I finally got around to reading Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear, the “smash-hit tradwife satire” that BBC Culture has declared “2026’s most divisive book”. Actually, I didn’t read it – I had it on audiobook while driving to and from work (which is why this post will be short on any actual quotations from the book). I tend to chose audiobooks on the basis of ‘not sure I’m committed enough to read it, but will give passive absorption a try’. Anyhow, I ended up really enjoying it, so much so I listened to the end when not even in the car (something I very rarely do – the last time, I think, was with Emma Donaghue’s The Wonder).
Perhaps I should hand back my feminist card now. The impression I get is that no true feminist, regardless of her particular flavour of feminism, is supposed to like this book. If you lean towards the more liberal side of things, you will find it trivialising, insufficiently engaged with the political darkness of tradwife culture; if you are of more ‘reactionary’ leanings, you will feel it misunderstands what drives women towards domesticity. A full-on radical feminist might find it completely irrelevant, a made-for-Hollywood cardboard cut-out feminist ‘dilemma’. Added to that, the portrayals of male violence are ambiguous, to say the least. I still liked it, though.
The truth is, I’ve always liked novels with monstrous female characters, women whose monstrosity comes from the fact that they know the rules for ‘being a good woman’, judge every woman around them for coming up short and harbour unbridled fury at the thought that their commitment to ‘goodness’ – their taking it all too extremes – might be insufficiently appreciated by the rule-makers (and that other, lesser women might find happiness in ‘failure’). The particular womanhood model can be different – Amy Dunne in Gone Girl, Barbara Covett in Notes on a Scandal, Jess’s mother in Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. It’s not that I like or admire these characters, but there’s something about that sense of “yeah, well? Aren’t women supposed to hate other women? Aren’t they supposed to follow every command to the letter? Isn’t that what it looks like?” that I find very engaging (which may well say something terrible about me. I’ve often thought this about anorexia as well, insofar as anorexia could ever be a message: “isn’t that what the world wants? Don’t go complaining about it now”). It’s that clash of performative compliance and total aggression, that fuck-you submissiveness that seems the end point of having a standard that only functions if no woman can meet it. Except some women do, then they’re hated for being the monsters they’ve become. I think there are times when, in the character of Natalie Heller Mills, Burke captures that rage very well.
Yesteryear is perhaps not as well-written or as psychologically complex as the other novels I’ve mentioned. There is a certain trashiness to it, but it’s a well-executed trashiness. Were one to judge it by the standard of ‘feminist classic’ novels such as The Women’s Room or Wide Sargasso Sea, it would obviously fall short. One could argue that the central ‘problem’ within it is crass – does one seriously have to pitch tradwife extremism against the sad, lonely ‘career woman’ lifestyle that Natalie imagines for her former college roommate Reena? Indeed, the whole tradwife vs ‘career woman’ ‘debate’ is crass. It ignores decades of feminist thought on valuing maternity and care work, favouring whatever the mainstream media has seen fit to highlight in order to problematise any decision a woman makes. It blows my mind that decades after the so-called ‘mommy wars’ I can look at social media and instantly encounter bullshit about women being duped into choosing “a mediocre salary and PowerPoints” over snuggling up with their babies. As Faludi documents in Backlash, women in the 1980s were already inundated with messages telling them that feminism has made them unhappy by fooling them into believing they could ‘have it all’. I’m 51 and can remember being annoyed by this from about the age of 12. So when Natalie expresses this, it’s not exactly original, and nor is the way in which – inevitably – one side (Natalie’s, in this case) has to be punished to create some sort of resolution. Even so, this is not a crass, idiotic war of Burke’s making, and one might as well get a gripping novel out of it. As a victim-villain, the tradwife influencer is compelling. Is it for a novel alone to answer the question ‘who made her?’
