She says career mothers are selfish. They say she's a hypocrite. Anna Mundow meets Caitlin Flanagan, who believes it's best for a woman to stay around the house
Caitlin Flanagan has countless fond memories of her father, the writer Thomas Flanagan, whose novels include The Year of the French and The End of the Hunt. She also has one particularly unsettling childhood recollection. "My father's office [ at the University of California, Berkeley] was a very scary place," Flanagan says, laughing. "He had a big Japanese sword that he'd brought back from the second World War hanging over his desk. I remember I used to climb up the tree outside his office window and wave in at him, and he would happily wave back. But I also remember thinking, Who would do that to themselves, be shut away like that? I never wanted to be a writer growing up."
Young Caitlin wanted above all to be like her mother, Jean, who gave up her nursing career when she had children and who, in her daughter's eyes, "lived every minute of her life in service to others. It's just who she was".
Adulthood, however, broadened Flanagan's ambition. "In my 30s I felt I was the best dinner-party guest in the world," she says. "I could make people laugh, tell stories, I was up on everything; I had this verbal acuity. So I thought, What am I going to do with this?" That being the 1990s and not the 1950s, Flanagan got to have it all. She became a writer whose articles appeared in Atlantic Monthly magazine, where she became a contributing editor, and, later, in the New Yorker, where she is now a California-based staff writer. She also became a wife (twice) and the mother of nine-year-old twin boys.
Flanagan still makes people laugh, chiefly with her irreverent commentaries on the often frantic life and bizarre social customs of the modern American woman. Take the contemporary wedding night. "The problem of introducing drama to the wedding night is a big one, and Brides [ magazine] tackles it unflinchingly . . . The bride might consider a suggestion that involves a 36-inch strand of acrylic pearls, preferably strung on nylon, and some water-based personal lubricant, although she is cautioned (in what may be the issue's single best piece of advice) to 'be careful with the necklace's clasp'."
Or take the angry 1970 marriage contract of the feminist Alix Kate Shulman: "[ Norman] Mailer considered the agreement at some length, concluding that he 'would not be married to such a woman'. The potential of the agreement to serve as a lifetime protection policy against marriage to Norman Mailer makes me half want to hold on to my own copy, just to be on the safe side."
Flanagan also makes people furious, particularly when she insists that, contrary to her own experience, women simply can't have it all. "I'm very disgusted by women who say 'But now I can't be a good mom and be partner in a law firm.' That's just tough. At a certain point you have to be an adult and make a choice. Nobody has tricked you."
When we spoke, Flanagan was bracing herself for the reaction to her first book, To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife, which offers her analyses of housework, nannies, sexless marriages, the white-wedding craze and other topics alongside descriptions of her childhood, marriage and childbearing and of a recent brush with cancer. "The knives are already out," she predicted.
She was right. Joan Walsh at www.salon.com christened Flanagan "the happy hypocrite" who "isn't a stay-at-home mom; she's an accomplished writer who plays a stay-at-home mom in magazines and on TV." Hilary Frey in Ms. Magazine wrote that Flanagan's earlier writings convey "a chill, vindictive, scornful message: women of a certain class who choose to work are selfish, overextended whiners who care more about their fragile egos than their children".
So is Flanagan anti-feminist? There is a short silence. "I feel that the earliest kind of feminism demanded rights for all women," Flanagan says, weighing her words. "But I associate feminism now with women who are like me: white, educated, middle to upper-middle class and who feel they are still getting the shaft. But for heaven's sake, if anything we have the privileges now. We are now the men of the 1950s."
The conversation turns to privilege in the US, but Flanagan interrupts herself in mid-sentence. "Wait a minute. Another thing about feminists," she says. "They're all unhappy. I'm writing a piece now called The Attack of the Unhappy Women, and the great thing about researching it is that these women have been writing these stupid essays and memoirs all along. You know the kind of thing: 'I don't have sex with my husband. I drink too much.' And I'm saying that one of the reasons I don't want to be like you is that you don't even want to be you. Who would?"
Okay. Back to privilege. Flanagan readily agrees that her domestic life is far easier than her mother's was - at least in the material sense. Flanagan had a series of nannies to help care for her sons and still employs a cleaner, a gardener and a personal organiser, who advises her, among other things, on clutter control.
"I won't lie that I do any cleaning," she says. "But I do try to cook delicious things for my family. I want to find out what happens if I fully invest my life in my husband and my children."
Skewering the phenomenon of the overscheduled family in which Mom, away on a business trip, sends her breast milk home by Federal Express - Flanagan knows one such mother - while Dad pencils in meetings with his adolescent son and the home itself is "a kind of very large hotel suite unintended for long-term habitation".
Flanagan wistfully recalls the grace with which her mother ran a household - until 1971, when Mrs Flanagan rebelled. "By the time my mother reached midlife, she longed for things that weren't worn or secondhand," Flanagan writes. "She would get a job and earn some money of her own. He said he wouldn't allow it. She told him to drop dead. Two weeks later, she was back at work for the first time in 17 years. The Sunday afternoon before she started she made five casseroles and stacked them in the freezer . . . When I got up Monday morning, she was gone."
Today, Flanagan's sons are the age she was when her mother returned to work, and she cannot imagine "a middle-class mother doing what mine did then: going to work and making absolutely no provisions for her school-age child other than to tie a key around her neck and hope for the best".
She is not whining. She does not seem the whining type. Even Flanagan's trials - loneliness and depression following the birth of her sons; the death of her parents; the diagnosis of breast cancer - prompt reflection or grim humour. "Death seemed better than what they had planned for me," she writes of her cancer treatment. "There was even one especially ghoulish doctor eyeing one last choice bit: my cervix." When Flanagan's chances of survival are reassessed, she notices "my oncologist warmed up to me. I seemed someone worth getting to know, someone who was going to be hanging around for a while". Whatever her critics think, she will be, as will be the debate about women working inside and outside the home.
To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife by Caitlin Flanagan is published by Little, Brown, $22.95 in US