‘Yesteryear’ book review: Unraveling the absolute adherence to tradwife identity

What happens when the woman selling the fantasy of the perfect traditional life is forced to actually live it?

Caro Claire Burke, in her Yesteryear, takes this premise that revolves around Natalie Heller Mills, a successful tradwife influencer, and drops her into a world where the very elements that she once romanticised for content are means of oppression and terror.

Natalie built her life around a carefully constructed image of marital bliss along with Christianity and domesticity. She considers her entire life to be a performance, as evidenced by her inner dialogues that are constantly present. This happens long before she wakes up in the 1800s, to the extent that she imposes traditional gender roles on everyone around her. 

The biggest example of this would be Caleb, her husband. When he spoke up about his desire to be a kindergarten teacher, she outright rejects the idea since she does not consider it masculine enough. Instead, she turns his childhood dream of becoming a cowboy into a much more revenue-generating career as a farmer.

The most interesting element of this work is the language used that reflects Natalie’s worldview. Mundane experiences are often described with terms like divine and chastise, almost giving it a religious twist. Even her inner monologues are rife with biblical allusions to characters like Lot’s wife. This provides the reader with a glimpse of how stubborn she is about being a good Christian woman. 

Her determination to continue the performance reaches unsettling lengths when she decides to get pregnant with Caleb in truly disturbing ways. This acts as a sharp contrast when she is unable to connect with her child due to postpartum depression. Instead of confronting it, she disregards the alienation to perform the role of a dainty, loving mother. 

This performance follows her into the 1800s. She wonders whether the entire ordeal could be a reality show, imagining producers behind the scenes deciding how far things can go before crossing a line. Remove the cameras, and Natalie simply invents an audience. She has spent so long performing her life that she cannot imagine one without spectators.

Even though there were multiple chapters about Natalie navigating the 1800s, it still fell short on multiple possibilities where she could have met women from different backgrounds and worldviews of the era. This might have helped her understand that the notion of traditional womanhood she possesses is not universal. 

The same limitation appears in her treatment of women who challenge her. Natalie dismisses her critics as “angry women”, reducing disagreement to bitterness rather than engaging with their arguments. While the novel critiques the policing of women’s identities, Natalie becomes a policewoman of femininity herself.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists provides a useful lens here. Adichie argues that gender roles restrict everyone and that boys and girls should be allowed to grow without artificial limitations. Natalie does the opposite. She decides what masculinity should look like for Caleb and what femininity should look like for herself.

Moreover, the novel’s critique largely operates within a white, affluent American worldview, leaving little room for how race, class and culture complicate women’s experiences. 

Yet the ending has more to it than a simple conversion to modernity. Natalie does not suddenly become a progressive woman. She is merely beginning to let go of the tradwife identity she once treated as absolute. Back in the present, when she thinks she might be pregnant again, she demands an abortion, a monumental choice for someone who once built her identity around motherhood and the large traditional family.

Then comes the final line: “For the first time in my life I smiled.”

Natalie has not discovered a new ideology. She has simply loosened her grip on the old one. After spending the novel performing the perfect wife, mother, and Christian woman, she is finally able to want something without asking whether it fits the role.

And after a novel so obsessed with performance, that may be its most honest moment.

Yesteryear

Author: Caro Claire Burke

Publisher: Fourth Estate Ltd

Pages: 400

Price: ₹599