The devil wears a prairie dress
 May 12, 2026 Greetings, Meteor readers, The WNBA’s 30th season tipped off this weekend with gigantic rings and an iconic performance from the one, the only, the incomparable Ellie the Elephant. You literally love to see it.  ELLIIIEEEEEE (VIA GETTY IMAGES) In today’s newsletter, we’re putting on our cutest boots to dig into the intersections of “The Devil Wears Prada 2” and book-of-the-moment Yesteryear. They’ve got more in common than you think! But first, the news. xoxo, Shannon Melero  WHAT’S GOING ON
 The Devil Wears a Prairie DressYesteryear and “The Devil Wears Prada 2” have the same moral: Let women’s ambition run wild.BY NONA WILLIS ARONOWITZ  ANNE HATHAWAY’S ANDY SACHS IN “THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA 2” AND MODERN DAY TRADWIFE HANNAH NEELEMAN, AKA BALLERINA FARM. (SCREENSHOTS VIA YOUTUBE AND INSTAGRAM)
Everyone is talking about Yesteryear, Caro Claire Burke’s bestselling novel about a deeply venal tradwife influencer who suddenly wakes up in the year 1855. The book (which will soon be a movie) hits many, many notes: Its time-travel element reminds us how little the 19th century deserves rose-colored glasses, but Yesteryear also seeks to expose modern ills like the empty grift of tradwife cosplay, the rise of the manosphere, and social-media brainrot. Maybe it’s because I immediately followed this book with a viewing of “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” but to me, Yesteryear is above all a warning about what happens when women are not allowed to be openly ambitious. A little-discussed detail about the main character, Natalie, is that she breaks with her small-town Christian upbringing to attend Harvard on a free ride. She doesn’t mention specific intellectual ambitions, but we know Natalie is gifted and sharp from a young age. She was “practically running” her Sunday school class by the time she was 12. Never one to socialize, she was excited to go to a college “where intellect would matter much more than being likable.” Pretty soon, though, Natalie’s long braid and air of superiority render her an outcast, and we are treated to a succession of fish-out-of-water scenes that reminded me of Tom Wolfe’s anti-hookup-culture novel I Am Charlotte Simmons. Homesick and lonely, Natalie takes refuge in a church group whose members are comfortingly familiar, even if they’re “dumb as rocks.” It’s there where she meets her future husband, Caleb, a wealthy senator’s failson. She never gets her degree. Within a few short years, she’s a wife, mother, and owner of a vast Idaho farm that becomes the stage for her illusory world—and her family’s principal source of income. Without giving away too much, I’ll say that throughout Yesteryear, Natalie is not well. She is selling a life premised on domestic bliss, but she experiences very little genuine happiness throughout the book. She tamps down her anger by pretending she is being watched at all times. She smiles maniacally no matter what. She appears to suffer from severe postpartum depression and psychosis. She has zero respect for her increasingly red-pilled husband, whom she realizes is “an actual, honest-to-God idiot.” (“Please give my husband a spine,” she prays to the Lord at one point. “I’m tired of him needing to borrow mine.”)  (VIA PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE) One of the only flashes of pleasure we see Natalie have is her rush of ecstasy when two nannies show up to almost fully take over her five children’s care. Eventually, she becomes physically unable to repress her innermost negative thoughts and instincts (which leads to an incident that jeopardizes her influencer career). Other than a desire for control and outward perfection, we don’t know what truly makes her tick—because she doesn’t know. In her 1983 book Right Wing Women, Andrea Dworkin describes how a woman’s intelligence, if left to wither, disfigures her. “Imprisoned, intelligence turns into self-haunting and dread,” she writes. Confining a smart woman into a domestic space for which she is ill-suited will only lead to misery, because intellect by its very nature cannot be perfect and pre-packaged. “Wild intelligence abhors any narrow world” because “intelligence is also ambitious: it always wants…more of a bigger world.” And yet, Dworkin notes, within the traps of a patriarchal society, a woman “cannot be ambitious in her own right without also being damned.” Natalie’s distress and eventual downfall in Yesteryear is a cautionary tale of what happens when a woman’s intellect is imprisoned, or in this case, channeled into the pursuit of creating an avatar of the ideal white Christian American family. Natalie becomes an influencer almost by accident, but her ruthless negotiations with Caleb’s father reveal her skill for playing hardball, her fearlessness in the face of power—leading us to wonder what would have happened if that unflinching quality had been applied elsewhere. Contrast this bleak portrait of an unfulfilled woman with the fizzy romp that is “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” the number one movie in America right now. Watching “DWP2” on the heels of reading Yesteryear, it struck me how happy the lead women seem to be when they’re working hard, especially in comparison to the first movie. The first act treads familiar territory—Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestley is cruel and vindictive as Runway’s editor-in-chief; Anne Hathaway’s Andy Sachs is put upon as her newly minted features editor. But the rest of the movie has a dynamic duo caper feel, allowing the two women’s wild ambition to thrive in a bigger world. Andy’s successes are unvarnished feel-good moments, and we spend absolutely no time mourning the hypothetical family she never built. Instead, we hate the brotastic heir, and later the callous billionaire tech mogul, who pose an existential threat to Runway and the media industry writ large. At one point, Miranda does acknowledge the domestic sacrifices she’s made, the many lost moments with her daughters, but leaves us with an affirmation: “Boy, I love working. I really do. Don’t you?” These lines are delivered with an authentic smile that makes a mockery of Natalie’s Instagram-ready grin in Yesteryear, a smile so relentless that, at one point, it remains frozen upon her face even when tears run down her cheeks. The moral of both stories seems to be: Let women’s ambition run free—free from the manosphere, free from insipid rich dudes, free from stifling expectations. The villains of “The Devil Wears Prada 2” are not powerful women, but unambitious men messing with the careers that powerful women painstakingly built. In the funhouse-mirror world of Yesteryear, the antagonists are men, yes, but also women enforcing the rules. Perhaps the runaway success of both projects shows us that work can make us happy—as long as we’re the ones making the rules. P.S. Our Yesteryear book club is meeting next week, and we’d love to have you! Reply to this email if you want in.  FOLLOW THE METEOR     Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
