From Stepford, CT to Yesteryear Ranch: A Cultural History of Women’s Roles Choices & Perceptions

A Lecture on Tradwives, Literature, and Social Trends Through the Decades

Dear lovelies,

Keen readers will notice I didn’t post a review this week and that’s for good reason! I was incredibly ill! And also giving a very important talk at the West Hartford Library that I was honored to be invited to give.

This talk was an event in a series on Caro Claire Burke’s bestseller Yesteryear, a novel about a Tradwife influencer, Natalie, whose spiral into a psychosis we are privileged to read in her first-person narration. I love Burke’s narration and splice-of-life approach to story-telling, flipping back and forth through Natalie’s personal history, disorienting us as we read her spinning justifications and perspectives as she navigates a life she is determined to pretend to love.

I contextualized Yesteryear and Tradwives by putting it in conversation with two other books in an unlikely trio of feminist horror texts. Burke made her own connection to The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) which I expanded on and added to it The Stepford Wives (1972) as well as both of their TV and film adaptations over the decades. There’s much we can learn and grapple with by the way these two texts are reconceived for modern/contemporary audiences, and I can’t wait for Yesteryear‘s film adaptation starring Anne Hathaway to see how this complicated first-person narrative translates. All of these ideas are also part of my current book project on the housewife in American pop culture.

Anyway, I put a hell of a lot of work into this talk while very sick, so in lieu of a film review this week, if you’re interested in this, here’s the recording of the talk I gave on Tuesday night featuring Biscuits.