Last year’s review: Caro Claire Burke’s debut novel punishes the tradwife

Last yearthe buzzy new debut novel by Caro Claire Burke has the kind of premise that’s hard to look away from: A Tradwife influencer named Natalie—a Harvard dropout who married rich at 20—wakes up in 1855. Gone are her tastefully discreet gadgets, her prized collection of sweaters, her team-work sweaters. In their place: an outhouse, stained homespun prairie dresses, and hours of backbreaking labor spent washing a single load of laundry with homemade lye soap.

Natalie, faced with this brave old world, cries a lot. Things get especially rough for her after she tries to escape, stumbles into a bear trap, badly injures her leg and then has to make do with 19th century pioneer medicine. The medicated salve “smells like bacon grease,” and there’s no anesthetic for the stitches, so, says Natalie, “it feels like my body has drained a month’s worth of energy from just translating so many screaming nerve signals. EMERGENCY to my brain.”

There is a kind of satisfaction in witnessing Natalie’s distress. You find yourself wanting to say, “How is all that translation working for you now?” and then maybe a little mockery.

Finally, one of those wickedly attractive traditional housewife influencers—the type who’s always posting videos of herself baking bread in a sun-drenched kitchen while her cute kids break next to her—was forced to put her money where her mouth is. Now, you think, surely she will have to admit that the modern age has certain things.

Last year is a book animated by this kind of anger, by a palpable anger at the tradwife archetype. That’s what makes the premise so irresistible – irresistible enough to acquire breathless review coveragefor Anne Hathaway to sign on to produce and star in the film after a vicious bidding war with four studios. I read myself Last year in one long rush, unable to put it down.

But where the book starts to falter is when it tries to suggest that tradwives are as mad at themselves as feminists are.

in Last yearNatalie knows her content is rage bait. She refers to her followers as “the Angry Women,” noting smugly that “self-proclaimed progressive women” are “chemically addicted to hating women like me.” When she runs into Vanessa, a high school friend who has since renounced her devout upbringing, on a trip to Target, Natalie lingers with almost erotic pleasure on how much the person must envy and despise her. “Go on,” she thought cheerfully. “Give yourself a migraine thinking about me.”

Natalie is not wrong that much of the attention women receive ranges from critical to angry. “Is tradwife content dangerous, or just stupid?” asked a viral Cut essay in 2023. Another essay in 2020 described the sexism at its core as “the gateway to white supremacy.” In a 2024 profile of Hannah Neeleman, the influencer known as “Ballerina Farm,” who is the most prominent of the tradwives, the New York Times summarized the discourse: “Is she, as her fans would have it, a woman who made the laudable decision to stay at home, raise the children and support the family farm? Or is she, as her detractors would argue, someone who uses social media to push for a return to traditional gender roles while obscuring the privileges that allowed her to have such a lifestyle in the first place?”

To people who consider themselves progressive, which is generally the supposed audience for Last yeartrad women are not women who “choose their choice“; they threaten the gains of 20th-century feminism. They try to sell women the lie that they would be happier without birth control or education or careers, raising endless beautiful children in a spotless, beautiful kitchen. And it’s true that a large part of their followers are there, both for the pleasure of their beautiful pastoral lives and to be their political furore lives.

Natalie describes the appeal of her content by analogizing it to the rancid, desirable flavor of black truffles. “People don’t seem to be that different from pigs,” she says. “Once they learn that a rotten thing can be eaten, they will eat it, and they will become addicted to it.” She believes there is a “rottenness” of unhappiness on her farm that comes through in her content—her own exhaustion at the drudgery of her chores, the palpable counterfeit of her artificial paradise—”and everyone came rushing at me with their pitchforks.”

For most critics of tradwife content, the “rot” Natalie describes here is the anti-feminist proselytizing, the romanticizing of a bleak way of life that has left many women trapped. The decay that Burke portrays Last yearhowever, are just simple influencers hypocrisy.

Influence in its most basic form is sales, and like any overworked saleswoman, Natalie lies about her product: herself, and her supposedly pure lifestyle. She secretly uses the family’s “organic” farm in pesticides because she knows they will never make a profit otherwise. Her pastoral-chic range of Dutch ovens are made and delivered in Taiwan. She has nothing but contempt for Vanessa, whom she warmly greets while internally calling her a “pick me” and a “whore” for naming her daughter Zoe.

