To Hell With all That

To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing our Inner Housewife by Caitlin Flanagan

After reading this book, I have one big question: What's your point?

Flanagan, the anti-feminist, has set out to convince us that the women's movement has done women a disservice in showing that women might be dissatisfied with merely performing perfunctory household duties. Being a housewife should be celebrated, she says; women should be glad to fix dinner and do the laundry. Child-rearing has been elevated to an art and needs to be scaled back a notch, back to the days when being a wife was first and foremost and the children a mere by-product.

Excuse me? She really expects me to believe this tripe?

And she is the poster child?

Flanagan writes of the evils of nannies, the amount of discomfort they can bring to a household. And this in the same book where she devotes an entire chapter to the relationship she has with — you guessed it — her nanny. The woman she hired to care for her children for three years when she wasn’t even working. It is the noblest thing to be home with one’s children, she says, and points out that she stayed home with her children. But in the same breath she tells us that she had a 9-5 nanny and that she was practically paralyzed, unable to function, between 7 and 9 a.m. before the nanny’s arrival. She makes it clear that children need their mother their when they’re sick in the night … but that she did not actually put the sheets in the washer — that was the nanny’s job.

She talks of the amount of satisfaction a woman should get from taking care of her home and her family. Then tells you of the maid and gardener who actually do most of said housework.

Sometimes it seems as if her point is to make it clear that she is a woman of privilege — she can afford to be home, yet can pay all this household help. She and her husband can send their two boys to a soigné preschool, one whose very élan was disrupted by an outbreak of head lice. What — parents of children who go to public kindergarten aren’t disrupted by such things? Do we merely take it in stride?

Flanagan’s writing style, praised by some, is a bit pretentious for me (“soignée"? "élan"?). She seems more interested in painting a picture of herself as having made the right choices than in looking at what is good for all women. Her own mother tossed aside the apron in the early '70s in order to have a job and some time for herself, and all Flanagan can see is that she felt abandoned. In retrospect, can’t she see that maybe it was the only way for her mother to survive?

I don’t see a need to pit working mothers against stay-at-home moms — we all have our children’s very best interests at heart. To her credit, Flanagan does confess the realities of her life — the privilege that eludes most stay-at-home mothers of preschoolers — but she doesn’t quite see that they set her apart. She honestly sees herself as an ordinary sacrificing mother, even when she had full-time help. And today, as a staff writer for the New Yorker, she does not consider herself a working mother.

Not a book I could recommend. And not only because I didn’t agree with her point, but more importantly, because I couldn’t discern that she had one.