I Am Not a Housewife

Caitlin Flanagan fights the mommy wars

Comments (0) By Ella Taylor Wednesday, Apr 12 2006

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What understandably drives a lot of feminists right up the wall is that Flanagan, by her own admission a wealthy married woman with plenty of household help (including, according to a damning recent piece in Elle magazine, a personal organizer) and who has a pretty darn glam job of her own, tacitly blames professional working women for screwing up the undeniably beleaguered contemporary family. If children are suffering from absent or guiltily hyper-attentive parents, it’s the professional mothers who should be rethinking their work-life balance. In her book Flanagan concedes that working mothers “have retained the most of their former selves.” But, she writes, “the kind of relationship formed between a child and a mother who is home all day caring for him is substantively different from that formed between a child and a woman who is gone many hours a week. The former relationship is more intimate, more private, more filled with moments of maternal frustration — and even despair — and with more moments of the transcendence that comes only from mothering a small child.”

My own small child would probably tell Flanagan that I am much more fun, more fully engaged with her and more ready to play when I’ve had a stimulating day at the office, or lunch with a colleague, than if we’ve been joined at the hip all day. But it’s not just about the kids, according to Flanagan. If marriages are sexless, it’s because ball-breaker women, exhausted from long hours at the office and from nagging their husbands to fold the laundry properly, are not home putting home-cooked hot meals on the table, not greeting their husbands at the door in heels and slinky negligee and, worst of all, not putting out. “Under these conditions,” she writes, “pity the poor married man hoping to get a bit of comfort from the wife at day’s end. He must somehow seduce a woman who is economically independent of him, bone tired, philosophically disinclined to have sex unless she is jolly well in the mood, numbingly familiar with his every sexual maneuver, and still doing a slow burn over his failure to wipe down the countertops and fold the dish towel after cooking the kids’ dinner. He can hardly be blamed for opting instead to check his e-mail, catch a few minutes of SportsCenter, and call it a night.”

''At home'' mom Flanagan (Photo by Beth Coller)

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When I point out that a favorite topic of complaint in women’s circles is knackered husbands who show no interest in sex themselves, Flanagan tells me that’s different. “Women can get really pissed off and put upon and exhausted and flip the switch off. Whereas with men I think something’s going on, an affair, or severe depression.” Women, in her view, are the natural homemakers. Never mind that we both know neatnik males — most of them domesticated in the 1970s during the heyday of feminism — who complain bitterly of their wives’ slobby habits around the house. In an otherwise invigorating recent piece in The Atlantic she places the blame for an oral-sex craze among teenage girls on rap lyrics, pornography — and, mysteriously, feminism.

Between galley and bound copy, the introduction to Flanagan’s book has softened its brickbats against the women’s movement a touch. Gone are the giveaway phrase “feminist agenda” (replaced with “the new prescription for female unhappiness”) and the laundry list of what most in the women’s movement would now consider old-hat demands, like “Caring for the emotional and physical needs of a husband constitutes subservience.” Indeed, Flanagan is at pains to acknowledge her debt to feminists. “I spell out in there that [feminism] was the most profound movement and that it did create equal rights and opportunities in a deep and profound way,” she insists. “I have only profound gratitude.” All this profundity, however, has not increased her respect for what she dubs the elitism that taints feminism now that “the big equalities have been gained.” Her most controversial piece, whose harsh tone she now calls “slightly insane” and is not reprinted wholesale in the book, takes upper-middle-class working women to task for achieving liberation off the backs of the armies of poor immigrant women they hire as nannies and housekeepers, and for failing to pay the Social Security taxes that will shore up these women’s retirement. About that she is quite right (though she’s hardly the first to note the problem), but she hammers the point as if her entire critique of 21st-century family life depends on it. “Was that worth a 7,000-word essay in The Atlantic?” wonders feminist writer Barbara Ehrenreich, who wrote the 2002 book Nickel and Dimed, an account of her several months working in minimum-wage jobs, and who had a testy exchange with Flanagan in the online magazine Slatewhen the nanny piece came out. “It’s like running a 7,000-word piece about running a red light. If you’re going to be concerned about women working in the home the concern shouldn’t stop with Social Security. The issue is that they are badly paid and live far from their children.”