The Left Is Wrong About Tradwives

Who else has read Yesteryear? I swear this book cover has been all over my social media lately, and it’s been quite a while since I’ve seen this level of PR hype over a debut novel (this thrills me! More marketing $$ for novelists pls). Don’t worry, reading isn’t a prereq for today’s article. But it is what inspired it, so if you’re going to send me angry emails about how you disagree with me you might want to take a look first: 

In case you’re not interested in reading, just know that the book follows a tradwife influencer who suddenly wakes up to find herself living in 1855. Forced to live the life she once marketed to her social media followers, she grapples with the reality of living the actual trad wife lifestyle without a team of production assistants, kitchen appliances, and Target stores within driving distance to support her. 

It’s a fantastic novel. Extremely well-written, fun to read, and thought provoking without being overly preachy. But when a work of fiction is getting this level of attention in the press, it’s often not just because the author crafted an incredible story (which she did! Amazing work Caro Claire Burke). In this particular situation, I think this narrative struck a nerve with a very specific audience: liberal white women. 

Okay fine so I don’t know the political affiliation of the woman in this stock photo but you get the idea. 

As a liberal white woman myself, I feel uniquely positioned to opine on the discourse surrounding this novel. Or at least some of it. And let’s face it, liberal white women seem to make up a huge proportion of fiction readers in the first place. I couldn’t find stats on this exact demographic breakdown — Pew Research doesn’t seem to want to dig into the late-night reading habits of each individual political affiliation — but I did find enough evidence to support my pretty vibes-based theory. Namely, that in 2022 46.9% of women reported reading fiction or short stories compared to just 27.7% of men. Additionally, looking along party lines, Democrats consume 10.6 books per year versus Republicans’ 7.7 books. I will note that the partisan divide appears to be driven primarily by those on the left that would be considered heavy readers, as the median number of books read is roughly 2 for both parties. 

But you know what? That actually proves my point. Liberal women are skewing the data on readership. And I’d like to think I play my part in beefing up that number. 

Given this not-entirely-scientific fact, it’s not surprising that the NYT bestseller list is generally populated with novels that appeal to the interests of women such as myself. From crime to sci-fi to romance (we haven’t even mentioned #booktok yet), the central themes of a lot of novels can often demonstrate a distinct lean to the left, whether we realize it or not. The case of Yesteryear is one of the more overt cases. There’s a clear message here for readers to latch on to: a tradwife who gets stuck in the past?! Finally, she’ll get her comeuppance. 

But before we punish this tradwife, I have to punish you, dear readers, with today’s ad:

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Back to our ill-fated (we hope) tradwife…

I won’t lie to you and say that I didn’t find myself gleefully anticipating this release myself. I’ve felt my share of frustration that women such as Hannah Neeleman, of Ballerina Farm fame (sorry, not linking), portray themselves as espousing an old-school, traditional lifestyle all while raking in money selling carefully curated products to the millions in their audiences that seems to not realize that there’s no way these women can truly be living the lives they portray if they’re able to broadcast it out to millions of people each day. Not to mention the genuine harm these influencers can cause by tacitly implying to women everywhere that outsourcing their decision making to their husbands is somehow freeing rather than willingly participating in the construction of their own cages. 

And that’s where the liberal reviewers of Yesteryear lost me. The women I follow were so eager to see Natalie, the protagonist of this novel, get punished that they never stopped to actually get to know her. I personally didn’t find Natalie to be nearly as dislikable as everyone would have had me believe before I actually read her story. Sure, she had her flaws — we all have our flaws — but my prevailing thought while reading this book was, wow…this woman is trapped in a prison of her own mind. 

What Burke has done so beautifully here is to illustrate just what it feels like to be under attack by your own internal monologue. Anyone with anxiety should have felt a genuine kinship with the voices in Natalie’s head. And aren’t we liberals the queens of functional anxiety? But no, we’re so impatient to see Natalie fail that we ourselves miss the point: 

We are all Natalie. Or at least at a very real risk of becoming her.

