The happy hypocrite

But just when you're trying to accept Flanagan's two-faced approach as a kind of honesty, as evidence of the confusion we all feel as mothers who work, she'll sucker-punch you. In a great Elle profile this month, Laurie Abraham likened a feminist reading a Flanagan essay to taking a nice walk to enjoy the colorful fall leaves during hunting season ... it's so beautiful and then, ka-boom. You're Harry Whittington and she's Dick Cheney, and your face is full of buckshot! You'll be reading and smiling and thinking about how it's so complicated for women today, but we're also lucky, we have so many choices ... and then pow! Abraham points to this passage in Flanagan's famous 2004 Atlantic essay "How Serfdom Saved the Women's Movement:" "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 when a mother works, something is lost." (The line was dramatically toned down for "To Hell With All That," but don't worry, much nastier lines replace it.)

The essay's main point is to guilt-trip women about taking advantage of their (mostly third-world) nannies, and scare them about being replaced in their children's hearts by their nannies, since their nannies are around more than their moms. My favorite example of Flanagan's method comes in the essay "To Hell With All That," where she sides with both the career moms and the stay-at-homes in the mommy wars. In the end, though, she picks a side. After calling the question of whether women should stay home with their kids "an endless, fruitless debate," she mulls whether there's a perceptible difference between the kids of stay-at-home and working moms (which she confesses she expected to see in preschool). "What a bust. There was no difference at all that I could divine. If anything, the kids of the working mothers seemed a little bit more on the ball." Ah, that's a nice admission, thank you! Maybe we are all in this together. Maybe we're all a little too hard on ourselves, and each other. Let's have coffee!

But Flanagan was just soothing and distracting me, like a pheasant she'd later throw toward Dick Cheney:

"In the end, what did my boys gain from those thousand days they spent with me before school took them out into the larger world? Nothing, it seems to me, of any quantifiable value ... All they gained, really, was the sweetness of being with the person who loved them most in the world. All they gained was an immersion in the most powerful force on earth: mother love."

Oh, that's all. Suddenly the career mom curled up with the book is sitting upright on the sofa, and Flanagan's saying: "Well, I enjoyed spending time with you, your daughter is adorable (if a little wild!), but, well, we're really not all in this together. Because, remember, I stay home, and you don't. Oh, and your daughter? She loves her nanny more than you! Buh-bye!" Then she and her twin sons, Conor and Patrick, just drenched in full-time mother love, are out your door, tripping over the toys on your stairs and you just know you'll never see her again and you're not sure what just happened but you feel ... bad.

Those kidney punches make Flanagan seem a bit sociopathic, but some of her magazine essays, at least, contain comparatively few razor blades in the apples. The portions of the book that are new, including the introduction and the final essay about cancer, however, are studded with them. Her self-congratulatory introduction casts "To Hell With All That" as the product of years spent covering the home-front beat, where she witnessed what happens to men, women and families When Feminists Get Their Way! And clearly, what happens isn't pretty: You have neglected children, men who aren't getting any -- no nurturing, no home-cooked meals and no sex -- and women ... well, the women might be the most miserable of all. Boy, are they confused!

Feminism's rejection of traditional roles for women, Flanagan tells us, has resulted in "a drag queen ethos" of femininity, in which presumably masculinized women demand supersize trappings of womanhood without, in Flanagan's words, "the obligations and restraints that gave those privileges meaning." She sees it all around her: women rejecting traditional, patriarchal marriages but demanding expensive traditional white weddings; disdaining home and hearth but dropping a bundle purchasing the Martha Stewart facade; wanting demanding careers and children too, but not wanting to hear about the consequences to their kids when mom goes to work; demanding ultimate sexual freedom as well as "the right to free themselves from sexual obligation of any kind" and rejecting the notion of sex as a "wifely duty."

Although Flanagan declares that the book is not meant as "a call to action" or "a prescription for a happy life," it reads like both. It comes complete with a "code of feminism," which is worth looking at in all of its crackpot detail for the way it caricatures feminists. The code according to Flanagan holds:

"Girls do not have a natural interest in homemaking.

"A young woman should not spend any of her energies finding a suitable husband and preparing for her life as a wife and mother.

"A woman doesn't need a man, and a child doesn't need a father.

"Caring for the emotional and physical needs of a husband constitutes subservience.

"Paid professional work outside the home is the most valuable way for a woman to assert her intelligence and native gifts onto the world.

" There is no connection between the number of hours a woman spends with her child and the nature of her relationship with the child."

It takes an enormous capacity for intellectual dishonesty to lay out such straw-women exaggerations and pretend that "feminists" unanimously believe any of them, let alone all of them. But Flanagan takes the code seriously: "For many women, this code has brought heartache."

Next page: If feminism has caused so many women heartache, why has Flanagan -- the anti-feminist -- been so depressed?