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Chapter 1: What is the premise of the novel 'Yesteryear'?
Now, the big buzz novel right now is a book called Yesteryear, and it's about a modern day trad wife influencer who wakes up one day and finds herself living in 1855. Ellen Coyne, political correspondent of the Irish Times. Good afternoon.
Good afternoon.
Ellen, you've read the book, but just briefly first, for anyone who's missed the whole trad wife thing, explain the background to all this.
So Tradwife is like a new trend in social media influencers. The most popular one is Hannah Nealman. She runs Ballerina Farm. She has 10 million followers and she espouses this lifestyle where women are kind of working within the home, following traditional, in her case, Mormon beliefs of being fruitful. She just welcomed her ninth child in March of this year.
You know, she's kind of staying at home, working on her farm, creating food from scratch. And it's an entire fantasy version of traditional gender roles where the woman stays at home, has loads and loads of kids and is cooking all day. And the man is the provider who goes out and earns a lot of money to sustain the farm by keeping his hands dirty.
And so these videos with all this wholesome baking and child rearing and then, you know, honouring and worshipping your husband and everything. Is there some kind of appeal to them, though, for people?
Yes, in two very different ways.
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Chapter 2: What is the Trad Wife phenomenon and its cultural implications?
So on the one side in America, obviously, this is part of a big culture war. We know that the Trump administration is really big on pro-natalism, which is trying to raise the birth rate by encouraging women to have more children. And obviously, some of that is tied up to conservative Republican ideas about gender roles and modern feminism.
On the other side of things, I think the appeal to the majority of women, certainly women in Ireland who would have no truck with the politics of the tradwife movement, is that in 2026, to be able to work within the home, to have loads and loads of kids kind of seems like a subversive idea because for so many of us, that is just out of reach.
But I think just to burst the bubble slightly, a lot of these women, including Hannah Nealman, are multimillionaires. Her husband happens to be the heir to the dynasty of an airline tycoon. The farm is worth 2.75 million and they have a staff of 30 people, including a homeschooler and some housekeepers.
So all is not really as it seems online, but obviously this has become like a big, it's really captured the zeitgeist because it seems to capture something with women.
It's interesting, yeah. So, like, no, you are a feminist and everything, a working woman, a working mother and everything. But is there something appealing in there to you?
Yep, I mean, I'd be very candid, I think I've said this to my colleagues in the Irish Times, that if I had a choice, there is no way that I would be working outside of the home, certainly until my child or any other children I might have reach school age.
But obviously, you know, living in Ireland, I think a lot of women are forced to work outside of the home because a lot of families require two incomes. And I think... That's kind of why this kind of people are so fascinated by this because they like having a look into these worlds that are so far divorced from our own.
Even though you know it's a kind of a fantasy.
Yeah.
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Chapter 3: How does the Trad Wife culture relate to modern feminism?
It's an attention economy, all of it. So there's something about it that has just captivated the attention of modern women. I know some of it is hate watching. There's some women who just don't like any aspect of this at all. They think it's regressive. They think it's like being a traitor to feminism. But it's certainly something that people can't really tear their eyes away from.
OK, well, thank you for reading it. So I don't have to. I'll wait for the film, I think. The book is called Yesteryear. Ellen Coyne, thank you so much.
Brendan O'Connor on RTÉ Radio 1.