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Domestic goddess?
Kay S. Hymowitz
The Mommy-Wars Insurgency Essayist Caitlin Flanagan has enraged the feminists. 9 May 2006 To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife, by Caitlin Flanagan (Little, Brown, 272 pp.) Talk about a quagmire! Forty years into the Mommy Wars, feminist fundamentalism has launched a powerful insurgency. The spark igniting the feminist street isn’t a Roe-stalking Supreme Court nominee, as you might expect. No, it’s a book, To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife, a modest collection of revised personal essays from the Atlantic and New Yorker, by Caitlin Flanagan, a Los Angeles . . . matron. Actually, most parts of the country escape the hostilities between working and stay-at-home mothers; for the majority of women the decision to work or not is a nonsense-free question of how to pay the mortgage. But on the coasts, where media women are especially influential, what’s at stake is the same thing that has driven history’s most intractable conflicts: identity. For the media feminists, Flanagan personifies 1950s motherhood. Flanagan has spent “an entire career picking at other women for being insufficient Stepford wives in order to make insecure men swoon,” a poster at the feminist website Pandagon announced. Other critics have accused, with what some might call a remarkable lack of irony, her “ranting,” her “swiping and jabbing at other women,” and her reinforcement of “rigid, antiquated stereotypes.” What’s notable about this insurgency is that Flanagan isn’t exactly Phyllis Schlafly. For starters, much of her book proceeds in the vein of what David Brooks has called comic sociology. Flanagan brings a gimlet eye to the habits of contemporary professional class women (among whom she includes herself)—from their baroque white-dress weddings to their embarrassed devotion to Martha Stewart to their battles with the clutter caused by take-out containers, Legos, and advertising circulars. But if she is funny—and she is—she is also alert to the urges that underlie yuppie obsessions. “My attraction to these images [in Martha Stewart publications] is rooted in a simple truth: women like pretty things,” she writes. “Stewart’s magazines . . . all seem to depict some parallel universe in which loveliness and order are untrammeled by the surging chaos of life in session, particularly life as it is lived with small children.” Flanagan believes that feminism’s doctrine that “caring for children and husbands and households constitutes subservience” is at odds with women’s continued longing for domestic satisfactions. She dislikes the *****-in-the-House (an only quasi-parodic title of a recent collection of essays about women and housework) anger it has introduced into marriage. And she admires the competence and frugality of the old-fashioned housewife, who would sew up a frayed hem rather than “recycling” a dress to the thrift shop. Things may have been tedious for these women at times, she concedes, but the rituals and routines of their lives reflected primal needs in a way that the 8 AM video-conference meetings of a marketing executive do not. Still, Flanagan’s answer to the To Work Or Not To Work question is far more complicated than the fundamentalists have allowed. She remembers the mild despair she felt during her own twin sons’ infancy and that she spied in her own mother when she was a young girl. Her chapter “Housewife Confidential” is in part a compilation of the double-edged descriptions of their lot by humorists Peg Bracken, Jean Kerr, and her favorite, Erma Bombeck. When her sons start kindergarten she expects to find a big difference between the children of working mothers and the stay at homes. She admits that she does not. And yet, she says—and yet. Children are madly attached to their mothers. Families, including men—the louts!—thrive when home life is orderly, comfortable, and good-humored. For Flanagan, women can find no easy escape from “the tensions of our times.” “What few will admit—because it is painful, because it reveals the unpleasant truth that life presents a series of choices, each of which precludes a host of other attractive possibilities—is that whatever decision a woman makes she will have lost something of incalculable value.” These days, when every seventh-grade girl knows about the joys of the office, Flanagan has set herself the thankless task of reminding us of the deeper, though more encumbered, satisfactions of life at home. The housewife, she writes, can be “harassed into the end of time yet capable of moments of transcendence, when she [is] struck by the power of her love for her children and by the importance of her sacrifice on their behalf.” More at http://www.city-journal.org/html/rev2006-05-09kh.html |
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