Feminist Book Club: Yesteryear and Trad Wife Book Summer

Trad Wife Culture is Inherently Political
By: Sydney Petersen

Say what you want about the narrative structure, the character development, or the plot twist—but Yesteryear did what it set out to do, which is start a conversation.

There are so many threads to this book, but the one I want to unravel is the question it raises around what political responsibilities trad wives have, if any.

As someone working for a feminist organization, I wholeheartedly believe that all women should have the choice to lead any life she chooses, whether she’s a CEO who puts her kids in child care or a stay-at-home mom who bakes her own goldfish crackers for her kids’ after school snack.

The problem is not that trad wives choose that lifestyle, it’s that their lifestyle is being weaponized by the right to subjugate and control women. Though it still raises the question: is it the trad wife’s responsibility to denounce the use of their platform for harmful means?

Yesteryear tried to answer that question.

In the book, the main character, Natalie, is a trad wife influencer who has a bigwig senator for a father-in-law who dreams of becoming president. He’s a traditional conservative, but despite his “All-American” views, he isn’t doing that well in the polls.

That is until he latches onto an extreme internet movement called “the manosphere.” The “manosphere” is not a fictional place conceived by the author to show readers the stakes of unrestrained misogyny. It is a real, dark, ugly online space that, among other things, believes that a woman’s primary place is at home making babies.

In the book, Natalie’s father-in-law keeps begging her to use her burgeoning social platform to endorse him, because he sees how the life she is pretending to lead on social media resonates with his base. But she refuses, saying that she “can’t get political.”

After a scary, over the top rally for the father-in-law’s campaign, Natalie is forced to pull her head out of the sand during an exchange between her and her young producer, Shannon.

“He’s going to win, Natalie,” Shannon said, when I didn’t say anything. “You do realize that right? That he’s going to win?”

Shannon goes on to say: “These people are talking about the same bullshit [your husband] talks about. All that crap about rats. And then what [your father-in-law] said onstage, about returning to the ‘days of Yesteryear.’ He was practically quoting your Instagram captions word for word.”

Despite being chronically online, Natalie is shocked by the idea that her content is being used by her father-in-law to pull in voters and move toward a dangerous political agenda.

This exchange between Natalie and Shannon captures a real and pervasive trend in our culture, one where powerful men use conservative-aligned media, such as trad wife content, to make their own extreme agenda seem more palatable to the masses. “Returning to the day of Yesteryear” sounds far better than “returning to a time when husbands controlled their wife’s body and finances.”

It’s not that women who decide to live out traditional gender roles are inherently sexist—in many ways, they embody the very principle that the feminist movement has long fought for: the freedom for women to choose the life that feels right for them. The problem lies in the ways that conservative politicians and online commentators weaponize the trad wife lifestyle to shame other women who make different choices.

These are the same men (and women!) who present trad wives as the ideal model of womanhood and work to eliminate other viable roles and futures for women to take up. In doing so, trad wife content becomes fuel for a broader political agenda that seeks to push all women back into traditional gender roles, regardless of their own ambitions, needs, or desires.

The book ultimately asks whether trad wives like Natalie have a responsibility to distance themselves from the dangerous right-wing ecosystem that is spreading misinformation and attacking the very rights that make their choices possible in the first place. Can someone truly claim to be “apolitical” when their image, platform, and lifestyle are being used to advance a political agenda?

As Yesteryear makes clear, even opting out is its own kind of political statement.

Yesteryear Asks: Why Do “Natural” Gender Roles Take So Much Work?
By: Hannah Finnie

Yesteryear had my mind in knots. Reading was painful. The main character, Natalie, infuriated me. And yet—I couldn’t tear my eyes from the page.

There’s so much in this book, and much of the national conversation has (understandably) concentrated on what this book says about women’s role in society. But I want to focus instead on Yesteryear’s portrayal of how men also suffer under traditional gender roles through the character of Caleb, Natalie’s husband.

Natalie, who grows up under a traditional, devoutly Christian mother and absent father, meets Caleb in college. They first connect through a religious student club in college, which she attends after months of feeling ridiculed and isolated by her more liberal classmates. After three dates, she’s sold: they’re getting married.

When we first meet Caleb, he’s not the most traditionally masculine guy.

He’s sweet. He’s gentle. He likes doing yoga and playing with kids.

Given Natalie’s upbringing, she expects Caleb to immediately take to the role of breadwinner. When it becomes clear that Caleb has no idea what he wants to do with his life, Natalie starts to spiral.

At one point, Caleb laments the fact that he can’t turn his love of playing with kids into a job. “I wish there was a job for playing with babies,” he says. “I’d be great at that.”

Of course, there are jobs for playing with babies. Caleb could work as a nanny, a teacher, or (gasp) even be a stay-at-home parent. But society doesn’t view any of these jobs as masculine jobs, so to Caleb (and Natalie, who nixes Caleb’s interest in playing with their kids) it’s as if they don’t exist at all.

