To Hell with All That
August 2004
Judging from the recent influx of emails, I was not the only mother/writer anxiously awaiting (or dreading, as the case may be) Caitlin Flanagan's formal debut as a new staff writer for The New Yorker. Flanagan, a forty-something mother of twin boys, earned her reputation by penning nostalgic and often cutting commentaries on the sorry state of modern motherhood for he Atlantic Monthly. Her central premise is that the new breed of mothers -- with all their ill-tempered yammering about the drudgery of housework, child-rearing and conjugal sex -- lack the composure and gentle good humor of the "happy housewives" of our mothers' (or grandmothers') generation. According to Flanagan, today's mothers are, by and large, missing the whole point of marriage and family life. Flanagan mourns the loss of the small touches of gracious living that were once the stock and trade of accomplished homemakers -- such as taking the trouble to make an attractive place setting, even for '60s-style frozen dinners served in tacky foil trays -- but she also has a penchant for hectoring affluent, career-oriented mothers who (she contends) heartlessly abandon their innocent children to the care of exploited third-world nannies without so much as turning a hair. In Flanagan's pampered and privileged world, second wave feminists really screwed things up for everybody when they convinced middle-class wives and mothers that there was more to life than making chopped salad and waxing the floor.
In her new essay for the New Yorker -- which is artfully written and really quite poignant -- we learn a bit more about why Flanagan is so out of sorts. In "To Hell With All That" (July 5, 2004), Flanagan writes that she was overcome by a soul-shattering sense of abandonment when her own homemaking mother (who, Flanagan once believed, "was happiest …when she was standing at her ironing board transforming a chaotic basket of wash into a set of sleek and polished garments") abruptly decided to quit scrubbing the kitchen wallpaper and get a job. When her mother's employment left 12-year old Caitlin at loose ends after school, the poor little thing was first traumatized by losing her house key (Flanagan admits she's "a hysteric by nature") and subsequently feared that she would be kidnapped by militant revolutionaries while her mother was in absentia. "The rhetoric of liberation," Flanagan writes, "exhorted women to go to work not in spite of their children but -- at least partly -- because of them. …Being on my own recognizance was supposed to toughen me up, to deliver me from my mother's crippling cosseting and vault me to new levels of independence -- not an unreasonable theory. If I had had a different temperament, it might have worked." Flanagan's mother eventually quit her job -- not to make life less stressful for young Caitlin, but to support her husband's career.
Flanagan expresses a degree of ambivalence about her own decision to stay at home full-time when her sons were born. Initially, she gushes with maternal feeling ("the emotion I felt staring down into their bassinettes was something akin to romantic fervor"), but later discovers that spending day-in and day-out with small children can be excruciatingly banal: "If the last gasp of my youth was to be spent sitting in a lawn chair in a tiny back yard watching little boys poke things with sticks, so be it."
What makes Flanagan's writing so interesting is not her infuriating attitude, but the arc of her personal history. Still somewhat shell-shocked by her mother's sudden bolt from the family's well-stocked kitchen, Flanagan is determined to shield her young sons from the presumed deprivations of maternal absence, even when the isolation and aimlessness of staying home makes her a little bit crazy. She's dead certain there will be a big pay off for her sacrifice; but when her sons enter nursery school, Flanagan admits, "I naively assumed the children would fall into two easily recognizable camps: the wan and neurotic kids of working mothers and the emotionally hardy, confident kids of stay-at-home mothers. What a bust. There was no difference at all that I could divine -- if anything, the kids of working mothers were more on the ball." In an especially revealing passage, she confesses to switch-hitting in the mommy wars at a pre-school fundraiser. Still, Flanagan's weakness is imagining that the weight of her private anxieties affects mothers at large. As MMO contributor Abby Arnold remarked in an email, "I found Flanagan's new article insidious: I enjoyed it, thought it balanced… until I had time to pull away from it and think of all the ways it was manipulating me to agree that the stay at home mom is best."
As in several of her essays for the Atlantic, Flanagan's latest wraps back around to the death of her mother. One might conclude that Flanagan's core subject is not motherhood per se, but motherlessness; we can only pray that the editors at the New Yorker have the good sense to keep her on track. Meanwhile, not all readers were terribly impressed by Flanagan's take on the strains of modern mothering. In the magazine's July 26, 2004 issue, a letter-writer observes: "Flanagan seems to believe that, because she was miserable when her mother went out to work, all children everywhere feel the same… Having worked her mother's choice into a sad psychodrama, she writes that for mothers -- not fathers, a subject she barely mentions -- the decision to work outside the home 'will always be the stuff of grinding anxiety and regret.' For her maybe, but not for everyone."
At this point, I should disclose that one of the reasons I'm completely fascinated by Flanagan's work (in addition to the fact that she writes about motherhood and I tend to disagree with her major points) is that our respective childhoods overlap to a surprising degree. We both grew up in Berkeley, California during the '60s and '70s (I'm a few years older), and we both had homemaker mothers and writer fathers who worked at the University. As it happens, my mom was brutally candid about her dislike of ironing and generally disdained the extra work of maintaining a fashionable home in favor of reading novels (and later completing her graduate studies). By the time I was 12, my after-school hours were frequently occupied caring for other people's little children -- a real job for which I was paid. However, I knew and admired girls like Flanagan, and I knew and admired women like her mother. I often wished our chaotic, no-frills household displayed some of the informal elegance and attention to detail that seemed to imbue those homes with love and warmth. But instead of inspiring a longing for the cozy comforts of yesteryear, becoming a mother sensitized me to the source of my own mother's frustration with confinement to homemaking and mothering, and reinforced my respect for the surge of political consciousness that partly freed the housewives of her generation -- and the generations that followed -- to pursue a different kind of self-fulfillment. And Flanagan may disagree with me, but I think it's time we finished the job that earlier wave of feminists started.
"To Hell With All That: One woman's decision to go back to work,"
Caitlin Flanagan, The New Yorker, July 5, 2004
"Leaving Home," letters to the editor on Flanagan's "To Hell with All That"
The New Yorker, July 26, 2004
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