The real women of Yesteryear
Caro Claire Burke's lack of historical curiosity weakens her novel
As a child, I loved to dress up in costumes and make-believe I had barely enough to survive. I played Little House on the Prairie or I played Oregon Trail. I played “Alaska.” I was a Depression-era scamp hitching a ride on a train like Natty Gann. I was on the Titanic and it was going down. Always an orphan, never a bride. If my friends or younger cousins wanted to play “princess” or “pop star” or “fairies,” the answer was, “No.” Where was the conflict? Let’s be stuck on a raft in the middle of an ocean. Let’s be accused of witchcraft like The Witch of Blackbird Pond.
When I saw the 2024 deal announcement for Yesteryear, I berated myself. Why didn’t I think of that? I’ve written two influencer novels—why hadn’t I ever thought write one where I sent an influencer into my childhood fantasy on the prairie?
In the months leading up to the release of Yesteryear, I knew the book was going to be big, because my friends on BookTok were calling it “the next Gone Girl.” I bought it in hardcover the week it came out.
The premise is both hilarious and terrifying: what if a photogenic mother of five, whose skills include cooking with Cuisinart and maternity “fit checks,” gets transported to a dugout?
But the novel doesn’t deliver on this premise.
This is not because Caro Claire Burke is a bad writer. Yesteryear is a big swing by a writer with nerve and ambition. Burke has a natural instinct for pacing and a gift for metaphor. Here’s Natalie, the narrator, immediately recognizable as Ballerina Farm, describing the relationship she has with the women who love to hate her Instagram content:
If the Angry Women found out about any of my children’s failings, they’d go crazy with bloodthirst. They’d also be devastated. None of them realized it, of course, but they needed me as much as I needed them. It was a symbiotic relationship. I was a shark, and they were five million tiny fish, nipping at the nutrients along my belly.
Given the premise, I expected the novel to take place in the 1800s. I thought I’d be turning the pages to find out how Natalie would survive her predicament—and how she would escape the time travel glitch (would she, like Phil in Groundhog Day, have to undergo a painful character change from self-absorbed jerk to hero? would she use her own child to ingeniously plot her escape, à la Ma in Room?)
Instead, the majority of the novel is the backstory of how Natalie grew her following on Instagram, not as the result of her own ambition, obsessive drive for attention and fortune, and hard work, but due to lucky encounters with men: her father-in-law gives her the money she needs to buy a farm, another man shares her account on his popular YouTube channel. Confusingly, Natalie doesn’t even want children; her father-in-law bribes her to have them: “That’s the deal. I’ll pay for this little farm fantasy, and in return you’ll give my son a big American family.”
What does Natalie want?
The scenes set in 1855, the ones I was most looking forward to reading, are boring and lifeless. They lack the verve of the influencer backstory:
Maeve and I bring the basket of eggs inside. I stand, holding the basket, while she marches around the kitchen, getting a bowl and then guiding me to the kitchen table. She climbs onto a chair and then cracks the eggs one by one and begins to stir. Mary is by the fire, carefully pushing a covered pot into the coals, positioning it until it’s surrounded by embers, but not actually touching flames. Biscuits. My stomach growls. For pretty much the entirety of my twenties, I never thought about food. I was a woman of discipline, not cravings. Now I’m constantly hungry in this world.
By page 189, Natalie is picking up on my frustration and admitting how flat and repetitive it is over yonder in the 1800s:
And then the day passes in the same dreary rotation as the day before—chick coop; hello, ladies; breakfast boule baked to the opposite of perfection; chores; chores; chores; hemming; ironing; sweeping; dinner prep; dinner; stare exhaustedly into the fire until I’m about to fall asleep on my chair—and then the day is over and I walk slowly back to my bedroom, stunned with exhaustion, my clothing pounds heavier from all the sweat and dirt, and I get into bed before I remember, for the millionth time: It didn’t happen today. Nothing changed.
Finally, it clicked: Caro Claire Burke didn’t think it was necessary to bring any research into the novel about what it was like for women homesteaders in the American West in 1855.1 She wasn’t curious enough to learn what “chores; chores; chores” actually entailed; she expects millennial readers to fill in the gaps with their memory of watching Little House on the Prairie reruns on TBS.
