Natalie Heller Mills is the perfect and traditional American woman. Or at least she wants the world to believe that. Wife of the son of a Republican politician, she lives with her husband and their six equally impeccable children on an idyllic farm far from the world, where there is an organic garden, a cow, a rustic kitchen, and a pen where a large number of hens lay eggs in their nests. Besides that, she bakes her own sourdough bread, and makes homemade soap and butter.
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And at some point during that immaculate day, Natalie turns all of that into a public performance: when she records herself for Instagram, uploads the videos, showcases her routine, and watches the reactions of the 8 million followers her account has.
In summary, Mills fits within the concept of “tradwife” (short for traditional wife), meaning a woman who adopts and promotes the gender roles of the 1940s and 50s, on a journey to the heart of the 20th century. Her life is focused exclusively on caring for the children, household chores, and voluntary submission to a husband who acts as the sole economic provider. All of this, of course, she amplifies through digital platforms, where she receives criticism from feminists and hundreds of women who do not share her lifestyle.
She has even confronted them in real life, at the moment she decided to flee modernity encouraged by her university peers after meeting her husband, Caleb, at a Christian congregation.
But her status goes beyond facing options as if in a trench: for many experts, “tradwives” are changing the social landscape of countries like the United States and have been essential in the conservative wave, both politically and socially, that these nations are experiencing.
This is also the starting point of Yesteryear, the literary debut of American Caro Claire Burke – already available in Spanish, with an expected release soon in Chile – and which has become the best-selling phenomenon in recent months in the North American industry. There is no other work that has generated as much debate and critical analysis.
Its publication was contested by no less than 15 publishers and the text already has a film deal with Amazon MGM Studios, whose rights were acquired before publication for about 2 million dollars. The omnipresent Anne Hathaway will participate in the project as lead actress and producer.
But, of course, the protagonist’s existence is not limited to her duties as a housewife. At one point, the narrative fractures. One morning, she wakes up in a house that is not hers: by a quirk of the calendar, she is in the mid-19th century, in 1855, without technology, no Instagram posts, just a fireplace and several pieces of firewood to carry to keep the house warm.
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Naturally, it is not the life she likes. She cannot promote it through social media nor monetize it as an influencer. She has her children and her partner, but now she must face a backward and past world in real time, not idealized, on a reverse path wrapped in satire and dark humor. Should she stay in that universe or prefer to escape? That is the dilemma the novel presents, alternating two timelines in each chapter: one narrates Natalie’s fate in 1855 and the other how she evolved from childhood to the moment she travels to the past.
“Burke, before taking the step to novelist, became known on TikTok commenting on feminism and the tradwife phenomenon, hence her knowledge of the subject. Yesteryear is a fierce critique of tradwives and their expansion on social media and addresses motherhood, marriage, religion, and being a woman, criticizing all those who consider it a performative spectacle,” Elle magazine has said about the literary success.
The Guardian, on the other hand, has been less enthusiastic. “Yesteryear: the fall of a traditional American housewife,” says the title of its review, then elaborates: “The premise — an Instagram influencer faces the reality of pioneers — is great. But does this ambitious debut live up to expectations? Its biting and sometimes hilarious voice — about the night she loses her virginity to her new husband, she says: ‘I felt the need to put a dish towel over his penis and wait an hour for it to get hard’ — makes the novel move at full speed. However, Burke almost completely omits the female body, a strange choice for a novel about a woman giving birth to several children as part of a pronatalist agenda. The descriptions of pregnancy and childbirth are superficial and full of clichés (‘my body would have to open for a child to come out of it’), and the reason for Natalie’s growing insistence on an unmedicated birth is left completely unexplored. Breastfeeding is reduced to that: no latch, no milk letdown, no description at all. Natalie’s difficulties in bonding with her children postpartum are treated superficially.”
The author has explained her debut in an interview with El País: “Tradwives sell a fantasy. The term tradwife arose in incel chats when they talked about what their ideal woman would be like. And layers of fiction have been superimposed very much related to the simple life of the American Wild West, an obsession very present right now in the country. Living off the land, the fruit of your effort, and somewhat isolated. It’s a fantasy from start to finish. Sometimes I am much more interested in those children (her children) than the influencers themselves, because I think it’s hard to understand the level of exploitation and identity theft from the earliest childhood. In the United States, there are children who are beginning to raise their voices. However, it is a complicated conversation: those in charge of child protection can be very reactionary and their measures often involve separating children from the internet to levels that can prevent teenagers from accessing, for example, queer spaces they might need.”
In the same conversation, Burke says she feels empathy both for tradwives and for the women who criticize them. “I identify with both,” she argues. Then she adds: “The less time I spend on the internet and the less value I give to what people think of me, the less it affects me. It’s a lesson Natalie could have learned: no matter how important you think you are, you’re not. Unless you’re Taylor Swift.”
And does she believe the current U.S. government has promoted tradwives? The writer responds: “When they started, many people treated it as a trivial matter confined to women’s publications. Now we know it was an unmistakable sign of a much more significant sociopolitical shift. I don’t think there has been a massive exodus of women who have stopped working to return home. But this extremist religious sect, which is a minority in the country but a majority in the Administration, is taking legislative measures to put women back in their homes, such as making access to contraceptives difficult, removing reproductive rights, raising the cost of daycare and preschools…”
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