SparkleBliss

Caitlin Flanagan has a new book out, To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife all about how “women have felt a deeply emotional connection to housekeeping.” That might be a hard pill to swallow, coming from someone who has a maid handle most household chores.

Flanagan really gets under my skin. She harps on the joys of being a housewife, while maintaining what appears to be a very lucrative career as a freelance writer. I would assume working as a staff writer for the New Yorker is fairly demanding. Note to Ms. Flanagan: freelance writing is still work, regardless of whether or not you can do it at home.

Apparently, the whole thing is her mother’s fault. A new piece in LA Weekly includes great tidbits like these:

“Then, sponge in hand, she [Flanagan’s mother] said to herself, ‘to hell with it,’ climbed down again, and went back to work as a nurse, leaving her bewildered younger daughter Caitlin to while away the after-school hours with a house key tied around her neck. In her new book, To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife, whose title was inspired by her mother’s midlife epiphany, Caitlin writes that to this day ‘my anxiety about being alone in a house borders on the pathological.’”

“‘But do I think that society should bend itself backward to give them more time with their children and to do this profession? I’m not sure I am at all.’ She goes on: ‘It’s different to spend a lot of time with your child. If you stay home with your child, you’re going to have a lot of frustrating moments and quite a few transcendental moments. The kid can’t schedule his days so that the transcendental moments occur from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.’”

I think the core problem here is this: Caitlin Flanagan really enjoys being a mother and a homemaker. And, while that is just fine — we should all be so lucky as to have the luxury to enjoy careers that we genuinely love and find rewarding — Flanagan has gone off the deep end, assuming that the path that works for her is the path that works for everyone.

Motherhood has a special place in the arena of occupations, as it was once considered the only viable option for women, at least in this culture. If Flanagan or any of the other postfeminist homemakers were instead postfeminist assembly line workers or postfeminist retail clerks, advocating assembly line work or retail clerking for everyone, we would laugh. But, because they’re advocating a role that was seen as “natural” for women for decades, we just keep reading.

I’m sure Flanagan was traumatized by her mother’s return to work. However, for some of us, our mother’s absence was far from onerous. And, really, for all of us, we deserve all the options available. Mothers deserve the right to work if they want, and many of them have to, regardless of desire. Making entry into the workforce sound like a selfish indulgence is narrow-minded at best, mean-spirited at worst.

For further reading, here’s a 2004 article from Ms. Magazine.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 13th, 2006 at 10:37 am and is filed under books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.