If you’ve spent more than five minutes on social media in the past couple of years, you will probably be familiar with the tradwife phenomenon that has grown up as a reaction against the harder-edged and more strident girlboss feminism that itself threatened to become the dominant form of discourse towards the end of the last decade. Tradwifery, a form of embrace of traditional domestic roles that concentrates on the woman as homemaker, mother and carer while allowing her husband (always a husband, never a “partner”) to fulfill masculine aspects of patriarch and hunter-gatherer, has been decried by some as a right-wing coded backwards step into submissiveness. Others have described it as a welcome return to common sense and social cohesion.
Wherever you stand, it is clearly a hot-button issue that shows signs of reaching outside Reddit forums and Facebook debates, not least because Caro Claire Burke’s debut novel Yesteryear might become the most talked-about book of 2026. It revolves around the character of Natalie Heller Mills, a smug and successful tradwife influencer who has rallied a considerable online following behind her idealized depictions of her life on a farm, Yesteryear, where she conducts her existence as if she was a 19th century throwback, living with her husband Caleb and multiple children. With the inevitability of fate, not only does she realize that her superficially perfect marriage is a lie, but one day she wakes up in 1855 America, where she is condemned to lead a grittier, considerably nastier version of the tradlife that she has been espousing to her followers.
Yesteryear has been both a beneficiary and a victim of The Discourse that seems duty-bound to accompany the publication of every successful, button-pushing novel these days. The same thing happened when R.F Kuang’s 2023 novel Yellowface, a satire on diversity in publishing, came out, but now Burke is reaping the considerable whirlwind of having written a book that is polarizing readers along religious and political divides. Although, ostensibly, it is a satire on tradwifery and its proponents, many argue that it is, in fact, a fiercely moral book that looks despairingly at American decadence and argues that its central point is that we should once again embrace faith and family and learn the lessons that our forefathers taught.
There will, undoubtedly, be a raft of imitators and rip-offs appearing in bookstores in the near future
The publication Religion News argued that “This is a transformation that Yesteryear understands intuitively. Natalie and the family she marries into are defined not by Christian faith but by the politics of Christian nationalism. It’s only when she’s abruptly torn from that world that she begins to glimpse something deeper.” This sits askance from the left-wing views of titles like the New York Times that argue that the novel is a sophisticated attack on right-wing and conservative values, epitomized by Natalie, and that it takes aim at absurdly idealized portrayals of a bygone world rather than celebrating them.
In any case, whatever Rorschach-esque view of one’s individual opinions Yesteryear speaks to, there is increasing grumbling that it is poorly written, indifferently plotted and more in thrall to its Big Idea than to any conventional literary merits. It may not have helped its case amongst a certain constituency that Anne Hathaway has been announced to star in its (inevitable) film adaptation. Hathaway has also revealed that she is pregnant with her third child; this has not only led to excitable claims that the actress is herself a tradwife, or at the very least a tradwife sympathizer, but suggestions that, at 43, she must have used IVF or similar hocus-pocus in order to have conceived.
By the time that the movie of Yesteryear comes out, presumably in 2028, it may be that the tradwife discourse has died down, replaced by something else. Yet the success of Burke’s novel has been to light a match and throw it into a social, sexual and political tinderbox that shows no signs of being extinguished any time soon. There will, undoubtedly, be a raft of imitators and rip-offs appearing in bookstores in the near future, but whatever happens, views of what women should be doing – and the contrast with what is actually happening in America today – are being shaped by the year’s most controversial bestseller. Whatever you think of its politics, it shows that people are at least reading, and that must be a good thing.
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