The fortress of Natalie’s psyche is so impenetrable because it has been meticulously constructed over years of learned behaviors. Of conditioning by herself and others to ensure that she can’t make sense of the cognitive dissonance occurring in her own mind. Women everywhere should be familiar with this sensation — it’s a different version that causes us to, for example, instinctively judge another woman before realizing that the source of our criticism is in fact our own internalized misogyny. 

Have you ever found yourself cringing at another woman’s behavior — what she’s wearing, what she chooses to share online, or her willingness to put herself out there and ask for what she really wants? That instinctive cringe is your own personal prison. You’ve just managed to make yourself feel righteous about the fact that yours feels as if it’s been built by feminism rather than by men in power. But we’re all casualties of the systems we were raised in. And in America, that system was created by men. Lawyers, no less. No wonder it can feel so difficult to argue ourselves out of critiquing our fellow women sometimes. 

In the case of tradwives, Natalie gives us a glimpse into the construct we on the left have been powerless to stop. Because we’re so busy declaring our own moral superiority that we forget to actually do anything other than point and say: See? Look at all that hypocrisy! But if we want to shift the pendulum, we’re going to need white women to do it. So we have to stop antagonizing them and start treating them like human beings rather than objects. Because that’s exactly what we’re doing: pretending they’re entirely without agency, the very objects we have been fighting against being viewed as ourselves. Once again, Democrats are failing to understand women. 

The women who are drawn to the tradwife ecosystem are doing what every other woman has been doing since the dawn of time — trying to belong, trying to find community, and trying to be supported. They’re not mindless androids. They may even have plenty of opinions that you find yourself agreeing with. 

Which brings me to my larger point here. The current political climate has created an environment where we are pushed to seek only sameness. Even within our own communities, we’ve started jumping on any opportunity to eject someone from the club. And I think this problem is particularly pervasive on the left. 

I’ve noticed that as soon as someone expresses an opinion that even slightly deviates from the agreed-upon norms, hordes descend to ostracize them. God forbid that person actually make a mistake, we vilify them rather than work to help them understand why we believe they were wrong. The conservatives bemoan cancel culture, but the victims who are actually punished are more often on the left. And the only thing this accomplishes is to push more and more people away from our causes. 

Hordes of people are working towards common goals: preserve the checks and balances of our Democracy, make our communities safer, save the planet from destruction, advance the rights of women (or at the very least prevent them from being further stripped away #plsgod), I could go on but I think you get the point…

So if we all share these aims, I contend that we need to work harder to accept those who might be coming at these objectives from slightly different paths. Examine our history…so much progress in America was built on the backs of coalitions. Maybe even those that left a bad taste in activist’s mouths. But they persevered because what they were trying to achieve was so great. An example you might not want to grapple with? The women’s suffrage movement largely excluded black women. Why? Because the white women in charge felt it gave them a greater chance at succeeding. In fact, many white suffragettes like Susan B. Anthony appealed to the racist ideals of white supremacy in order to push their own agenda. Kind of horrifying to look back on, isn’t it? Yet today we hail these (mostly white) women for making enormous sacrifices in the name of all women’s rights. 

It’s easy to judge these women harshly in retrospect. I like to think there were plenty that criticized them back then as well. But the truth of the matter is that this was a strategic attempt to make progress. And sometimes it’s necessary to make sacrifices in the name of larger goals. To compromise for your future ideals. To align with people you may disagree with in order to win. 

Obviously I’m not advocating for abdicating our moral values. But if we’re unwilling to collaborate with people whose policy positions we don’t 100% align on, then we run the very real risk of letting people we wholly disagree with decide our futures. People who don’t mind chipping away, bit by bit, not always tallying big wins but continuing to move forward. And where will we be? Stuck at the starting line, waving our fists, trying to prove to everyone that our moral righteousness means we deserve to win a race we never even started. 

So let Natalie of Yesteryear serve as a cautionary tale to women everywhere. Especially the privileged, white, liberal women like myself who live in progressive enclaves where they enjoy significant shelter from the battles happening elsewhere (shoutout to my bff in Texas who grapples with this reality more than we in NYC ever realize). If we want to win our rights back — if we want to preserve our autonomy over our own bodies and minds and decisions — then we have to be strategic. And that means remembering that we are all human. All fallible. And also all reachable. 

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