Caro Claire Burke comes to Yesteryear, her debut novel published in April 2026, not from the outside, looking in, but from a place of obvious immersion in the influencer economy. A graduate of Bennington College Writing Seminars and co-host of Diabolical Lies, a podcast centred on pop culture, feminism, and neocapitalism, Burke has evidently spent a long time thinking about the architecture of conservative womanhood and the digital ecosystems that sustain it. That intimacy with the subject shows in the writing.

The protagonist, Natalie Heller Mills, is a “tradwife” influencer living on a farm designed to look like an 18th century property, and hence called Yesteryear. Pregnant with her sixth child at 32, she describes herself as the “manic pixie American dream girl of this nation’s deepest, darkest fantasies”. What the camera shows is immaculate: a perfect marriage, perfect children, a naturally perfect appearance, an effortless affluence. What it hides is deliberate: the nannies, producers, pesticides for their crop, household gadgets like microwaves—everything that makes the performance possible.

Yet, Natalie did not aspire to be the tradwife. As a full-scholarship student at an Ivy League university, she might have charted a very different course, but a persistent sense of alienation and a distaste for what she saw in other women’s anger made her receptive to what Caleb offered. Caleb—devout, politically connected, the image of a “good Christian man”—was the natural choice for husband when she opted to make herself a “good Christian woman”. Still, it was not a life she inhabited with ease. The novel’s unflinching portrayal of the horrors of childbirth and Natalie’s subsequent downward spiral constitute its most haunting passages.

One day, Natalie finds herself transported inside Yesteryear, her “authentic time machine”, to 1855, the “good old times”, which turn out to be not so good after all. The house, husband, and kids are all the same, but life is as it was in 1855: without electricity, washing machines, heating, modern medicine, or the right to resist if her husband raises his fist. In her life in present times, Natalie had almost no direct involvement in the running of the household: nannies raised her children, producers created her content, and modern appliances did the rest, all carefully hidden from the camera. In 1855, there is no staff to delegate work to, no technology to make life easier, and no Instagram through which the performance of labour can be monetised: there is only Natalie and her daughters, doing it all by themselves.

After fits of rebellion against her husband, she tries to adjust, assuming it is a reality TV show or a nightmare that will eventually end. The female labour she had built her brand on—presented as her own but outsourced to her staff and sold as an aspiration to women without the means to delegate work—now comes back to haunt her. For the first time, she sees it for what it is: unpaid, gruelling, with the ability to strip her of her bodily autonomy.

Burke chooses to tell the story entirely through Natalie’s voice. As a result, we are always reading two stories at once: the one Natalie is telling, and the one spilling out from between the lines. Her blind spots are structural, and they are those of a woman trained since girlhood to believe that her suffering is virtue, her complicity is choice, and her performance of happiness is happiness itself.

Although the reader is tempted to dismiss Natalie, Burke also reveals the depth of the indoctrination Natalie has been both subjected to and complicit in. Patriarchy does not reward compliance; punishment is reserved for the meek, too, only in a separate form. Natalie is angry, but we are all angry women, rebelling against different patriarchal norms. She is angry because she has ensnared herself even deeper in the patriarchal net in pursuit of its meagre rewards. We are angry because, by upholding patriarchy, Natalie has made our lives harder.

The standardising machinery

The novel does not let Natalie off the hook. She went for the life of a tradwife when she had the financial and social agency to choose otherwise. The class dimension is important. Tradwife ideology is cruel not only because it constrains women but also because it glamorises constraint, making women’s subjugation seem natural and freely chosen. When millions of people consume content that presents domestic subservience as aesthetically and spiritually desirable, they might be led to believe that it is what all women want. Women who rebel against patriarchy or those who are forced to serve it against their will are effectively invisibilised. Yesteryear brings out the workings of this standardising machinery with deadly accuracy.

What Burke is excavating, beneath the satire, is a very specific regime of labour. The influencer economy extracts value from the most intimate spaces of domestic and reproductive life: pregnancy, children’s faces, the kitchen, the body, and marriage. The labour required to sustain these images of “domestic bliss” is real, but its workings are hidden.

By transporting Natalie to 1855, Burke removes the monetisation opportunity but keeps the reality of labour intact. This enables her to reveal the truth that Instagram aesthetic hides: domestic labour is not even considered as real by capitalism, let alone compensated for.

In India, the phenomenon arrives pre-loaded with an additional political charge. Indian influencers glamorise the performance of religious domesticity, effectively paying lip service to a cultural project that has long defined the ideal woman as the selfless upholder of home, tradition, and civilisational continuity. These creators frame domesticity as free choice, deploying the same language of individual agency that their Western counterparts use. The societal conditions that make the choice anything but free go unexamined.

Yesteryear arrives at the moment when content involving domesticity is not a fringe curiosity but a significant cultural force, liable to be used by political movements that stand to gain from women choosing the gilded cage. As such, it is a must-read, especially in a country like ours.

Aditi Mishra is a Youth for Tech Futures Fellow at the Youth for Digital Cultures Lab.

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