From a Google Image Search – LA Times

The topic of “tradwives” is trending which makes Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke very timely indeed. Conservatives are upset that Americans are having too few children. They’re upset that men are feeling challenged by women seeking fame and fortune. Right-wingers believe that men are being left feeling emasculated, and angry. The rest of us are upset that so many men are unwilling to entertain the idea of evolving to a mental state in which they can enjoy sharing power with women. The answer is, supposedly, to return to an earlier time when men were dominant and women submissive, when men “brought home the bacon” and women were “barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen”. 

Natalie Heller, born in rural Idaho, a Christian girl with unbending ideas about life, morality, and the immoral behavior of modern women, accepts a scholarship to Harvard as if enlightenment will win out over culture shock. Her judgmental signals alienate roommates and dorm mates who then punish her with isolation. When Natalie attracts the son of a wealthy politician, she decides that she’ll show them all, so she leaves school to get married. However, Caleb Mills turns out to be spoiled and aimless. For a while they live with his parents. Eventually Natalie takes the wheel and talks Caleb’s father, Doug, into buying them a farm and bankrolling them. Doug agrees but his support has financial limits. Five million dollars sounds like a fortune, but Caleb has no concept of what things cost. He has an image of what a farm should be like, so he buys big equipment he doesn’t need, milk cows he can’t care for properly, and farm workers to do all the farm work. He decides that he will only grow vegetables which Natalie knows will not produce the income needed to keep up with the costs of having this farm.

Natalie, facing the end of Doug’s financial support and Caleb’s rather dreamy approach to life, decides to become a “tradwife” in an online podcast. Natalie’s mom advised her “to remember to be kind.” Although this sounds like the typical advice to women, “smile, honey”, in Natalie’s case it is simply good advice. Natalie is not kind. We see her thoughts because the author lets us in on them. She judges her followers, she judges her husband, and she has no intention of being an actual “tradwife,” although she does produce plenty of offspring (Clementine, Stetson, Samuel, Jessa, Junebug, Mary, Maeve, Noah and Abel). She has two kitchens, one without modern appliances, and around a corner in an adjacent room she has all the appliances found in modern kitchens and laundry rooms. She mistakenly hires a producer for her Instagram posts who learns all her secrets and sees the two nannies Natalie has hired to keep her children from being a burden and from being neglected by a mom who has no interest in being a mom. Natalie is, to say the least, as inauthentic as most of us would suspect a modern “tradwife” to be.

The author transports Natalie and Caleb back to 1855, to a time when life required women to occupy traditional roles. Even in this setting, Natalie avoids reality by imagining a kidnapping situation and with the help of a way moms dealt with the realities of being a tradwife in the 50s, “mother’s little helper.” (pills, drugs, alcohol)

It takes a while to put together the 1855 chapters and the present-day chapter, to see how they connect, to decide if time travel is involved. It leads to a truly surprising ending. Burke has written a book that will make you think deep thoughts about the changing roles of men and women, about parenting, about authenticity, love and kindness, and about social media’s ability to prevaricate, to present the unrealistic as real. Interesting subject, interesting book.