The happy hypocrite

I never cared that Caitlin Flanagan calls herself an at-home mother, even though she's a magazine writer with a staff of helpers. But now she's using her battle with cancer to denounce feminism and extol her traditional virtues -- and I've had it.

By Joan Walsh

Read more: Joan Walsh, Books, Women, Parenting, The New Yorker, Feminism, Motherhood, Reviews, Book reviews

April 12, 2006 | Everyone knows Caitlin Flanagan isn't a stay-at-home mother, she's an accomplished writer who plays a stay-at-home mom in magazines and on TV. Right? Part of why I've never gotten upset about Flanagan's pro-hearth and home shtick is that I've seen it as just that, shtick. I'd read enough to know she had a full-time nanny when her twin sons were infants and she was trying to be a novelist; then she wrote about modern womanhood and family life for the Atlantic Monthly after they hit preschool; now, with her boys in grade school, she's got a great gig at the New Yorker. So how is she not a career woman who's also a mom?

I've been too busy to figure it out, since I am a career woman who's also a mom. I haven't always found time to read Flanagan's glossy essays, although I know I should, since she drives some feminist writers I admire to fits. Not me, I always said, with (dare I confess?) a semi-secret, Flanagan-like flash of self-satisfaction: I would never judge those women who are driven nuts by Flanagan, but maybe I'm just a little wiser, a little more secure in my choices, just a bit harder to rattle than they are, the poor dears.

Then I picked up Flanagan's new book, "To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife," and I lost my equanimity. It's mostly a lightly reworked compilation of her New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly essays from the last few years, but dressed up with a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger introduction blaming feminism for causing women "heartache," and a truly below-the-belt conclusion, on how surviving breast cancer confirmed Flanagan's conviction that traditional marriage and motherhood is best. I put the book aside for almost two months because even though I'm tough, I'm not tough enough to kick someone with cancer, and Flanagan deserves a kick for the dishonest and divisive gloss these new essays give the book, and her whole career. But I guess I learned something new about myself in this process: Apparently I am tough enough to kick someone with cancer, but only after feeling bad about it for a while.

As the book's publicity machine gathered steam, it suddenly mattered very much to me what's true about Caitlin Flanagan, and what isn't true. Flanagan has come to feel like another publishing-industry hoax, not as fake as James Frey or J.T. Leroy/Laura Albert, but in some ways worse: a hoaxer who's using a great gift from the cosmos -- recovery from breast cancer -- to rail against feminism, evangelize for traditional gender roles, and to debase women who can't or won't make the same choices she did. So maybe we do have to get to the bottom of this one. Who is Caitlin Flanagan, and why is she writing this crazy stuff?

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I suppose it's inevitable that since feminism was at least partly launched by complaints that women were miserable trapped at home, cut off from careers, it would be vulnerable to an assault that depicts women as happier in the home, as wives and mothers, than in the workplace. A not-so-great consequence of Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique" is that it led to the conclusion that stay-at-home motherhood was bad because it felt bad to a lot of women in Friedan's generation; by the same logic, we're now being told by writers like Flanagan that stay-at-home motherhood is good, because to some women (who believe they'd been denied it by feminism), it feels good. (Most mothers, let's remember, don't have the luxury of choosing to stay home full-time, but Flanagan and Friedan belong to the mouthy minority that does.) Flanagan has always been clear on where she stands in relation to angry, unhappy Betty, who, she reminds us, usually had housekeepers doing the domestic duties she railed against. The only thing worse than a hypocrite is an unhappy hypocrite, Flanagan seems to say.

Flanagan, by contrast, bills herself as a happy hypocrite. She readily confesses that although she's an at-home mother (more on her hair-splitting definition of same later), the "home" part of the equation doesn't get much attention; she's not much for cooking or housekeeping or bleaching or mending, or any wifely duties, really, except (we're supposed to infer from a chapter about how feminists won't give their husbands sex) sex. She's had a full-time nanny, housecleaning help, a "household organizer," and now that the kids are in school, no nanny, but a baby sitter. And while she loves to read old texts like "The Settlement Cook Book," with its recipes and its polite solutions for every domestic problem, some of which involve one part bleach, she's honest about having no practical relationship to the book, beyond that of a reader; in fact, she compares herself reading the cookbook at home to a man reading Playboy in a hotel. "I have never made a solution composed of one part bleach and nine parts warm water  I have been married a total of sixteen years to a total of two men, and never once have I been asked to iron a single item of either man's clothing or to replace even one popped button."

Flanagan can occasionally seem more wry than judgmental. You might coast for pages on her breezy descriptions of the differences -- and similarities -- between the neuroses of at-home and career mothers. You might even find yourself nodding in agreement -- it really is awful that work takes up so much of our lives, that in too many couples and families no one has time to make dinner, to plan seductions, to make a house a home. She sometimes seems like an amusing bystander watching the crazy millennial "mommy wars," occasionally jumping in on both sides of the debate. At one school fundraiser, she confessed in an essay, she hung out with two career-mom friends and the three poked fun at a stay-at-home mom's pathetic zeal for school projects. "Get a life," one of them said, then they all snickered, and turned their backs on pathetic mom and talked about work. But another time, Flanagan admits she joined the mean-mom brigade, tsk-tsking over one little girl whose career mother never shows up at school.

Next page: Flanagan sees a world of "drag-queen" femininity, where women behave like men but demand to be treated like traditional women