Burke doesn’t seem to find women’s domestic labor very interesting, which I guess makes sense, if you consider that she set out to write a novel about how Ballerina Farm is part of a conservative Christian propaganda campaign to get women to leave the workforce.2
“What were good Christian men if not experts at making their good Christian women vanish from the world?” — Yesteryear
There’s a moment in Louis Theroux’s Inside the Manosphere documentary where he’s interviewing male influencer Justin Waller on a balcony in Miami and Justin says something (I’m paraphrasing) like, “Every single thing you can see right now—men built all of it. Men built the world.”
I wanted Theroux to say, “Women built every single person you see,” because that’s what I was thinking.
Women built the world, too—and unlike Caro Claire Burke, I’m fascinated by how they did it, and how hard it was.
In 1982, Cathy Luccheti and Carol Olwell published Women of the West, a collection of diaries, letters, autobiographies, and photographs by and of women who lived in the American West in the 1800s, including white wives and mothers, but also a nun, a member of the Paiute tribe, a black widow raising a son, and a woman who received her medical degree at age forty in 1880. Olwell drove twenty thousand miles over the course of a year to visit photographic archives in sixteen states, searching for images of women that went beyond the staged studio portraits and showed them in action in their daily lives: writing letters, baking, bathing children, branding cattle, serving meals, playing the piano, riding horses.
Mary Richardson Walker was born on April 11, 1811 and kept a diary for fifty-seven years. Her entries are intimate, vulnerable, and at times inadvertently funny:
August 7, 1833. I see very few men that are perfect enough to please me.
When she married her husband Elkanah five years later, she wore black, to symbolize her grief at leaving her family in Maine forever, before traveling to Oregon. She became the first white woman to cross the Sierra Nevada mountains.
They reached Waiilatpu, near Walla Walla, then part of Oregon Territory, in August 1838, but didn’t have enough time to erect a cabin before winter, so Mary, Elkanah, and their newborn moved into a cabin with seven other adults and two children. The combined indignities of new motherhood, an insensitive husband, close quarters, and the annoying habits of other women all come through in the diaries:
Tuesday, November 6, 1838. Slept little last night. Mostly in consequence of something husband said to me. Rather indisposed all day.
Tuesday, December 11, 1838. Nipples very sore. Worry with my babe. Get all tired out.
Monday, December 17, 1838. Felt quite out of sorts this morning because they did not bring me plenty to eat. Was very faint for want of food. At breakfast took hold of horse meat with pretty good relish. Through the day have been well-supplied. Tonight felt had been ungrateful to murmur. My breast still a cause of much suffering. Sat up & tended my babe about half the day. Took a nap. This evening made a cap for my babe, the first time I have sewed any. Fear I have worked too hard today.
Tuesday, April 23, 1838. I feel vexed. This is the third morning I have omitted the sweeping when I first got up just to see if Mrs. E. would not take her turn. Sunday morning when I commenced sweeping she remarked she would have done it but supposed I had already. But the floor was so dirty had she looked at it she could not decently avoid sweeping. But some how she managed to get to the tubs. I would not be so impolite as to crowd her away, so while she was washing her clothes I just swept the room. This morning I wished to make haste & iron while babe slept so left an opportunity for her to sweep again. But I left it go till ten o’clock when she took her knitting & walked off cracking & scattering about nut shells. So I have swept the room with a vengeance. I have washed the room every week while we have been here & she not once & I think she shirks more than is decent. Evening, have got plenty of words to say.
The passive-aggressive sweeping! The score-keeping! The grudge-holding! To me? Delicious. The best stuff of life.
In 1855, Natalie doesn’t have the Angry Women of the internet to battle against, in reality or in her own mind. Burke does not give Natalie any 19th century conflicts, trials, or tribulations to face. She just has her main character repeatedly injure herself, every time she tries to run away.
I hadn’t thought about Women of the West in years until I got a DM in response to one of my Instagram stories about Yesteryear. Flipping through its pages, I saw a familiar name: Miriam Davis Colt. Why did I know her?
I realized I’d written about her in my memoir Land of Enchantment:
Take the diary of Miriam Davis Colt, the twelfth of seventeen children from a poor New York City family. In 1856, she heads west to a promising “experimental vegetarian settlement colony” in Kansas with her husband. When they arrive, they find the colony to be nothing like they expected. Everyone is living in tents “without floors or fires.” Miriam fashions an Indian blanket into a door, but still “the prairie winds come whizzing in.” Her husband takes two wooden boards from their covered wagon and tells her, “Miriam, you may make your bed on the smooth surface of these two boards.” But she insists he take the bed because he works the hardest, and she and the children take the floor. Within months, almost her entire family is felled by disease. A few years later, to raise money to support herself and her surviving daughter, she publishes her diaries, along with letters and poetry, in a volume called Went to Kansas: Being a Thrilling Account of an Ill-Fated Expedition to That Fairy Land, and its Sad Results: Together with a Sketch of the Author and How the World Goes with Her.
