After months of circling it, I finally got my hands on Caro Claire Burke’s YesterYear, a book I’ve been seeing everywhere online. It is a dark, comedic satire of influencer culture and the “tradwife” movement. Its heroine, Natalie, is a tradwife influencer from Idaho with millions of followers, presenting herself as the flawless Christian wife and mother. She sells the romance of homeschooling and old-fashioned living, while her picture-perfect life is quietly propped up by political dynasty connections and nannies. Then one morning, Natalie wakes up in 1855, stripped of technology and forced to survive in pioneer reality. Early on, her husband strikes her across the face, and what can she do? In this era, she must swallow it and push forward in this life. Burke paints childbirth and motherhood as frightening and isolating and shows how quickly a perfect family turns on a woman who is struggling.
Dark as it is, and cut with humor, I keep returning to what it portrays: beneath the soft lighting of tradwife content is nostalgia for a supposedly simpler time. I have always been wary of that word. Those times were only simpler for some. They were years when women could not hold their own bank accounts, make their own legal claims, or govern their own bodies, and when real power belonged almost entirely to white men.
The book also made me think of something I have watched unfold online. Ever since conservative “tradwives” rose to prominence on the internet, women who subscribe to traditional gender roles and assume the role of the homemaker and SAHM took notice. I have seen more and more women who cook, whether for joy or for a living, grow uncomfortable sharing it, afraid of being percieved as a tradwife. But there is a clear distinction between women who cook professionally while keeping their independence and autonomy, and internet tradwives.
Take, for example, Tineke “Tini” Younger. She is an American chef who completed a formal culinary program at trade school, a cookbook author, and a breakout star whose approachable comfort food and made-from-scratch recipes earned her a spot on mainstream media as a contestant on Next Level Chef and a place on the Forbes Under 30 list. She is a young woman with a specific skill set and real talent for culinary arts, and she shares it online to educate and inspire others while monetizing her skills and building her following.
By comparison, Ballerina Farm shows another young woman, but she is on a farm with eight children, making food from scratch and romanticizing domesticity and assuming a traditional gender role. Her content offers a window into her daily life, and she romanticizes it by sharing it this way, making traditional gender roles look extremely tangible and easy. It reinforces the belief that the past was simpler, more natural, and easier, with a more fitting role for women to play. Consider Martha Stewart, Maangchi and Marie Kondo versus Estee Williams and Ballerina Farm. One group sells a skill, and the other sells a way of life that, by design, asks women to step back from the world.
But that dream is far out of reach, and completely subverts the fact that this lifestyle isn’t just unrealistic; it’s unaffordable. Being a tradwife is a place of extreme privilege, given the high cost of a home, the upkeep of land and livestock, debt, job insecurity, education, healthcare, and the steep price of childcare. Then consider the danger of depending on a single income, which is one lost job, one divorce, or one illness away from freefall. And as Burke’s novel suggests, behind many of the women who sell this life, there is hidden wealth, and they are either backed by a partner with an extremely high income or money made from monetizing their lives through brand deals and sponsorships. Like Natalie’s nannies, the help is edited out of the frame. A life that is packaged as calm and easy is curated and packaged in short aesthetic clips to make privilege look like a choice anyone could make. Under the linen and the sourdough, “tradwifing” on the internet sugarcoats submission, patriarchy, and exclusion, and asks us to admire a deeply regressive worldview.
That is the line I want us to draw. On one side stands a lifestyle that reinforces old stereotypes and softly erases women’s voices. On the other stand women who prove that domesticity and independence can live in the same house.
Professional kitchens have long been male-dominated, and the reason is older than any algorithm. When a boy is good at cooking, we tell him he should become a chef. When a girl is good at cooking, we tell her she’ll make someone a good wife. The same talent earns a career in one case and a role in the other. So the question is never whether a woman is in the kitchen. It is whether she chose it, whether she is paid for it, and whether she can walk out the door.