If you scroll down to the bottom of Ballerina Farm’s Instagram page, all the way down, to the point where your browser starts sputtering in protest at the data usage, you can find images from more than a decade ago of America’s most famous homemaker goofing around on the beach and at Disney World in clothes that are demonstrably made from polyester. There are no earthenware mixing bowls in sight, no raw-cotton milkmaid dresses, no gathered floral centerpieces or spuming jars of sourdough starter. Hannah Neeleman and her husband, Daniel, look like average beaming newlyweds, young parents fake-posing with margaritas and figuring things out.
Today, things are quite different. The Neelemans have nine children, 10.4 million Instagram followers, and a thriving retail and e-commerce brand selling meat and frozen cinnamon rolls. Hannah cooks more than she smiles now, making sauerkraut, rolling out dough for taco shells, breastfeeding an infant in front of the stove. She wears an awful lot of gingham. You can chart the evolution of her aesthetic with her exponential increase in followers—pre-2020, she wore mostly jeans, T-shirts, and waterproof boots, grinning endearingly from atop a truckful of plastic bottles and posting muddy pictures of livestock. You can’t definitively argue that this turn toward an ultra-feminine, domestic-nostalgic, pacified depiction of womanhood has been driven by audience engagement. But you can deduce that it’s working.
Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear, the most talked-about novel of 2026 so far, has landed in a moment that’s in thrall to the tradwife: the domestic goddess who cooks everything from scratch, homeschools her sizable family, hides her state-of-the-art kitchen appliances behind Shaker cabinets, and treats her husband like a king. Conservatives idolize her. Feminist Substackers gleefully dissect tradwife pregnancy announcements and raw-milk misadventures. A recent King’s College report that surveyed women ages 18 to 34 found that respondents appreciated tradwife content, not because they believe in “traditional” gender roles, but because they find the “calm, relaxed” portrayal of domestic life preferable to the pressures of working while caring for a family.
The contradiction embedded in the tradwife, which Burke explores with fierce aplomb, is that she does have a job—a lucrative and demanding career in content creation. (Hulu’s The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives has offered a revealing glimpse of the peculiar marital dynamics at play when women who become famous for performing traditional womanhood also become the breadwinners of their families.) Yesteryear is narrated by a woman named Natalie Heller Mills, a Ballerina Farm facsimile who is pregnant with her sixth child at the beginning of the novel, and whose pixel-perfect online life as @YesteryearRanch is essentially all a lie.
Natalie’s husband, Caleb, is the youngest son of a senator and a terrible farmer whose failures on their Idaho land have to be propped up by day laborers, secret barrels of pesticides, and Natalie’s social-media income. Their marriage is so dysfunctional that Natalie has to impregnate herself with a turkey baster. The children are being raised by a pair of nannies, to Natalie’s intense relief—as much as she considers motherhood her calling and identity, she despises it in practice. All of her care and creative energy is devoted to performing Online Natalie, whom she describes as a confused and eroticized projection: “a flawless Christian woman. The manic pixie American dream girl of this nation’s deepest darkest fantasies.”
Tradwifery carries an undercurrent of trolling—a middle finger raised at anyone antagonized by women boasting about catering to their husband’s every whim. Attention is a commodity like anything else, and it doesn’t have to be positive in order to pay dividends. Natalie has an almost psychosexual fixation on her followers who detest her; she names them the “Angry Women” and idly fantasizes about their rage while composing her posts. “These women wanted—no, they needed—perfection from me,” she thinks. “After all, the tighter the stitching, the more soothing it is to pick apart at the seams.” But the book dances around a more crucial question: What does Natalie want? Does she genuinely wish to promote a kinder, küche, kirche lifestyle for women, or is she just thrilled by her ongoing project of provocation?
Yesteryear is a rollicking read, in part because of the central twist that comes about 30 pages in: Natalie wakes up in what appears to be 1855 and is obliged to endure a true pioneer lifestyle. As Burke interweaves narratives from Natalie’s past and present, we slowly come to understand what’s happened to her. Along the way, the novel nods to an unwieldy number of contemporary flash points: political dynasties, the manosphere, white supremacists preparing for civil war, postpartum depression, reality television, the ethics of mining your own children for clicks. What becomes clear is that Yesteryear is not actually the withering critique of faux-trad influencers it’s been marketed as. Rather, it’s a character study of a woman becoming corrupted by the only kind of power she considers herself able to wield.
Yesteryear has been an unequivocal smash, its film rights snapped up prepublication by Anne Hathaway, its reviews almost unanimously enthusiastic (followed by the inevitable dissent), its sales high enough to make most first-time authors weep. Burke, who is in her early 30s, is a popular commentator on TikTok who discusses both feminism and its backlash; she also co-hosts a podcast named Diabolical Lies, which takes its title from an expression used by the NFL player Harrison Butker in a reactionary commencement speech he gave at Benedictine College, in which he urged female graduates to become homemakers. (“I think it is you, the women, who have had the most diabolical lies told to you. How many of you are sitting here now about to cross the stage and are thinking about all the promotions and titles you are going to get in your career?”) I’ve long been a fan; in her videos, Burke’s arguments are rigorous, engaging, and wry, and her presence on TikTok can feel like an island in a morass of absurdity and extremism.
