I am kneading dough. Next I will churn butter, milk the cows, scatter feed for the hens, cuddle my children, greet my husband warmly, and thank the Lord for all He has provided for me.
Also in this parallel universe, there’s a camera on the countertop, capturing this scene of domestic bliss. Later, I will splice together several clips of me doing said chores into an Instagram reel about the joys of embracing traditional womanhood.
Happily, in this universe, I am not her. Despite growing up in an evangelical fundamentalist household where a woman’s path seemed pre-ordained (wife, mother, homemaker, caretaker), I find myself gloriously single — independent, self-directed, unencumbered by a chorus of small demands or the quiet disappointment of a man I felt obliged to marry.
That’s not to say I don’t have enormous respect for women who devote themselves to raising children and caring for a home. I have seen, intimately, the scale and texture of that work.
My own mother is a career housewife: she raised nine children, cooked, cleaned, and offered tireless support to my father. I know how hard this role is; how thankless, how demanding all the myriad tasks are. But it’s not for me.
I am fascinated by the phenomenon of tradwives, especially those who make a career of posting their carefully curated life online. Social media abounds with these soft-spoken, impeccably-styled women — influencers such as Nara Smith and Hannah Neeleman (Ballerina Farm) — who have gained massive followings by showcasing highly aesthetic, 1950s-style homemaking, including cooking pop-tarts from scratch and homeschooling.
And so I was greatly excited to hear of an upcoming debut novel by one of my favourite podcasters, Caro Claire Burke. Yesteryear concerns itself with one momentous question: what if a social media "tradwife" were forced to live the reality she so carefully curates online?
Natalie Heller Mills is a tradwife influencer who lives on a picturesque farm, complete with a red barn, a brood of chickens, a handsome cowboy, and their five adorable children. Natalie’s wildly successful online persona — an idyllic blend of rustic domesticity, Christian virtue, and effortless motherhood — conceals a carefully staged reality propped up by long-suffering staff, unacknowledged privilege, and performance.
When Natalie wakes one morning to find herself seemingly transported back to 1855, she is forced to face a new brutal reality: a labour-intensive, patriarchal world where her familiar husband and children feel eerily wrong somehow. As Natalie endeavours to understand whether she has time-travelled, lost her mind, or found herself plopped Truman-style into a reality TV show, Yesteryear interrogates the seductive myth of "traditional" womanhood and the machinery behind influencer culture.
Yesteryear is at its best when dissecting the performance of femininity that lies at the heart of tradwife culture. Beyond simple "gotcha" revelations about hidden nannies or staged content (a la Ballerina Farms), Burke presents femininity not as an authentic state but as a role — one that Natalie both constructs herself and is forced to inhabit.
Natalie’s pretty, soft-spoken, endlessly "nice" persona reflects a stifling ideal in which women are valued less for intellect or interiority than for their ability to soothe, serve, and beautify.
Beneath this Instagram-perfect exterior is a current of fury, ambition and calculation that the performance cannot fully suppress. Yesteryear’s satire cuts both ways: it both mocks Natalie’s carefully maintained illusion while also implicating the audience who chooses to believe in it.
Case in point: Natalie’s success (like that of her real-life counterparts) depends on selling the appearance of female submission as empowerment; she gains agency precisely by promoting the loss of it.
Natalie’s propulsion back to 1885 — a world where this performance becomes reality — reveals the impossibility of the ideal she embodies. When the soft lighting and curated charm of her online persona is wrenched away, Natalie is forced to confront the reality of "traditional" womanhood: relentless physical and emotional labour, maternal bodies pushed to exhaustion, dangerous childbirth, and domestic life governed by rigid, patriarchal control.
Yesteryear is undeniably readable — I finished it within a single day — but its weaknesses become more apparent the longer I’ve sat with it. The prose is often clunky, weighed down by blunt metaphors and on-the-nose phrasing that repeatedly underline the artificiality of Natalie’s constructed world rather than allowing it to emerge organically.
There’s a heavy-handedness that gives the novel an overtly ideological feel, as though the thematic intentions are being explained to the reader, rather than dramatised.
There is a similar lack of subtlety when it comes to characterisation. While Natalie herself is an intriguing character, not to mention a wholly unreliable narrator, she frequently reads less like a fully realised person and more like a composite of familiar cultural tropes about influencer culture and conservative femininity. Secondary characters, such as her children and husband, are left underdeveloped.
What I found most frustrating however was the novel’s reluctance to fully engage with its own religious and ideological terrain. Although Yesteryear gestures towards the performative aspects of faith ("Who is our Lord and Saviour, if not the original audience member for our lives?") and raises intriguing questions about tradwife culture, it stops short of offering any sustained theological or political analysis.
Natalie’s beliefs are treated as sincere yet strangely narrow, largely confined to gender roles. There is little exploration of the broader doctrinal, racial, or ideological frameworks that typically underpin such worldviews.
What does Natalie think of her husband’s use of a migrant workforce, or her mother’s homophobia? What do we know of Natalie’s religious beliefs beyond pro-natalism and the importance of "being kind"? While the novel hints at complex and troubling themes — religious fundamentalism, exploitation, and the politics of domesticity, for example, it never quite follows them through.
Yesteryear is undoubtedly a novel with its finger on the pulse — alive to the aesthetics of tradwife culture, the manosphere, the distortions of social media, and the overlap of gender, religion, and politics.
However it is not able to translate that insight into anything momentous or lasting. What begins as a sharp, provocative premise — a social media tradwife transported back into the patriarchal past — melts into something more like an adult fable, flattening the very complexities it gestures towards.
Reading Yesteryear, I found myself wanting more depth, more theological and ideological engagement, and more emotional truth, especially from a novel so clearly positioned to deliver it.
And yet Yesteryear cannot be dismissed entirely. The novel has the potential to spark important conversations about the stifling expectations placed on women within patriarchal religious frameworks, the hypocrisy of influencer culture, and the impossibility of living life as a performance.
• Jean Balchin is an ODT columnist who has started a new life in Edinburgh.
