Hollywood is pushing a new story called “Yesteryear” that’s already got conservative voices fired up, and Allie Beth Stuckey lays into what she sees as a deliberate attack on religious and traditional women. Anne Hathaway helped amplify the book by sharing a clip, and that was enough to bring the controversy into public view. Stuckey argues the novel’s plot and punishment of its protagonist read like an ideological hit piece informed by hostile online sources.
“Yesteryear” is a time-travel novel being made into a film that supposedly crushes the “tradwife” movement through a Christian influencer’s journey back to a time void of scrolling and comfort. It’s not subtle: the premise trades on a cultural clash, and Hollywood backing suggests a message beyond mere entertainment. For conservatives watching the culture wars, the timing and tone feel calculated rather than accidental.
Anne Hathaway’s post promoting the book put a mainstream stamp on the story, and that’s when Stuckey says the true intent became clear. “That means that this book is conveying a message that Hollywood wants us to hear, Hollywood wants us to believe, that the media wants us to believe,” Stuckey says on “Relatable.” She reads the push around the novel as part of a broader media pattern rather than an isolated creative choice.
“And that is why so much has been ginned up around this because it is echoing a sentiment that is not only very popular already among a lot of liberal women, the progressive intelligentsia, and Hollywood, but it is also trying to convince us of something. It is also trying to scare us away from something,” she continues. That’s the core of Stuckey’s argument: the story isn’t just critical, it’s persuasive in the wrong direction. And persuading through caricature is an old tactic in the cultural toolbox.
The novel’s heroine, Natalie, is an influencer who monetizes a picture-perfect domestic life while outsourcing the actual work and hiding painful secrets. Readers are shown the gap between image and reality, and that gap is used to punish her in the story. “This idea of an influencer not being who she is portraying herself to be for money, like we understand it. It resonates with us,” she continues.
Plotwise, Natalie’s husband is tied to a political dynasty and is cheating, while she pretends to her followers to be a faithful homesteader and mother. The book then drops her into 1855 and forces her into the real world behind the Instagram posts, stripping away modern comforts and conveniences. That choice of era pushes the narrative into a more extreme zone, where survival and power dynamics matter in a harsher way than modern critics often acknowledge.
Stuckey is blunt about the tone she hears in the pages: what reads as moral correction often slips into ideological punishment. “You can see that, OK, there is almost a malice behind this story and how it is written and the punishment that is doled out that seems to me, ideological,” Stuckey says. “It seems to me, personal.” To her, the punishment feels aimed at a real group, not simply the fictional character.
She goes further, arguing the author turned Natalie into an easy target so readers won’t feel sympathy for the people she represents. “I think she wanted her to become a caricature because I believe to this author that Natalie represents conservative Christian women, and she does not want the reader to have empathy for the different facets of conservative Christian women,” she continues. That, Stuckey warns, collapses nuance and flattens real communities into a villainous sketch.
Stuckey also points out the author’s own framing. In fact, according to Stuckey, Burke “explicitly says this is a critique of America.” That framing matters because it moves the novel from a personal story to a cultural indictment. “This is a critique of America as a Christian nationalist nation,” she says, before pointing out that the author got much of her source material from ex-religious communities on Reddit.
Her final jab focuses on where the research came from and what that means for fairness and accuracy. “There are bad people who use religion certainly as a way to perform and then to mask hypocrisy. All of that is true, but Reddit is not the place to go for these testimonies or for an objective rendering of what these worldviews are like,” Stuckey says. “So it doesn’t surprise me that Caro Burke has these feelings when she is consulting Reddit in her descriptions of what a Christian conservative woman is,” she adds.
