I Am Not a Housewife

Caitlin Flanagan fights the mommy wars

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

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Certainly Flanagan comes across out of touch with the pressures on contemporary women — and men — of all classes, not just her own. Perhaps because she once taught at an exclusive private school (Harvard, before it became Westlake) and sends her sons to another, she seems unaware of the sheer variety of family forms and child-care arrangements unfolding in today’s cities. In my daughter’s public-school elementary class alone there are three stay-at-home dads, one pair of gay fathers, and Lord knows how many single mothers if you count the north-of-Montana-Avenue women whose executive husbands work (as Flanagan’s own husband does) around the clock. And most of them will tell you that what is crushing the life and joy out of family life today is not packs of over-educated, screaming viragos, but a workplace culture that makes impossible demands on the time and energy of men and women alike, and not just those who are trying to make partner. No wonder some of those who can afford it — and they are few and far between — are throwing up their hands and going back home. “I say this as an old second-wave feminist,” says Ehrenreich. “We thought we could have it all because we thought jobs were eight hours a day. I have great sympathy for the young lawyer who works 60 to 80 hours a week. If you have a husband who can support the family, I can see the temptation to give up work. But I also sympathize with the poor women who have two jobs. If you’re a big defender of domesticity, you should be furiously protesting welfare reform.”

I don’t believe that Flanagan is a cynic or an opportunist, as some of her detractors have called her. But for someone who feels unfairly judged, she’s harshly judgmental herself. At the end of To Hell with All That, in the only original essay in the collection, Flanagan writes affectingly of being diagnosed with breast cancer in 2003, and of how her husband stepped up and took care of her, ferried the children to school and to their activities during her nine months of treatment. “If a marriage is like a bank account . . . I suppose my balance was high,” she writes. “I suppose that all the days I had made a home for my husband, and all the times I had ended my writing days early so that he could work late or come home to a hot dinner and not to a scene of domestic chaos — all of that, as much as the desire and intensity that originally brought us together, were stores in my account.” It’s nice that Flanagan’s husband rose to the occasion, and even nicer that she got better. But there’s an unspoken complacency here, and an implication that working mothers care less about their husbands, and that those husbands might not do the same for their wives if they fell ill. She professes to hate the term “mommy wars,” but she fans the fires by driving a wedge between working women and stay-at-home mothers. “If I went to an at-home mom and I said, ‘Hey, at-home mom, have you missed out on something with your career?’ And she says, ‘Yes, I really have, I would have been up to here by now on the corporate ladder, and I’d be going out and seeing people.’?” She goes on, “But if I go to a working mother and say in a very simple way, ‘Gee, have you missed out on some important moments in your child’s life?’?” She switches to a witchy voice. “?‘Well, absolutely not, I have scheduled this and this and this.’?”

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

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Flanagan thinks working women hanker for more traditional lives (hence the Martha Stewart craze) but slams them for claiming that if they make law partner, all boats will rise for women at home and poor women. I’ve never actually heard a feminist or a working woman say this, but it’s true that in the early days of second-wave feminism there was a strain of contempt for women who chose to stay home with their kids. To judge from Mommy Wars, a new essay collection edited by Leslie Morgan Steiner, the difficulties of achieving that elusive work-life balance have made more mothers, working or not, more sympathetic to each other’s choices. We all draw our lines in the sand, and I know, as my mother knew before me, that I’d be a bitter hag of a mother if I didn’t also have interesting work to do. I also believe it’s a perfectly legitimate choice to stay home with your kids. God bless the at-home moms — not “housewives,” Flanagan insists — who uncomplainingly put hours and hours of unpaid work into organizing activities, acting as room reps and raising money for my daughter’s school. In principle I don’t see much point in having kids if you’re not coming home until eight at night on a daily basis — yet I have seen parents make that work, just as I have seen children who get so much undivided attention they can hardly breathe by themselves. As Carolyn Hax, who pens the exceptionally smart syndicated advice column Tell Me About It and raises three boys under 2 years old with a mostly at-home husband, writes in Mommy Wars, “I am old enough now to have known enough people making enough bizarre arrangements work (and making textbook arrangements fail) to persuade me that anyone who thinks she can judge what’s best for other people’s kids is either arrogant, psychic or high.”?

TO HELL WITH ALL THAT: LOVING AND LOATHING OUR INNER HOUSEWIFE| By ?CAITLIN FLANAGAN | Little, Brown | 244 pages | $23 hardcover