Meanwhile, traditionally feminine characteristics don’t seem to come naturally to Natalie, either.

Her personality isn’t very “soft” (if anything, it’s severe) and she lacks anything resembling a maternal instinct, often neglecting her kids in favor of doing her influencing work. For instance, when she’s giving birth to her first child, Natalie describes feeling a “debilitating certainty of the wrongness of the situation.” So wrong, in fact, that she assumes God would intervene and stop this “mistake of parenthood” from developing any further (that doesn’t happen).

The author’s intent is clear: she’s endowed Natalie with stereotypically masculine personality traits, and Caleb with stereotypically feminine ones.

Even Natalie eventually sees this: “Suddenly it was so obvious,” she says. “Caleb should’ve been born a woman, and I should’ve been born a man.”

Instead of using this realization to interrogate the idea that “natural” gender roles are anything but—if they were natural, wouldn’t Natalie love playing with kids and Caleb have an ounce of ambition?—she doubles down, choosing to read this mis-match of genders and personalities as a mission from God:

“Marrying Caleb had not been a mistake, or an act of ignorance. No. Quite the contrary: it had been the beginning of a divine mission. We were put on this earth to teach each other how to be. To give each other purpose. I would help Caleb become a better man, and he would help me become a better woman. Through my example, Caleb would grow stronger, more ambitious, and through his example, I’d grow softer, more loving with our children.”

As Natalie forces rigid views of gender on both herself and her husband, they each unravel. Caleb’s softness fades away and he becomes a hardened shell of his former self. He becomes physically violent after being wedged into a narrow gender role that doesn’t naturally fit his personality. Natalie, meanwhile, is flattened into a gendered caricature of a wife, cooking and cleaning in front of the camera while pulling in the couple’s money behind the scenes but not being allowed to control its direction.

Did Natalie succeed at her “divine mission” to “teach each other how to be”?

Not really. As both characters are acting out their assigned gender stereotypes, they’re both clearly miserable—putting on personalities that don’t fit.

In the end, Caro Claire Burke and Yesteryear raise a thick eyebrow to the idea of traditional gender roles. If gender roles are supposed to be natural, Yesteryear asks, why do they take so much work?

Children as Props in the Era of Social Media
By: Sarah Yergeau

Since the publication of Yesteryear, the “It book” of Spring 2026, there have been countless takes on the good, the bad, and the in between. The main character – Natalie Heller Mills, whose head we are in for the whole book – is the epitome of an unlikeable narrator. And her unlikability is only amplified by her general disinterest and sometimes outright disdain for her children.

For an influencer like Natalie, her children—especially in the womb and as babies—are a guaranteed money maker, click generator, and way to boost her content. As a result, they are integral to her “brand” whether she actually likes her children or not. While the book ends with Natalie in prison for 30 years after being convicted of child abuse because of her treatment of her kids in “1855” (the year she is transported back to), the thread of child abuse or even just using her children for her own selfish gain is just as strong in the present-day timeline.

For trad wives, children are often a means to an end, especially when it comes to maintaining a media empire as an influencer. In Yesteryear, Natalie clearly wants to spend as little time with her children as possible outside of filming. She mainly interacts with her children as a way to generate content. Natalie forces them into filming wholesome cooking videos and frolicking through the meadows rather than interacting with them in organic, off-camera ways as their mother.

Natalie and her husband also neglect to make sure their kids are getting a strong education: in one scene, their oldest child doesn’t know what oceans are despite being a preteen. And there are other forms of neglect, too: Natalie leaves one of her kids—then a baby—in her car while she does a Target run. For Natalie, it’s not a content moment, so why bring her inside?

Throughout the book, the author Caro Claire Burke drops nuggets of some of the biggest culture flashpoints of today from the “manosphere” to assumed traditional gender roles to the reality behind the influencers’ cameras. In depicting how Natalie uses her five kids—and a sixth on the way—to further her online persona in the present-day timeline, Burke brings in growing cultural conversations about the ethics of sharing every moment of your children’s lives online. Yesteryear also taps into the recent pushback from children of the first “mommy bloggers” about the harm living their lives online has done to them over the years.

Yet, as with many of the larger cultural commentaries in the book—the impact of postpartum depression on how Natalie decides to parent, feeling isolated and out of place at an Ivy League college, her husband’s complete lack of farming skills while pretending they are living off the land—we never get a full examination of the mistreatment of her children in the present day. Instead, the book remains laser-focused on a high-level critique of the trad wife lifestyle overall. I was left wishing that Yesteryear had less nuggets of the “hot topics” of today and instead went deeper on a few of the key themes. Though in the end, maybe that’s part of the point—and what’s fueling so much of the hype for it to be the book club conversation of the moment.