I started writing regularly through mummy blogging in the early 2010s. I don’t mean this designation in a ‘little old me and my little old blog’ way, though I imagine that’s what could be heard through the term. My oldest children were four and two, and yes, sometimes I was going out of mind with boredom. I’d compose pieces in my head and bash them out later, about parenting, gender stereotypes, feminism. I started writing guest blogs for Mumsnet and spoke on a couple of their BlogFest panels (one was a total nightmare, but that’s another story). I even got shortlisted for a BritMums Brilliance in Blogging award. Which is to say, I wasn’t imagining that I was a mummy blogger because I was a mum who wrote. That’s who you were if you wrote about that kind of thing. You might be writing about postpartum depression, maternal isolation, male violence, birth injuries, raising children in a world riven with prejudice and economic inequality, but to people outside of the ‘mummy blogging’ bubble – to whom ‘mummy blogger’ was a pejorative term – you might as well have been writing about the best way to puree your organic carrots. Indeed, you really should have stuck to carrots. As Sarah Pederson describes in The Politicization of Mumsnet, the ‘mummy blogger’ was seen as someone who was stupid and trivial because all she cared about was boring old mummy stuff, then vilified the moment she stepped out of her lane and wrote about something serious, because what the hell would a boring old mummy know about that? Shut up, stupid mummies with your stupid mummy thoughts! Especially the ones where you try to relate important things (politics, economics, violence, power) to your experience of motherhood!
For me, as to many others, this kind of environment, and the judgement to which ‘mummy bloggers’ were subjected, was radicalising. When women on Mumsnet started debating gender self-ID, it was informed by concerns about the impact of gender stereotypes on children, shared experiences of male violence, and a sharpened awareness of the salience of biological sex. Naturally this did not stop critics from viewing this as evidence of the stupid mummies being brainwashed by outside forces. Just being a mother who thought motherhood mattered politically – because of course, it does – marked you out as reactionary (no matter what your actual thoughts were on how and why it should matter).
It increasingly felt to me that to continue to be seen as someone worthy of involvement in public life and debate, you were expected to downplay the relevance of motherhood (not to mention the female body) to feminist and indeed any broader politics. As Elisa Albert put it in her 2015 novel After Birth,
“Heaven forbid it might be true that female bodies are different. Heaven forbid we might admit that living in these female bodies is different. More terrible and more wonderful. Because, what? We might lose the vote? Because we might get veiled, imprisoned? Best deny it, deny it, make it to the Oval office, win, win, win.”
To the degree that you were allowed to talk about motherhood and femaleness, you were expected to strip it of any politics relevant to the thing in itself, and fill it with politics from elsewhere, things that might be more relevant to men, to anyone who wasn’t just some stupid mummy. There are different ways in which one might respond to this.
I don’t think a retreat into reactionary pro-natalist politics – this is what you think I am, so I’ll be it anyways – is a necessary or productive answer (though in the case of Yesteryear, it can be an entertaining one). For me, feminist writing on re-evaluating motherhood in ways that invite a re-evaluation of male-dominated power as a whole – Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born, Susan Maushart’s The Mask of Motherhood, Mary O’Brien’s The Politics of Reproduction – started to influence how I saw other political issues (assisted dying, social care, surrogacy, sexual exploitation). Maternal feminism is not a reinforcement of the status quo, with a few extra pats on the head for the mummies thrown in. I think people who believe it’s progressive to tell mothers to shut up about motherhood don’t really want to save them from tradwife hell; they just want mothers to shut up.
When the ‘tradwife’ movement (if one can call it a movement) first began to be discussed, there was a part of me that thought “funny – that’s how all mummy bloggers were seen. That’s the same kind of crap that was written and said about us, only now it appears to be accurate”. And there was a part of me that felt a little bit protective of these types, whoever they were, whatever they believed, because I sensed that part of the anger directed at them was of the “shut up, mummies” variety, not the “this is anti-feminist nonsense” type. Even if it was anti-feminist nonsense. Which it was. Then I wondered whether I should feel that way, since even if the mummy bloggers didn’t deserve it, maybe on some level, these women did.