You can sense Burke’s trenchant voice in Natalie, who’s an extraordinarily compelling character—vicious and driven and as sharp as a blade—but perhaps an implausible person to choose a life of wifely submission and pastoral drudgery. Her religion is left intentionally vague; she explains only that she grew up in a traditional community in Idaho but was raised by a single mother, who was by no means as conservative as some other families. There are no named pastors in her backstory, barely any Bible passages or internalized commandments. When Natalie mentions God, she’s usually taking his name in vain. “I was interested in the fundamentalist nature of Natalie’s interests, and that kind of transcends any specific religion,” Burke said in an interview with NPR.
But the flip side of that decision is that Natalie has a giant void where her relationship with faith and God should be. “I barely related to Natalie, who comes across as a peculiar Christian fundamentalist: theologically illiterate and seemingly unchurched,” Liana Graham, a self-professed “tradwife influencer” (who’s actually a research assistant for domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation), wrote in the conservative women’s magazine Evie.
What Natalie does seem driven by—more than faith, more than redirected ambition—is her instinctual loathing of other women. She’s something of a beguiling sociopath, roiling with narcissistic self-obsession and external loathing. She despises her nannies, whom she considers work-shy and incompetent. A run-in with an old acquaintance in a Target fills her with fury at all the women like her, “with their expensive latex foreheads and their I’m with her bumper stickers.” Natalie describes her eldest daughter as “practically a woman now. She couldn’t be trusted.” She has nothing even approaching a friend. In flashbacks to her time at Harvard, where Natalie feels victimized for having long hair and a conservative wardrobe, she especially hates her roommate, Reena, who encourages her to drink and has unpleasant casual sex in their shared dorm room. But Natalie also hates the women in her church group, noting that “the idea of sharing spiritual communion with them would probably feel like getting intellectually stoned to death.”
Burke is making an implicit, and compelling, argument: that what unites men who want a submissive and traditional wife and women who want to be one is their shared misogyny, with the proviso that women—like Natalie—who are in the fold but can see the supposed deficiencies of other women get a pass. (Evie recently ran a piece titled “Why I’m Not a Girl’s Girl,” and the comments on Instagram are a thing to behold: “As a female myself, I never did like most girls.” “From my experience, there is no such thing as sisterhood.” “I own nothing to anyone.”) But what kind of pass is it? Out of spite, Natalie marries Caleb, the first man she goes on a date with, who happens to be “capital-R rich”; out of rage at her gentle dud of a husband, she goads him into becoming a cruel conspiracy theorist; out of fury at her lack of options, she encourages her father-in-law to buy them a farm where Caleb can cosplay as a cowboy and Natalie can start constructing her own simulacrum of an American ideal, a cult of sorts in which she is the Heavenly Mother.
Burke gets some heavy digs in at all the paradoxes of tradwifery. Farming, she makes clear, is backbreaking work, filthy and despair-inducing and as far removed from a sun-dappled photo of a woman in Laura Ashley bottle-feeding a lamb as it’s possible to be. And because of the “traditional” dynamics of her marriage, Caleb is entitled to all of Natalie’s Instagram revenue, reducing her to siphoning off crumbs into a secret personal account. A sourdough-baking breadwinner she may be, but Caleb’s name is on the deed to the farm, and her income relies on the strength of her brand as a dutiful wife—a brand that a surfeit of problems renders more fragile by the day.
Still, Yesteryear doesn’t seem majorly invested in social critique. It’s telling a story first and foremost, throwing out clues and red herrings on the way to its ultimate reveal. I don’t want to spoil the book’s twists, but it’s fascinating how Burke likens the self-surveillant habits of an influencer to the principles of religion—if you grow up believing that God is always watching everything you do, then broadcasting your life online might simply mean performing for a different kind of audience. And yet, Natalie isn’t trying to spread her faith with her videos, the way that many tradwives and content creators seem to be. She’s grasping for power. She knows that the domestic realm is the one space that’s been ceded to women’s authority, and she’s aware that the internet has given her ways to expand her sprawling desire for control. “What did I want? An easy answer,” Natalie explains early in Yesteryear. “I wanted more of what I already had. I wanted the whole entire world to see itself through my eyes. A new level of influence.”
In her 2025 book, The House of My Mother, Shari Franke—the eldest daughter of Ruby Franke, a popular parenting influencer who’s currently in prison for aggravated child abuse—imagines the moment her mother gave birth for the first time: “In her arms lay not just a baby but a woman’s ultimate power. Her divine right to mold a new soul in her own image.” If she’d had other opportunities, her daughter thinks, Ruby could have redirected her ferocious ambition into other outlets. Instead, motherhood was her calling, her creative project, and her business enterprise, and her children were forced to become subservient cast members in her never-ending performance. If Yesteryear seems at first like it’s satirically critiquing savvy businesswomen who pretend to be docile helpmeets, by the end it’s much more attuned to the tragedy of women like Natalie, and how corrupted motherhood can become when it’s all about the audience.
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