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Originally published by the Wall Street Journal, April 25, 2006 The Ordeal of Domesticity By Jennifer Graham Caitlin Flanagan can write, and beautifully. On that we can all agree. But is there anything else she can do? In "To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife," Ms. Flanagan confesses that she can't sew, doesn't dust and is grievously stressed each night by the prospect of summoning yet another dinner to the table. If pressed, she could not tell us how much anything in her refrigerator cost. She has never applied for credit in her own name and does not scrub her own bathtub. When her twin boys were small, she staggered about the house and street in a helpless fog each morning until the nanny took over at nine. She requires the help of maids, gardeners, organizers and shrinks to make her life run smoothly. To read Ms. Flanagan, freed from the word-count constraints of magazines, is to remember the lament of Dagny Taggart early in "Atlas Shrugged": "She felt herself screaming silently, at times, for a glimpse of human ability, a single glimpse of clear, hard, radiant competence."
A purely self-made woman Ms. Flanagan is not. She owes her recent career as scathing social commentator and critic of all things feminist to, first, the birth of her sons ("For the first time in my life," she writes, "I was gripped by a sense of purpose") and, second, to terrific connections. When a significant editor, the husband of a friend, invited her to write a family column despite her lack of writing credentials, she uncovered -- finally! -- a clear, hard, radiant competence that translated nicely to the pages of the Atlantic Monthly and the New Yorker. "To Hell with All That," which draws on some of those writings, is the latest barrage in the nonfiction genre known as the Mommy Wars. Its worth is in its style, the graceful turns of phrase and flashes of sardonic wit that rapidly earned Ms. Flanagan regard. In the preface, she writes that her book is not about equal rights or opportunities but about what came in their wake. "It is less a book about what we have gained than it is a book about what we have lost, and if there is something of the elegy in it, so be it. For those who may be distressed by the ideas herein, there is infinite solace: it is only a book about a ruined city." In that ruined city, the Mommy Wars still rage, and Ms. Flanagan acknowledges that neither her tennis partners nor their high-heeled bankers will stop feuding anytime soon. "The tiresome question of whether women ought to stay home with their children has become the stuff of an endless, fruitless debate framed around the assumption that with enough talk, talk, talk (the woman's cure-all), the correct solution to the puzzle can be divined and the whole subject laid to rest." Shrewdly, Ms. Flanagan does not attempt to offer a solution to the tension between at-home and at-office mothers. It would be difficult for her to garner support from one side or the other, since she doesn't belong to either. She resides, instead, in a curious subset of women, generously supplied with brains, money and offspring, who want Martha Stewart style but have little first-hand knowledge of Kmart, who believe young children are better off in the care of a parent accompanied by a nanny, who admire hard household work and frugality but would rather not practice it themselves. It sounds like a subset too small to have much to say to the many people who fall outside of it. And this is precisely Ms. Flanagan's problem. On one level, she is an immensely appealing writer and social observer. Her yearnings for ye olde days of unscheduled children freely roaming friendly neighborhoods while pot roasts simmer on the stove back home will strike a chord in even the most strident of the Friedanfrau. She poignantly recalls the dismantling of her dead mother's kitchen and demonstrates startling courage and cheer when battling breast cancer.
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TO HELL WITH ALL THAT
By Caitlin Flanagan (Little, Brown & Co., 244 pages, $22.95) But then, just when you're poised to succumb to her charms, you come across a passage like this one, in which we learn about the thrill-packed workday of Paloma, the nanny, and learn that, for Ms. Flanagan, being an "at-home mother" doesn't require much actual mothering. "'Paloma, Patrick is throwing up!' I would tell her, and she would literally run to his room, clean the sheets, change his pajamas, spread a clean towel on his pillow, feed him ice chips, sing to him. I would stand in the doorway, concerned, making funny faces at Patrick to cheer him up -- the way my father did when I was sick and my mother was taking care of me." The response to a vomiting child is surely the measure by which God tests the mettle of mothers. Like Ms. Flanagan, Vivi, the conflicted protagonist of Rebecca Wells's 1996 novel "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood," yearns for achievement and meaning not offered in a house that has been child-proofed. She spends a night comforting effluent children -- and then goes to confession and flees to Mexico. Mothering is hard work, stunningly so. But the fact that we do it -- clean the sheets, change the pajamas, fetch the ice chips -- serves as a kind of bond among mothers, whatever their 9-5 differences, bringing a temporary, dark-of-night truce to the Mommy Wars. Well, most of us do it. Then there's Caitlin Flanagan, standing in the doorway, while someone else's mother, in broken English, comforts her panting child. Ms. Flanagan's most famous phrase to date is "When a mother works, something is lost." The feminists she disdains are enraged by that truth, so evident to the rest of us. When looking for ways to discredit her, they find ample ammunition in the many admitted hypocrisies of her comfortable life. Ms. Flanagan is at least honest, calling herself an "at-home mother" rather than a woman who works in the home. Now that her sons are older, and their care has been delegated to prestigious teachers and coaches, Ms. Flanagan should quit her day job as domestic engineer and focus, unapologetically, on her real career. Sometimes, when a writer mothers, something is lost. Mrs. Graham is a writer in Boston, Mass.
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