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.

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 about me.” Natalie isn’t wrong that a lot of the attention tradwives receive ranges from critical to furious. “Is tradwife content dangerous, or just stupid?” asked a viral Cut essay in 2023.

Another essay in 2020 described the sexism at its core as “the gateway to white supremacy.” In a 2024 profile of Hannah Neeleman, the influencer known as “Ballerina Farm,” who is the most prominent of the tradwives, the New York Times summarized the discourse: “Is she, as her fans would have it, a woman who has made the commendable decision to stay home, raise the kids and support the family farm? Or is she, as her detractors would argue, someone who uses social media to push for a return to traditional gender roles while glossing over the privileges that allowed her to have such a lifestyle in the first place?” To people who consider themselves progressive, who are by and large the presumed audience for Yesteryear, tradwives aren’t women who “choose their choice”; they threaten the gains of 20th-century feminism.

They try to sell women on the lie that they would be happier without birth control or educations or careers, tending endless beautiful children in a spotless, beautiful kitchen. And it’s true that a large swath of their followers are there both for the pleasure of their gorgeous pastoral lives and to be furious at them for their political propaganda. Natalie describes the appeal of her content by analogizing it to the rancid, craveable flavor of black truffles.

“People aren’t so different from pigs, apparently,” she says. “Once they learn a rotten thing can be eaten, they will eat it, and they will become addicted to it.” She believes there is a “rot” of unhappiness on her farm that comes through in her content — her own exhaustion at the drudgery of her chores, the palpable fakery of her artificial paradise — “and everyone rushed towards me with their forks.” For most critics of tradwife content, the “rot” Natalie is describing here is the anti-feminist proselytizing, the romanticization of a bleak way of life that left many women trapped. The rot Burke is portraying in Yesteryear, however, is just straightforward influencer hypocrisy.

Influencing at its most basic form is sales, and like any overworked saleswoman, Natalie lies about her product: herself, and her allegedly pure lifestyle. She secretly douses the family’s “organic” farm in pesticides, because she knows they’ll never turn a profit