When I started a blog at the beginning of 2021, I felt a bit silly. Blogging was so passé. Who would read it? What was the point? Here is the reason to blog: Friends will give you book recommendations perfectly curated to your taste. And occasionally, publishers will even send you books that are up your alley! But mostly, friends will see what you write about and know the books that you will strike your fancy.
Such is the case with a recommendation to read Cailtin Flanagan’s “To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife.” How have I never heard of Caitlin Flanagan? What a wit! Adapted from essays she wrote for the Atlantic in the early 2000s, the book is at turns riotously funny and quietly poignant. In the acknowledgments, Flanagan writes to her twin sons that she would have preferred to keep the name they had landed on: “To Heck With All That.” This would have been a better title. I’m one to cuss up a storm, much to the consternation of my polite children, so it’s not the language per se that bothers me. It just doesn’t fit the content. “Heck” would have been much better.
Flanagan was born in 1961, the daughter of a college professor and a housewife, who had been trained as a nurse. Over the course of her lifetime, Flanagan saw the sea change from a world in which most mothers were in and around the home to one in which most college-educated women have career aspirations and rely on daycare to oversee the daily life of babies and little kids. Flanagan presents these facts with hilarious commentary on the underlying assumptions of ascendent feminism as well as reflection on what has been lost when mothers left the home and hearth and the world looked different for children.
Her playful writing and unorthodox opinions inspire delicious reviews, both from her detractors and her fans. Writing or Literary Mama, one reviewer noted her hesitation in reading the book, which was ultimately not what she expected. She wrote:
I had, of course, read her infamous piece in The Atlantic Monthly, “How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement: Dispatches from the Nanny Wars”, with its declaration that “When a mother works, something is lost. Children crave their mothers. They always have and they always will.” I had read her interview in Elle Magazine with Laurie Abraham, a mother of two who, enroute to her interview with Flanagan, learned from the sitter that her daughters’ pet gerbil had died. When Abraham asked Flanagan if she continued to stand by the “something is lost” comment, Flanagan observed, “The gerbil’s dead and you’re here.” She doesn’t pull her punches.
Despite these reservations, the reviewer found that, “Flanagan would be an ideal companion at a dinner party — full of wit, charm, and the ability to hold forth on a variety of hot topics.” Even while writing about taboo topics like the drawbacks of working mothers, sexless marriages, and the uneasy relationship of mothers and nannies, Flanagan manages to charm.
As Ben Casnocha describes it, “Together, the collection [of essays] gently advances Flanagan’s positive view of traditional motherhood and homemaking.”
“Flanagan knows exactly who she is and what she is doing and that’s why I’m sure she would be satisfied (not that she would care!) with my description of her book as a chatty, entertaining, often very funny, witty, but not altogether rigorous look at what it means to be a twenty-first century housewife, or a confused feminist, or a maybe-housewife.”
The first couple chapters reduced me to tears of laughter. I was a puddle of uncontrollable guffaws with tears streaming down my face. So rarely have I heard such a blistering rebuke to the post-modern nonsense of the feminist universe! What satisfaction to read it humorously developed.
Granted, I have made a hobby of thinking, reading, and writing about subjects of marriage, motherhood, and women in the workplace. Someone without such a fascination may not find it quite so funny. But for anyone aware of the demands of the 21st century feminist, consider this passage commenting on Allison Pearson and her novel “I Don’t Know How She Does It” (a fictional cri de coeure of the ambitious working mother):
Pearson told an interviewer, “Until they program men to notice you’re out of toilet paper, a happy domestic life will always be up to women”—a sentiment almost unanimously held by the working mothers I know. What we’ve learned during this thirty-year grand experiment is that men can be cajoled into doing all sorts of household tasts, but they will not do them the way a woman would. They will bathe the children, but they will not straighten the bath mat and wring out the washcloths. They will drop the toddler off at nursery school, but they won’t spend ten minutes chatting with the teacher and collecting the art projects. They will, in other words, do what men have always done: reduce a job to its simplest essentials and utterly ignore the fillips and niceties that women tend to regard as equally essential. And a lot of women feel cheated and angry and even—bless their hearts—surprised about this. (p.30)
So. Well. Stated. The fixation on “fair play” has resulted in decades of chiding men about their lack of concern for what can rightly be generalized as feminine sensibilities. Are there some men who care about throw blankets and decorative pillows? Yes! But they are so rare as to be the exception to the rule.
Flanagan has the benefit of growing up in a different kind of society, one in which a single salary could support a middleclass lifestyle. A man’s income could pay the mortgage, buy the car, and afford the necessities of life. Bridging that world to the current one may explain how and why she was able to hire a full-time nanny despite being a “stay-at-home parent” in the early 2000s. Perhaps that’s solely the result of marrying a man with high earning potential (on her second go-round) and making peace with blowing a lot of money on a luxurious lifestyle. Who knows? Hers is an arrangement that is likely to confound anyone under 40 so rare is it to have a nanny purely for the fun of it. It’s really very L.A. of her: a woman who knows her worth.
In discussing the incongruities of the modern feminist, Flanagan analyzes how our institutions have been hollowed out. The word “tradition” has been without coherence for several decades, it seems. In critiquing the wedding industry, Flanagan writes aptly, “Genuine tradition is not for sale, because no one needs to buy it; it’s moored in the customs of one’s own family (remember them?).”
Much more to say about this book recommendation. For being such a romp, this book gives you a surprising array of things to think about.
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