Yesteryear: A Subversive Stew of Misogyny, Anti-Natalism, Socialism, Resentment, and Cope

Caro Claire Burke's hyped book mocking tradwives is proof that you should judge a book not by its cover, but by its author's Substack

Caro Claire Burke’s debut novel Yesteryear reached #1 on the NYT bestseller list. She is all over MSM promoting it with fawning reviews. Anne Hathaway is already making a movie based on the book.

The premise is simple. A modern-day tradwife finds herself transported back to 1855. But the message is toxic. Caro’s Substack and interviews reveal her demoralizing agenda. Warn all of the women in your life away from this Trojan Horse.

Caro has a classic AWFL millennial girlboss background. She was born and raised in upper-class Massachusetts. After attending college in Virginia, she became a socialist. In an interview with her comrades at the Jacobin last year, she reveals that she was radicalized because sororities didn’t give her a bid:

When I rushed at the University of Virginia, I didn’t get in! So instead of reinforcing that social capital, I just became super mad. That festered in me for a really long time until I figured out where to channel it.

It was the first time that I didn’t get into the in-group, and I knew that the in-group was where you should be. It was just an instinctual, smooth-brain defense mechanism to be like, “Well then, fuck these chicks obviously.” It wasn’t until later that I started to really understand that the things I was angry at are foundational to our country and are connected to but go well beyond sororities…

I could have gone either way. I saw a tweet recently saying there are two options: tradwife or girlboss. And someone was like, “What’s the third option?” And the person was like, “Marxist.” Yes, the third option is Marxist. But that word is not acceptable, and that option is not usually available to people.

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Yesteryear fictionalizes Caro’s resentment of the sorority girls who rejected her and are now tradwives. She admits that she has an unhealthy obsession with Ballerina Farm. Hannah Neeleman is the world’s most famous tradwife with 9 children and 20 million followers. She and her husband are also both one of 9 siblings. Caro has two cats, a dog, a husband with pronouns, and a clump of cells (more on that later).

In Caro’s twisted fantasy, tradwives are secretly unhappy and she will save them by converting them into socialists. Yet the data shows that married conservative women with kids are happier than their single liberal childless counterparts. As a proud DSA member, she wants to tax the rich and large families. If she had the chance, she would vote to limit the amount of children they can have.

The cope and seethe is off the charts as she rants to the Jacobin:

Seriously, all the hot chicks at UVA that I wanted to be friends with and wasn’t because they were in sororities — a good amount of them are obsessed with my podcast. They’re all little socialists now. The conversion rate of Republican girls who voted Mitt Romney and are now interested in Jacobin is 100 percent with Diabolical Lies…

I am pretty shaken by the amount of supposedly left or liberal writers who are ceding ground to [the right] by playing into the whole pronatalist thing. Why are we having the conversation on their terms? Why are we taking for granted that the birth rate panic is legit when it’s clear that the entire premise is that society is in trouble because women are doing something wrong?

The Right wants us to blame feminism for society’s problems instead of capitalism. And as long as we are unwilling to acknowledge the capitalism of it all, we’re just gonna keep getting pulled further right.

Meme summary of Yesteryear:

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Ironically, Caro is an influencer just like the tradwives she hates. She shills for her book and will make millions from it, even though she is anti-capitalist. The name of her Substack, Diabolical Lies, was inspired by Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker’s speech about the falsehoods of feminism. He will forever live in her head rent free. Just like Ballerina Farm.

Caro has a podcast with AWFL 3-name clone Katie Gatti Tassin. Every episode is full of screeds about Christian nationalism. They predictably virtue signal about their “redistribution” donations to progressive causes.

The projection, lack of self awareness, and lust for collectivism are stunning:

These [tradwife] influencers are incredibly effective at intercepting people along the way, and that’s partly because they’re incentivized to. I don’t think we talk nearly enough about the extent to which they’re doing it to make money. They’re exploiting people’s desire for a way out and making money at the same time as they’re pushing this ideology. And you just can’t make as much money selling a Marxist vision….

They say they want to engender interdependence, but it’s a very specific kind of interdependence: dependence of child on woman, woman on man, man on God. When instead we need to expand the way that we think about what it means to be dependent on others and what it means to live interconnected with one another.

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All of our ancestors were tradwives, including Caro’s. We are alive because a dedicated woman in 1855 raised children in much more difficult conditions than the modern day. Yet our birth rates continue to plummet because of mind viruses like Diabolical Lies. Caro is accelerating the widening fertility gap between liberals and conservatives. Darwin would be proud.

The unholy trinity of female on female sabotage is complete. Eat Pray Love enticed women to abandon family commitments to travel and find themselves. Lean In encouraged women to focus on careers over family. Now Yesteryear enrages them to hate on the women who prioritized family over those pursuits.

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The ultimate plot twist is that Caro is currently pregnant on her book tour. She brags that she didn’t want to have a baby until she sold a book. Let’s pray that becoming a mother will change her perspectives. She goes out of her way to never mention her husband, but does enjoy talking about “reproductive rights”.

From a Harvard Crimson article about her stop there:

Burke sold “Yesteryear” nearly two years ago, and several editors urged her to rush it out, warning that the subject of tradwives might not stay relevant for long. Burke had also originally expected the book to be released under a woman president; instead, her novel arrives amidst RFK Jr’s raw milk politics and his “Make America Healthy Again” movement. Burke believes that these social events led to the manifestation of tradwife culture online.

Burke, who is currently pregnant in the midst of her book tour, added on a more personal note that she had coordinated all of her prenatal appointments before traveling to states with reproductive healthcare restrictions. “That was a very sobering, practical, personal reality in the context of a book about a woman going to a time period where her rights are taken away,” Burke said.

Is she hiding that she married a wealthy man, which would contradict everything she believes in? What would be the critical response to a book about an AWFL like Caro who wakes up in 2055 miserable because of the consequences of her decisions? Or one about a socialist who gets trapped in Stalin’s gulags in 1925? Would MSM boost any novels that valorize traditional values? It’s all so tiresome.

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Neuroticism, narcissism, and nihilism are the roots of anti-natalism - Harrison Butker spoke truth.