Caro Claire Burke’s novel satirizes the 21st-century “tradwife” (traditional wife) movement, a social media phenomenon where influencers promote a return to traditional gender roles. Flourishing on platforms like Instagram and TikTok, tradwife content often presents a highly curated aesthetic of domesticity, featuring activities like baking sourdough from scratch, homeschooling, and maintaining a picturesque home, all while framing wifely submission and homemaking as a woman’s primary calling. This digital performance frequently aligns with conservative or anti-feminist ideologies and is often monetized through partnerships with beauty and home product brands like Ogee Beauty, Sprouts Farmers Market, and Jell-o, and direct-to-consumer product lines, selling items like farm-sourced protein powder (Hicks, Katie. “The business of tradwives—and why brands keep working with them.” Marketing Brew, Jan. 2025). Real-world influencers such as Hannah Neeleman of @ballerinafarm, who presents an idyllic farm life to millions of followers, have faced public scrutiny for obscuring the significant wealth and hired help that supports their seemingly simple, self-sufficient lifestyle.

Other criticisms highlight the falseness of the lifestyles some influencers present to their followers. In 2025, an influencer popular among conservative circles, “Patriarchy Hannah” of @harmonizedgrace, was exposed for making false claims about their tradwife lifestyle, including having 14 children and living in a Louisiana house (Rosenblatt, Kalhan. “Tradwife account ‘Patriarchy Hannah’ apologizes for lies, says she was ‘not who I presented myself to be.’” NBC News, Feb. 2025). Internet users debunked these claims, leaving the user behind the Hannah persona to admit that they had fictionalized the lifestyle they were promoting.

Burke uses this contemporary context to build her protagonist, Natalie Heller Mills, a successful influencer whose brand is built on a similar illusion. The novel exposes the hypocrisy inherent in this performance, as Natalie internally strategizes how to hide her nannies and producer from her followers, crafting a practiced answer for when she is asked, “Why don’t you ever show all the help you have behind the scenes?” (6). When her daughter Clementine asks, “What does tradwife mean?” (12), the narrative directly engages with the label that both Natalie’s followers and detractors use to define her. Yesteryear thus critiques both the ideology of the tradwife movement and the calculated commodification of authenticity in modern influencer culture.