How a Debut Novelist Turned the Tradwife Discourse on Its Head

Moments before we speak, Caro Claire Burke travels back in time—to a world without electricity. Or, more accurately, she undergoes a brief power outage: Her area of Central Virginia, she explains, has been prone to them lately, and she almost rushed over to a friend’s house to get on Zoom with me before the lights flickered back on. In most situations, the outage would be a technological blip barely worth remarking on, but given the subject matter of Burke’s debut novel, there’s some poetic justice in her being (however briefly) catapulted into a reality not unlike the 1800s.

In Yesteryear, out on April 7, Burke’s protagonist Natalie Heller Mills becomes a tradwife social media influencer, operating a farm where she raises chickens and bakes bread before an audience of millions, only to be transported back to the real, not-so-halcyon days of churning butter and home surgery. Has she time traveled? Is she on some sort of twisted reality show? Is it all a dream? Burke keeps the reader guessing.

For what it’s worth, I am the kind of irritating person who DiCaprio-points at the killer 10 minutes into a crime procedural, and I had no idea where the story was going—and found myself genuinely surprised at the end. The novel is shaping up to be one of the biggest books of the spring, and Burke’s team has played cheekily into the tradwife theme, anointing lit-world VIPS with gingham-printed packages from “Yesteryear Ranch,” complete with candles and a faux embroidery sampler.

If Burke’s name sounds familiar, it might be because her book is buzzy enough that Anne Hathaway has already signed on to star in and produce the film adaptation. Or you might be acquainted with Burke from her presence on TikTok—where she weighs in on the tradwife discourse, among other hot-button topics. Or you’ll know her from her podcast, Diabolical Lies, which she co-hosts with fellow author Katie Gatti Tassin. (The podcast’s title comes from NFL player Harrison Butker’s, er, memorable Benedictine College commencement speech in 2024, during which he said that women have been told “the most diabolical lies” about pursuing a career.) On Diabolical Lies, Burke and her co-host have covered everything from the “womanosphere” to Evie magazine, which bills itself as the “conservative Cosmo” and which Burke once described on the show as “the newspaper of record for Lady Idiot Island.” These kinds of DGAF soundbites have earned the pair a legion of followers who call themselves the Dirty Little Liars.

Burke’s brand of take-no-prisoners feminism bristles against not only conservative culture, but also the liberal establishment—a practice that’s in line with sentiments expressed by many modern progressives, who feel that neither major party has their interests at heart. In her book, Natalie’s college roommate, Reena, is a career-driven character who serves as both a narrative foil to Burke’s protagonist as well as a built-in warning that the lean-in mentality can be equally fraught.

“[Tradwives] almost felt like this door for women to talk about the things that they maybe don’t always feel like they’re allowed to talk about.”

Burke became fascinated with tradwives long before she became a public critic of them. She admits to getting sucked into the onscreen lives of modern-day pioneer women the way so many of us have—while mindlessly scrolling social media—in the winter of 2024. The figure of the tradwife, she tells me, “sits at the intersection of everything about womanhood that interests me, even before I became interested in feminist theory or politics or culture—far before I was doing a podcast about it.” Now felt like a particularly poignant time to write a book about a tradwife, she says, because “there are so many women who want to talk about this now, with The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. The conversation is endless, and it’s a fascinating social experiment to see just how many women force and contort themselves to try to fit into a lifestyle that is fundamentally unnatural, even though it is billed as fundamentally natural.”

Earlier in her career, Burke wrote for female-centric sites like Bustle and Katie Couric Media, which gave her insight into the black box of what young women are really paying attention to. (Take it from someone who has also found themselves elbow-deep in Chartbeat: The disconnect between the topics people claim to care about and those they actually click on would make a Freudian’s head spin.) A running gag in Yesteryear is Natalie’s irritation with what she calls the “angry women,” commenters who chastise her constantly…but nevertheless continue to follow her account, not to mention her every move.

When Burke first began opining on TikTok in 2024, she realized that, much like celebrities and pop culture, tradwives were a portal into “bigger conversations about womanhood in America, womanhood under capitalism, under patriarchy…It almost felt like this door for women to talk about the things that they maybe don’t always feel like they’re allowed to talk about,” she says. “Because you’re talking about an Instagram account, you’re given license to have the more serious conversations that you might be afraid to have otherwise.”

Tradwives also resonate, I posit, because they are presenting seductive-seeming solutions to very real problems: the way work in this country is broken, the astronomical costs of childcare, and the mess that is our healthcare system. With the limited options so many women have at their disposal, who among them wouldn’t be tempted by a supposedly cure-all tincture, or a fantasy of kneading sourdough? “It’s not like Natalie would’ve necessarily been better off doing what Reena did,” Burke says.

“It’s not the women you hate; it’s the billionaires.”

Tradwives also occupy a compelling role in pop culture because they are, in the most successful cases, building massive careers—and even media empires—around the claim that women should be full-time homemakers. In some fundamentalist Christian circles, Burke notes, “that psychological backflip for women is embedded into the cultural text of how you perform. There are very real stakes to being a ‘correct’ woman in these communities. If you divorce your husband, you’re not going to heaven; you’re not going to see your children. So this oxymoronic behavior of espousing the idea of women submitting to their husbands while you are, in fact, the breadwinner—‘Women should be in the home,’ but you’re running an eight-figure empire—I think it’s all incoherent, but the communities themselves are also incoherent.”

The author Caro Claire Burke.

Through her research into tradwives, Burke also came to understand why the lifestyle might appeal to an increasingly conservative demographic of Gen Z. “People are really desperate for community, and so when someone online tells you, ‘We used to have community in the 1950s, and you were a housewife,’ it’s a very accessible visual,” Burke says. “I think that’s why so much work has to be done [to say], ‘It’s not the women you hate; it’s the billionaires.’ It’s hard for me to get angry about it because it’s so clear that this generation has been so failed and sold a false bill of goods.” Regardless of whether followers are idolizing influencers or writing takedowns of them in the comments section, Burke reminds us that these influencers are easy targets—and that any form of engagement on a social media platform enriches that platform’s billionaire owners.

“I think that, for a long time, I just moved through the world thinking that a lot of things had already been solved.”

Burke does not come from a fundamentalist background of any kind, but she does have some experiences with ideologically rigid spheres. She was raised Catholic and has talked on the podcast about formerly being a Republican (though very much of the fiscally conservative-socially liberal variety.) As a student at the University of Virginia in the 2010s, she took a class called “Taking Sex Differences Seriously” that made a biological argument for why women should not work outside the home. Growing up under neoliberalism in the 2000s and early 2010s, “I think that for a long time I just moved through the world thinking that a lot of things had already been solved,” she says. That all changed with the first Trump term and the rise of #MeToo. (Burke calls that epoch “my radicalization period.”)