But Natalie’s hypocrisy goes deeper than that. We learn that she despises her confused husband Caleb, whom she felt pressured to marry young and start having children with once the wedding was over, thanks to the culture of her unnamed evangelical sect; he cannot achieve a full erection during sex, leaving her to impregnate herself with a sauce hybrid. Being alone with her children causes panic attacks. Early followers tell her that her smile looks too strained, so now she compulsively fakes it at all times, struggling to drop it when the occasion solemnly calls for it.

Yet she tells herself that all the wives and mothers she knows are happier than the career women she sees lamenting their inability to have it all. Once she has her first child and finds herself bored and miserable, she decides the stay-at-home moms she knows must be lying about their happiness. With no work history or job prospects and an ever-growing group of children to care for, she can find no outlet for her intellect and creativity outside of the project of turning her life into online content.

Natalie has an intimate understanding of why her followers love to annoy her because she loves to annoy modern women. She follows her liberal college roommate Reena on social media for the sheer pleasure of hating her and her life choices, an act that mirrors career women hating tradwives. “She looked like a stereotype of a modern woman,” exults Natalie over a video of Reena announcing she was fired from her consulting gig, “poreless and lip-lined and shrill.”

Throughout the novel, characters create an imaginary woman from scraps of social media content, just so they can get mad at her. Natalie does it with Reena, and Natalie’s followers do it to her. In Burke’s telling, we do it because we are all unhappy with our own lives and want to vent. Which is a little strange, because what is the novel Last year if not the process of creating an imaginary woman out of scraps of social media content just so we can get mad at her?

Last year has a gripping, thriller-like pace, which it owes largely to the delightful mystery of what exactly happened to Natalie to send her to 1855.

Did she time travel, à la Outlander? Is she on some kind of hidden camera reality TV show? Is she being tested by God (Natalie’s favorite option)? At one point, she finds a secret cabin in the past with a sign that says “The Manosphere,” and I’m giddy with joy at the idea of ​​Burke positing a world where all those podcasters have decided to start building virtual realities to send aroused women for reprogramming, like an updated Stepford Wives.

Along the way, Natalie is punished by the world of 1855. There’s the bear trap, of course, and the fact that one of the first things Caleb does when we meet him in the past is punch his wife so hard in the face that she blacks out. Also, the food “looks, frankly, like shit,” made with such meager, stingy ingredients that even Natalie’s famous sourdough breads don’t come out right. (“The worst possible thing to happen,” she fumes.)

The real reason for Natalie’s time travel, when it comes down to it, is deflating. Without spoiling too much, Burke’s conclusion suggests that the sadistic rage that pulses through Last year – the desire to see Natalie put down a peg, humiliated, forced to admit that what she says she wants isn’t what anyone given the choice would actually want – is a feeling Natalie shares. She wants to see herself punished as much as the reader. She punishes herself enough to provide the entire plot of the book.

There is an easy complacency to this conclusion that, in retrospect, makes the project of Last year less satisfying than it initially promised to be. It relies on the seductive but unlikely idea that if tradwives were really honest with themselves, they would admit that they agree with feminists about what the problems with their lives are. This suggests Natalie also wants to ask, “How’s all that trading working out for you now?”

I don’t think we need to pretend that Ballerina Farm really is as idyllic as it looks on Instagram so that we can give traditionalists the courtesy of taking them at their word for their fundamental beliefs. Their lives may not be so happy, but it seems unlikely to me that tradwives secretly believe that this is because the message they preach is false and will make other people’s lives worse. I also don’t believe tradwives really think they are doing something wrong, anything rotby making the content they do.

Even Natalie, for all her quiet anger, can never imagine that the liberal women she hates don’t really believe in equality. It’s as if the strongest rise Burke can imagine for this woman who so angers us is to deny that she believes, through all her words and actions, the things she appears to believe. Last year punishes the trooper by turning her into someone less than substantial—and so in the end, this bingeable, buzzy novel fails to fully satisfy.

There is something fundamentally dishonest about building an imaginary woman to hate, and not even allowing her to hold her own principles. I suppose it’s fun to imagine a world where a tradwife seems to secretly love swearing and pills, where social media is not only exaggerated but an outright lie, and where she punishes herself to save all the rest of us the trouble. But it is no less of a fantasy than a bucolic farm where the bread is always perfect and the children never cry.