Illness, weather, death, and debt—Miriam wrote it all down. One entry describes how she sold her nicest clothes so that she could afford a gravestone for her son who died in the night, after calling out for bread and apples. It’s totally Dickensian, yet true, and authored by a woman. Where does that instinct come from? I wonder, the thought process that goes, Life is hard and terrible. I know what I’ll do: I’ll tell a story about it. I think I know the answer. I think fitting an experience inside the frame of a story is how some of us survive.
Yesteryear fails as historical fiction and it also fails as a time travel novel; it betrays the reader by not delivering on its own premise. It’s not a satire of religious fundamentalism because Natalie’s Christianity is illegible and incoherent. Burke told The Rumpus that she decided not to choose a denomination for Natalie because “I realized very quickly that whether it’s Mormonism or evangelicalism or Jehovah’s Witness, it’s really all the same in terms of how women are treated and what the expectations are for them.” When Natalie wakes up in 1855, she doesn’t even pray.
Jerusalem Demsas reported that Burke shared an essay by a self-described ex-Mormon who saw herself in Natalie with the caption, “this is who I wrote the book for.” Demsas found the essay to be written by AI, writing that “Burke’s praise of the hollow essay reflects the hollowness of her own book, one that promises biting satire and delivers superficiality.”
Worse than superficial—the twist and its aftermath make Yesteryear the most cynical novel on motherhood I’ve ever read.
The message of the novel is if you can’t be happy, at least you can be superior to the other unhappy women.
If you want to read a well-researched book on women like Ballerina Farm who are making a living documenting their families on social media, I highly recommend Like, Follow, Subscribe by Fortesa Latifi. Latifi explains why so many family vloggers are Mormon. We’re going live to discuss her reporting and Yesteryear on Wednesday at 1pm ET. Mark your calendar!
More upcoming events
Tomorrow night at 9pm ET I’m going live with Amran Gowani and Andrew Boryga to talk about satire. Mark your calendar!
This Wednesday in Chicago, I’ll be in conversation with novelist Candice Wuehle at 6:30 p.m. at City Lit in Logan Square, talking about women’s work, Britney Spears, and Taylor Swift
The Scoop
Erin Van Der Meer took a plot class from me in January of 2020, when she was drafting a novel about a night-shift journalist at a tabloid. In 2023, Erin hired me to edit the manuscript. This week, I got to moderate her Chicago launch at Madison Street Books in Chicago! It was so gratifying to hold the hardcover and celebrate Erin’s huge achievement, after the long road it took to get here. The Scoop is a media satire about the dubious ethics of covering the worst moments of celebrity lives for traffic and clicks. Highly recommend!
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The Rumpus asked her about her research and Burke responded, “the external research was, obviously, 1800s homesteading and trying to pay attention to what I wanted to pull from that and what I didn’t.”
“2025 marked one of the steepest drops in the workforce for women in modern history. I think it was four or five hundred thousand women who dropped out of the workforce, and it wasn’t because they wanted to. It’s because they had caregiving responsibilities and the economy is so hard on us right now. So I think you have these visuals surfacing in the same exact way they surfaced in the 1950s where all of a sudden women are being squeezed, or really rather, the American people are being squeezed. And when something has to give, it’s women who give it. So, I think it’s not accidental we’re seeing these visuals that essentially function to operate as a sedative or to comfort us, or to be like, ‘It’s not so bad if you can’t work.’ It’s just this kind of a rudderless propaganda campaign that surfaces every time the economy essentially forces women to make a change with their jobs.” The Rumpus
I didn't know how much I'd be grateful for this essay, but I truly am. Thank you! I haven't even tried to read the book because I just got wrong vibes about it from the beginning. I, like many of us, come from that long line of incredible women who built the west. My ancestors are the women who crossed the plains on the Mormon trail to Salt Lake City, many burying children or husbands along the way and doing the rest of the journey themselves. One of my ancestors was thirteen and left her family all on her own so she could join the pioneers herself. How can you NOT be amazed by and curious about these women?
The passive aggressive sweeping gives me life!