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What happens when a tradwife has to put her money where her mouth is

The buzzy new novel Yesteryear offers a sadistic influencer comeuppance fantasy.

Yesteryear, the buzzy new debut novel by Caro Claire Burke, has the kind of premise it’s hard to look away from: a tradwife influencer named Natalie — a Harvard dropout who married rich at 20 — wakes up in 1855. Gone are her tastefully discrete appliances, her prized collection of luxury sweaters, her team of nannies and farm workers. In their place: an outhouse, stained homespun prairie dresses, and hours of back-breaking labor spent washing a single load of laundry with homemade lye soap.

Natalie, confronted with this brave old world, does a lot of crying. Things get especially rough for her after she tries to escape, stumbles into a bear trap, badly injures her leg, and then has to cope with 19th-century pioneer medicine. The medicinal ointment “smells like bacon grease,” and there’s no anesthetic for the stitches, so that, Natalie tells us, “it feels like my body has depleted a month’s worth of energy from the mere translation of so many nerve signals screaming EMERGENCY to my brain.”

There’s a sort of satisfaction to witnessing Natalie’s distress. You find yourself wanting to say, “How’s all that trad working for you now?” and then maybe sneer a little.

At long last, one of those perniciously appealing traditional housewife influencers — the type who’s always posting videos of herself baking bread in a sun-drenched kitchen while her adorable children romp next to her — has been forced to put her money where her mouth is. Surely now, you think, she’ll have to admit that the modern era has some things going for it.

What it’s like to be a trad kid

Yesteryear is a book animated by this kind of rage, by a palpable fury at the archetype of the tradwife. That’s what makes the premise so irresistible — irresistible enough to have garnered breathless review coverage, for Anne Hathaway to sign on to produce and star in the movie after a vicious four-studio bidding war. I myself read Yesteryear in one long rush, unable to put it down.

But where the book begins to falter is when it tries to suggest that tradwives are just as angry with themselves as feminists are.

In Yesteryear, Natalie knows her content is rage bait. She refers to her followers as “the Angry Women,” noting smugly that “self-proclaimed progressive women” are “chemically addicted to hating women like me.” When, on a trip to Target, she encounters Vanessa, a high school friend who has since renounced her devout upbringing, Natalie lingers with almost erotic pleasure on how much the person must envy and despise her. “Go ahead,” she thinks gleefully. “Give yourself a migraine thinking........

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