgivings, I had to read it. 

There’s no use sugarcoating it: I hated this book. But it wasn’t because I believe trad wife influencers are above reproach, or even that I think it’s beneficial to watch them peddling impossibly perfect lives on social media. It’s because this could have been a discussion-worthy commentary on the fake-ness of content creators, performative motherhood, or even the realities of homesteading in the modern world. Instead, readers are treated to outlandish caricatures.

It all starts on the first page as the protagonist describes herself: “And who was I? A flawless Christian woman. A manic pixie American dream girl of this nation’s deepest, darkest fantasies. The mother every woman wanted to be, and the wife every man wanted to come home to. Like a nun in a porno, it didn’t make sense, by also, by God: it worked … I was perfect at being alive.”

“Yesteryear” is being marketed as satirical just so the author can say no, she’s not being mean; she’s just being funny. It’s really just code for, “I want to say something lazy and insulting, but I also want immunity from criticism.” If you don’t like it, it’s because you’re overly sensitive or you don’t get the joke. If you do like it, congratulations! You got to feel morally superior while consuming liberal fever dream propaganda.

In Burke’s world, conservative women are fake, Christian women are performative, husbands are abusive, followers are stupid, and every conservative person ever is secretly miserable, plus just objectively awful. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Every character exists to prove that stereotypes are reality.

The main character, Natalie, is not-so-subtly based on the most famous trad wife influencer of them all, the Juilliard-trained ballerina turned influencer Hannah Neeleman, aka Ballerina Farm. Her family-run farm, old-fashioned kitchen, and overall aesthetic launched a tidal wave of copycats and haters. It would appear this author falls into the latter camp.

“Yesteryear” protagonist Natalie is presented as a trad wife influencer who screams at her kids between photos, snaps at her husband, and treats her family like props for content. She despises her husband (“an actual, honest-to-God idiot”), her mother, her sister, her kids, and really everyone in her life, saying that “most people are morons.” She joins coaching calls full of Christian women with Idaho cattle farms trying to “make it big” online. The followers who call her out for being fake are collectively known as “angry women.”

It’s not even clear why Natalie is in the game other than to make money. Even after hitting the big time, her sour attitude never changes. 

And Natalie, while pretending to be deeply religious — not just as the narrator, but also to herself — does things like call people she doesn’t like “c*nt” and then semi-apologize in the form of a prayer. “Sorry, Lord, but really, f*** her,” she thinks to herself after an unpleasant encounter with a fan at Target.

It appears the author genuinely cannot imagine that any woman might sincerely want marriage, children, homemaking, or a more traditional family structure. In this worldview, if a woman says she likes that life, she must be lying, oppressed, dumb, or running a scam. Or in this case, actually disturbed and dissociating. 

But it’s satire. We’re all supposed to pretend this is comedy when it clearly represents a deep contempt for conservative women. The book is saying what a lot of progressive women already believe: These women are frauds, and we’re smarter than them. How original. 

Of course, once Natalie goes back in time, her husband beats her. He rapes her, too. Because if he’s a man from the late 1800s, naturally, he has to be a violent monster. And then — spoiler alert — it turns out he’s really a modern man acting like he’s from the past. The ending makes less sense than the lead-up, and all of it amounts to nothing more than grievance-driven fiction.

And now for the real spoiler alert. The big twist turns Natalie into a rapist. Yes, Natalie. Her husband’s father, a staunch conservative, is running for president, but then Natalie’s producer reveals that her boss raped her. At first the family believes the rapist is Caleb, making them annoyed but not entirely outraged because, as it’s presented, these things can be swept under the rug. But when they find out it was Natalie sexually assaulting the young woman, all hell breaks loose.

“If only my husband had raped our producer,” the book says. “That was basically what [her father-in-law] said that night, what he roared for hours and hours … if only his stupid little son had raped our stupid little producer … it would’ve been over with and forgotten in two weeks. But a predatory woman? Unthinkable. A good Christian mother and wife who (allegedly!) found other women attractive? … Kill the witch. Burn her.”

The solution Natalie comes up with for her misdeed is going off-grid with her family and turning her house into the fantasy she had been projecting online all along. She disconnects from the outside world completely, lives like it’s the 1800s, and ignores the fallout from the tell-all interview that ruined her life. Her older children, led by her surly daughter, run away from home, and then Natalie mostly disassociates and forgets she ever lived in modern times, aided by crushed up pills served in the form of a “calming tonic.”

Natalie’s husband remains a loser who sneaks off every day pretending to farm but is really watching TV in a nearby cabin and picking up grocery deliveries. They have more children because in their fake 19th-century world, suddenly his impotence is gone and he keeps impregnating his wife. The book ends with Natalie’s older children coming to rescue the younger kids who don’t realize there’s a modern world out there. Natalie goes to prison for aggravated child abuse.

Even mainstream media outlets admitted “Yesteryear” isn’t that great. Harper’s Bazaar called it a “vaguely feminist fairy tale” that only works “when you don’t think too much about it.” Vox said it “offers a sadistic influencer comeuppance fantasy.”

Plenty of GoodReads reviewers found the book to be about as deep as a driveway puddle. One reader called it “a mean-spirited revenge fantasy against a strawman the author made up.”

“In my experience, satire is supposed to say something, not just be an overt open mocking. I understand why this book will be popular, especially considering modern trends in literature, but all the positive reviews make me feel like someone’s trying to prank me a little bit,” the reviewer wrote.

Another reader said the story was actually detrimental to the cause of feminism because the characters “don’t seem like real people.”

And that’s what annoyed me most. This book could have been thought-provoking. There is a genuinely interesting story to tell about women turning their homes, marriages, and children into content, and about influencers pretending to live in 19th-century cabins while secretly using a behind-the-scenes microwave. That would be interesting. This, however, was not. 

Instead, the author took the laziest possible route, declaring that all trad wives are fake, all conservative men are monsters, all religious women are grifters, and all enlightened readers should just laugh at them. What you’re left with is not actually satire. It’s just a smug piece of trash that will sell a million copies because liberal women love it.