Flanagan v. Feminism

Even Flanagan's detractors admit she's an exceptionally talented and imaginative writer, but her contempt for feminism is what cemented her celebrity. Flanagan prefers the gospel of Martha Stewart to that of Betty Friedan, and complains that women's sudden interest in self-actualization, circa 1970, was the death knell of pleasant living:

Women were getting into ceramics and militant poetry writing. Talent was a prerequisite for neither occupation; all that was needed was smoldering anger. Putting on lipstick was an oppressive act. Cooking nourishing dinners was an oppressive act. The mothers in those houses were sullen and absent, or they were wrapped in batik and committed to cooking ethnic dishes. They would have hideous caches of broken eggshells and wet coffee grounds squirreled away on kitchen counters, waiting to be delivered to compost heaps. One girl I knew came to school with matted hair every day because her mother had given up brushing it -- too oppressive. …There was nothing to admire about these women, nothing about their lives that inspired dreaminess. They were half-liberated, half-imprisoned,
angry all the time.

Since Flanagan and I hail from the same hometown, I can vouch for her observation that the eggshell-and-coffee-ground combination was not at all pretty (organic composting being a practice my mother took up in the late '60s and continues to this day). On the bright side, our backyard vegetable garden provided fresh produce all summer long, which my mother whipped up into many a tasty dinner, ethnic and otherwise. (Mom was never a batik-y type though -- she favored easy-care pantsuits in colors that could make your eyes water.) I take exception, however, with Flanagan's conclusion that "there was nothing to admire" about those women in transition and their disorganized households. Perhaps our mothers did not inspire "dreaminess" -- although as someone who spent her high school years filling notebooks with moody poetry and listening to Joni Mitchell, I'd venture that a shortage of dreaminess was not a chronic problem for young women of the day. But the disillusioned housewives who cast off their aprons in the late '60s and early '70s deserve credit for choosing to move into an uncertain future -- a future promising that, someday, maybe soon, a woman's worth would be measured by the full range of her capacities and the depth of her character, and not exclusively by her sex appeal (if she was single) and devotion to others (if she was married). Yet Flanagan decries feminists for encouraging the abdication of domestic responsibility:

What's missing from so many affluent American households is the one thing you can't buy: the presence of someone who cares deeply and principally about that home and the people who live in it; who is willing to spend a significant portion of each day thinking about what those people are going to eat and what clothes they will need for which occasions; who knows when it's time to turn the mattresses and when the baby needs to be taken out for fresh air and sunshine. Because I have no desire to be burned in effigy by the National Organization of Women, I am impelled to say that this is work either Mom or Dad could do, but in my experience women seem to have more of a connection to the work -- and the way it should be done -- than men do.

I'm convinced the great promise of feminism -- and perhaps why Flanagan, in her cultivated dependency, is so rabidly opposed to it -- is not the dictum that men and women ought to divvy up housework 50-50, but that its principles defend a woman's right to take responsibility for defining the terms of her own life and to act accordingly. Feminism proposes that meaning and wholeness are something we achieve through self-acceptance, something we bring to our relationships -- with our husbands, our children, our parents, our chosen work -- not what we squeeze out of them. This idea actually predates the era when (by Flanagan's reckoning) an alarming number of once-respectable Berkeley matrons gave in to the temptation to liberate themselves. Elizabeth Cady Stanton laid it all out in 1892: "The strongest reason for giving women all the opportunities for higher education, for the full development of her faculties, forces of mind and body; for giving her the most enlarged freedom of thought and action; a complete emancipation from all forms of bondage, of custom, dependence, superstition; from all the crippling influences of fear, is the solitude and personal responsibility of her own individual life."

If a woman realizes that her grandest gift and greatest pleasure is caring for her husband and children -- rather than studying art history, or teaching high school English, or novel-writing -- so be it. Surely, no on else can make that call. If she's financially secure and has the right kind of social capital, she may even be able to create something close to her ideal of family life (but since the course of true love has been known to take a nosedive, she'd be wise to plan for a future that might not include the adoring husband). What Flanagan deplores most is the notion that honoring one's authentic self is license to disregard the emotional and material needs of those who are bound to us by love and blood -- and no person of good conscience could disagree. Nor does it give permission to proselytize a chosen lifestyle -- particularly when one's chosen lifestyle is defined by desires and anxieties not all women share.

mmo : april 2006