Neither Girlboss nor Tradwife

Yesteryear
by caro claire burke
knopf, 400 pages, $30

I wasn’t supposed to like Yesteryear, which is why I was surprised, and a little embarrassed, to discover how much I enjoyed it—not as a satire of women of faith, but as a dark psychological thriller.

By the time most readers cracked the spine, Caro Claire Burke’s debut novel was already on track to be a bestseller, with Amazon purchasing the movie rights and Anne Hathaway angling for the lead. It has been praised in progressive outlets as a reckoning with the performative, superficial, and ultimately “detrimental” nature of the tradwife movement. Burke’s primary audience—liberal, non-religious women—read it as a vindication: Women who choose traditional families, religious faith, and domestic life are either performing or going mad.  

The novel follows Natalie, a Christian fundamentalist tradwife influencer whose picture-perfect life begins to fall apart when she wakes up in 1855. Natalie’s story unfolds along two timelines, one tracking her modern life, the other her life in the nineteenth century, where she is forced to live the life she playacted for her online audience. These storylines are intercut with flashbacks to her childhood, her college years, and her early marriage to Caleb, a rich Republican politician’s disappointment of a fifth son. What Natalie wants is to hold together her image—to be seen as the submissive, feminine, traditional woman she has curated online, even when the audience disappears. 

Beneath the surface, however, Natalie’s inner world is vindictive, prideful, and distrustful, especially toward other women. She is as desperate to sell the mirage to her children as she is to her followers, reacting harshly when her eldest asks what a “tradwife” is. In the end, the two audiences she cannot fool are her followers and her own daughters, and it is they who ultimately bring about her downfall.

I found her portrait genuinely convicting—not because she accurately reflects most tradwives or religiously active conservative Christian women, but because she shows in no uncertain terms the depravity of life apart from God, especially when religion is claimed but never truly lived. 

Burke’s stated purpose was to understand “fundamentalist Christians,” and on this ground she fails. When asked about Natalie’s faith by NPR’s Ayesha Rascoe, she said: “It was important to me not to be focusing on any one religion so much as focusing on those power hierarchies, which I think are very consistent across a number of religions.” She described her research method as studying online tradwife accounts and “waterboarding” herself with Reddit threads and podcasts by women who had left Mormon, Jehovah’s Witness, and evangelical communities. 

In other words, Burke was never writing about Christianity, nor did she take the time to appreciate the differences between each religion, theology, or culture. She was writing about a generalized power hierarchy applied to tradwives and filtered almost entirely through the testimonies of those who deconstructed their faith.

No consistent church attendance is ever mentioned in the novel. Natalie’s prayers are brief, self-serving, and aimed at no one in particular—sorry I swore, I’ll do better. These are the Pelagian prayers of a woman managing appearances, not one who believes in God. 

What Burke could not give Natalie, because she does not possess it herself and declined to seek it in her research, is any interior experience of genuine religious life. Burke’s protagonist may be dressed in tradwife clothing, but her novel reveals far more about the spiritual lostness of secular women than about the religious women she set out to critique. 

The problem with Natalie isn’t that she is too religious or conservative, but that she is neither. Yesteryear ultimately isn’t a cautionary tale about traditionalism. It is a warning about how a life devoid of God ends with no redemption. 

Conspicuously absent from Yesteryear are wise older women and strong godly men—the two precise variables that determine whether women in traditional Christian circles flourish or flounder. Natalie’s father is “no longer with them” from a young age. Her Sunday school teacher sleeps off his hangover on the youth group couch while Natalie teaches instead. Her husband is directionless, incurious, and dull. Her mother only knows how to manage appearances, while her mother-in-law is a wallflower; her father-in-law is strong but neither godly nor kind. Natalie herself shows real intelligence and drive, but even that, apart from godly discipleship, falls short. 

The data bears this out. A Gallup poll from earlier this year found that only 29 percent of young women consider religion “very important” to them, down from 52 percent in 2000. A 2025 Barna study found that 38 percent of Gen Z women identify as religiously unaffiliated—higher than any other generation—and exhibit the lowest rates of Bible reading, prayer, and church attendance, especially compared to their male peers. Liberal women in particular have decoupled from institutional religion at remarkable speed, with Barna’s researchers concluding that intergenerational mentorship may be the key to restoring faith and belonging among young women. 

But if the support doesn’t come from wise older women and strong godly husbands, government will increasingly step in. Burke senses this, telling Lizzy Goodman of the New York Times, “We were all sold a bill of false goods, and that’s true for conservative women and it’s true for liberal women. . . . The point of the book is not that one wins.” When asked by Hanna Rosin on Radio Atlantic what comes next, Burke answered: “If you don’t wanna be a girlboss or a tradwife, what’s the option? And the option is Marxism.” Zohran Mamdani’s Marxism, to be precise—the kind that attracted over 80 percent of the under-thirty female vote in the 2025 mayoral election. Still, it strikes me that no political framework addresses the loneliness, pride, or spiritual vacancy that Natalie embodies so viscerally, and that so many readers recognize in themselves. 

Interestingly, one of the only biblical women the novel mentions is Lot’s wife, the woman who turned into a pillar of salt when she looked back on Sodom as it was being destroyed. Here the young protagonist queries, “What is the future for biblical women?”

This has been the focus of much of my personal and policy work, explored most recently in my book Lead Like Jael. Like Burke, I began with the recognition that neither girlboss feminism nor the online tradwife movement has the answer women are looking for. But where Burke turned to Noam Chomsky, and ultimately Marxism, I turned to the Bible. 

There I encountered Jael, whose faithfulness to her home steeled her to drive a tent peg through the skull of Israel’s enemy; Deborah, whose wise counsel as an older woman spurred Israel to action; Abigail, whose quick thinking prevented a massacre her foolish husband provoked; Ruth, whose excellence and wisdom attracted a man of equal worth; Hannah, whose raw desperation for a child led her to God in prayer; Esther, whose shrewd hospitality brought down her enemy and saved her people; and Mary, whose faith and submission to God’s Word led to the greatest gift of all: the birth of Jesus.

What those women reveal—and what Yesteryear never finds—is that the Bible offers women three paths, not two, to navigate the trials, disappointments, and challenges of life: They can do nothing, replace men, or seek to restore what has been broken. The women the Bible commends choose the third option: working within the order of home, church, and nation through personal adherence to God’s Word, submission to their husbands, proper accountability and mentorship, and standing firm in the protection of life. 

The women who flourish are not those who win the girlboss game, perfect the tradwife aesthetic, or embrace Marxism’s spiritual statism. They are those who are rooted in genuine religious community, mentored by wise older women, and protected by faithful men. It is therefore our task to continue the painstaking work of articulating, embodying, and passing on a vision of faith that is lived, not performed.