Finally, Inside a Tradwife’s Mind

We know too much about tradwives, and yet we know nothing at all. We know that Hannah Neeleman — the tradwife of Ballerina Farm fame — has a perfect life in Utah with her perfect husband and perfect children on their perfect ranch, where she bakes all her own bread, free of plebeian afflictions like microplastics and preservatives. She sells her audience on the “right” way to live because, we’re supposed to believe, she’s living it herself. Which is why I was legitimately surprised when she halted the sale of her raw milk amid bacteria concerns earlier this year. She didn’t make a spectacle of it; there wasn’t so much as a Notes-app apology. And yet we found out that Hannah Neeleman had done something wrong. Just for a moment, for one brief internet cycle, a crack appeared in the perfect life Neeleman peddles online.

That crack is the exception. The glossy surface is the rule. Online, tradwives show us exactly what they want us to see: the symmetrical sourdough, the candlelit births, the children who play outside all day and yet still have clean hands. Just enough to make us feel as if we’re intimates. But we’re not. There are tradwives whose cows I could name from memory, but I still don’t know how they actually feel about their husbands. Perhaps that’s why Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear is so appealing. Her fictionalized account of a famous tradwife might be the closest we’ll get inside a tradwife’s real and imperfect mind.

Yesteryear tells the story of Natalie Heller Mills, a Harvard dropout who marries the idiot scion of a wealthy family, buys a beautiful farm in Idaho, pops out a handful of children, and becomes a bona fide internet-famous tradwife. Natalie is not likable. She’s uptight, she leaps to judgment, she’s allergic to even trying to have a good time. But what she lacks in warmth, she makes up for in honesty. Burke doesn’t hold back on sharing Natalie’s most humiliating thoughts, such as the revelation that she searches her ex–Harvard roommate’s Instagram daily to confirm her old nemesis is miserable at her NYC consulting job. As we all know, the Instagram search history is the quickest path into the dark recesses of a person’s mind. In this case, Natalie wonders if she made the wrong move — if she should have followed the familiar paths her Harvard classmates took.

The parallels to Neeleman are hard to miss: Like Natalie, Neeleman is a woman who went to a prestigious university (she’s a Juilliard-trained ballerina), got pregnant young, married into money (her husband is the son of the JetBlue founder), and built a massive audience selling rural domesticity. And yet despite the volume of coverage — a Times of London profile that set the internet on fire, a New York Times feature that described her as “a social media star and a cultural lightning rod,” and an Evie cover story from a writer who very clearly wanted to wear her skin — Neeleman herself remains opaque. She admitted to the Times of London that she secretly loved getting an epidural. The New York Times reported that she had hired a homeschool teacher and a babysitter — staffing that contradicts the lone-pioneer-woman image she projects daily. Her husband said she sometimes gets so tired she stays in bed for a week at a time. But never does she turn her camera on any of this exhaustion and overwhelm. She mostly tells us about bread and cows.

Yesteryear keeps us in Natalie’s head for decades, following two timelines: one in which she mysteriously wakes up in the early 1800s and one in which she ends up the modern face of traditional femininity. Natalie’s voice changes as she grows older. Initially, she’s angry about her humble origins but open to her future. As the book goes on, she becomes more and more jaded. The humor is delightful in its subtlety — Natalie is almost self-aware, but not quite, and the moments when she flatly describes her reality are among the funniest. I laughed out loud at the words her husband says to her on her wedding night, which Burke just lets hang sans reaction. The result of this style is a fully realized character. A girl who thinks she’s better than her hometown but soon learns the rest of the world isn’t so perfect either. A woman who thought marrying into money meant all her problems were solved forever but slowly realizes she has to solve them herself.

And because we know her, there’s no single decision Natalie makes that feels completely unhinged or ill-intentioned. If anything, the events that lead her down a life of anti-feminist advocacy are almost quotidian. She becomes more reactionary when she struggles socially among the liberal elites. (This is also cited as the origin of J.D. Vance’s MAGA turn.) And then, like many millions of women before her, her options swiftly contract for one simple reason: She gets pregnant too young.

By contrast, the real-life tradwives would never let us see what compromises they’ve made. That would defy the whole project: to project an image of quiet assuredness, to assert that their lives are aligned with the natural order of things. So they regale their followers with upbeat stories of why they chose to abandon college in search of an SSRI-free life. The tradwives never express any regrets. There’s never an acknowledgment that they’re cosplaying Betty Draper because they have no other choice, because other doors had shut behind them. They can’t. The whole enterprise would fall apart if they did.

Natalie’s most toxic trait is her censoriousness. As she says of her early Harvard days, “I’d come to college intent on being a shining light for others. Now I was certain that no level of illumination would save these women from the horror of themselves. If anything, they seemed to revel in the pitch-black aimlessness of their lives. They were proud of it. Happy to wander blindly forth into a lifetime of selfishness. It was deeply disturbing. Most disturbing of all was the fact that these lost, hateful girls thought someone like me should inherently be jealous of someone like them.” The tone is harsher than the softness maintained by the real-life tradwives, but the substance is not. I can admit that I’m drawn to tradwives, in part, because I have the sneaking suspicion that they’re judging me right back. That behind every serene butter churn is a woman who thinks I wouldn’t need a hearty melatonin supplement if I stopped drinking Diet Coke with dinner. Natalie makes that subtext explicit, which is oddly satisfying. They are contemptuous. I was right.

Natalie’s options narrow in both timelines. In the past, it happens suddenly as she wakes up in a world without antibiotics. In the present, it happens slowly as she realizes she married a dumbass. In response, Natalie finds social-media stardom for another unspectacular reason, the same reason so many women make dubious choices: Her husband is too stupid to support the family, so she has to do it herself. Posting about traditional feminine values becomes the only way she can dig her family out of a financial hole. She finds agency in promoting a woman’s lack of agency.

Of course, that’s what the most famous real tradwives are doing too. Unlike Natalie in the 1800s, they’re not forced to live in the world they promote. Tradwives exist in 2026, when American women can not only make millions of dollars off their internet followings but they can also keep that money. They — the famous tradwives, the Fox News hosts, the MAHA moms, the Trump ladies, all of them — advocate for a world that hurts women in general but helps them in particular. They’re empowered by it.

The irony is that as I read Yesteryear, I realized that perhaps I would prefer the tradwives if they had less agency. Maybe I wouldn’t find them quite so reactionary if I understood them like Natalie: a woman who built her platform to survive. As unlikable as Natalie is, I could not help but have empathy. It’s harder to hate someone once you know their whole story. Burke’s writing is honest and accessible. She’s not trying to slander Natalie; she’s trying to show us the unvarnished version. At the end of the day, that’s the paradox of Yesteryear — and one that makes it worth reading. Burke doesn’t take down the tradwives. She humanizes them.