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There’s Nothing Traditional About Tradwives

Propagandists for stay-at-home domesticity are monetizing a fantasy—and they’re not really staying at home.

A tradwife influencer with millions of followers wakes up in the mid-19th century and has to be a farmwife for real. That’s Caro Claire Burke’s best-selling novel Yesteryear in a nutshell. The time travel doesn’t make a lot of sense (no spoilers), but it doesn’t matter—by the time the totally unconvincing switcheroo arrives, you’ll be in too deep to care.

No wonder Anne Hathaway is making it into a movie.

As many have noted, Yesteryear’s protagonist, Natalie Heller Mills, Idaho mother of six, tireless content creator for her millions of fans on social media, and one very sharp businesswoman, bears a resemblance to Hannah Neeleman, slim and beautiful Utah mother of nine and proprietor of Ballerina Farm, from which she portrays a picture-perfect life of adorable blond children, cows, chickens, and homemade bread while selling overpriced kitchen supplies to her approximately 23 million followers on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Skeptics tear her down for selling raw milk (ceased after health authorities found E. coli in a batch of it) and $259 cutting boards (Walmart sells a virtually identical board for around $17), and of course for kowtowing to her husband, Daniel, despite obviously being the brains of the operation. (In her videos, he has all the alertness of a stunned ox.) While she’s idolized by Christian nationalists as the perfect white obedient super-fertile butter-churning Mormon mom, she only occasionally touches on her religious beliefs and does not mention politics. If you want to keep your numbers in the multimillions, you probably want to keep things a bit vague.

Natalie is Hannah’s id. Warped by fundamentalist Christianity, taught by her mother that a woman’s job is to be sweet and uncomplaining, frightened of venturing........

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