Hold Up

The wailing and gnashing of teeth accompanying Caitlin Flanagan’s To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing the Inner Housewife, was completely lost on me until after I read it, perhaps because I am too busy working and raising children to pay too much attention to the social critics. Even so, I had read many essays in this collection of loosely connected vignettes beforehand in Atlantic Monthly and the New Yorker. Because of her brilliant defense of Martha Stewart (even though she finds the domestic icon personally unappealing) and her sense of humor, I became interested in her work, even if her perch of privilege prevents her from seeing how the issues affect those of us toiling far below.
The book, which is an attempt to vindicate the ‘50s housewife (and she correctly makes a distinction between the old-fashioned housewife and today’s stay-at-home-mom) infuriates many feminists who insist to themselves and others that working outside of the home is inherently fulfilling, that it poses no threat to the harmony and order of a house that is properly run (i.e. everyone in the house is fully evolved and chores are de-genderized), and that children of such mothers suffer no deprivation of any kind, which as most working mothers know, is flat bunk.
Of course, the problem is that both sides, as they are presented on the public stage today, are represented by the privileged and the well-educated. Unlike Flanagan and her detractors, millions of women have to work without the benefit of quality, dependable in-home care, and we know, without a doubt, that this prevents us from being the parents, wives, friends, daughters, and selves we could be. A daycare means we have to leave work early and inconveniently to pick up a sick child. It means that every few months new employees hired in the ever changing world of a daycare facility will be caring for our children, and we have no idea who these people are. It means less than nutritious food and less interaction with adults. Most women, unlike Flanagan and her detractors, do not have the luxury of working jobs that truly utilize their best skills or interests in any meaningful way. Few women grow up dreaming of a job in the food service industry, yet there they are in every restaurant, working hard to make quick cash, which is necessary given their lifestyles. Many simply sell desired services—the ability to memorize an order or deliver food with a smile, the willingness to type someone else’s letters and then sign his name to them—to a company that couldn’t care less what their employees' real talents are. And these women do this to finance not swimming pools and Solstices, but braces, mortgages well below the national average, second-hand minivans, and maybe, if they’re lucky, an inexpensive hobby that does utilize some of our talents.
My point is that Flanagan and her opponents are fighting a battle that has little to do with the rest of us. The Women’s Rights Movement, as it is presented in the media today has left us behind for the most part. Strides have been made, particularly for the wealthy and the educated—the very ones who currently have time to banter semantics on television and the Internet. But what hasn’t been addressed is the fact that there are millions of cesspool organizations where women still go to work early, off the clock, to wash the boss’s coffee cups from the day before, or where they are spanked if they don’t sell enough product; where they are unable, because of their family and work commitments, to get an education because a university advisor archly tells them that “One cannot get a graduate degree here by taking night classes.”
As for Flanagan, she does attempt to tackle a dilemma many feminists consider solved and dispatched long ago, and that is the longing many working women and stay-at-home moms have for domesticity, solitude, and a well-ordered, working home life, even if we don’t know how to make that happen. She claims some feminists threw out the baby with the bath water when they rejected and trivialized the ‘50s housewife, who, in fact, had a far deeper wisdom and sense of self than we ever suspected. I believe Flanagan may be right about this. I, too, suspect that today’s sexless marriage is a product of a screwy sense of priorities that my never-divorced grandmother would have found laughable. I very much believe in the sanctity and power of the dinner table and do my best to make this happen nearly every night. And yet I consider myself a feminist—a woman who believes I have the same right to political and financial power as any man walking.
So while Flanagan’s message is not difficult for me as a feminist to swallow, I do find her work frothy and facile. She never really addresses the necessity of passing on housekeeping customs from one generation to the next (which is the real reason I am able to provide for and insist on a sit-down dinner every night). She glides over the difficult issues so quickly that her sleight of hand bewitches the reader, renders her incapable of remembering that the ‘50s housewife was but a blip on the screen of history. The multitudes of women before (even during) that time were living hand to mouth existences in factories, sweatshops, other farmers’ tomato fields, their own farms, etc., and they certainly had no time or energy for philosophical issues such as mother’s guilt. I firmly believe Flanagan tries to assuage both working and stay-at-home mothers in her book (as opposed to the critics who deliberately misread the last chapter), but her tools are too paltry and class-blind to be all that convincing. Instead she could have shown us the centuries of women who rose at four and fell into bed at nine every night after a day of unceasing, back aching, but necessary work. These were working mothers whose children, as soon as they were old enough to count, became employees—either of the family farm or someone else’s business (think chimney sweep or mine worker). Flanagan would have gone a long way toward relieving our angst—genuine as it is, considering the number of hours many of us work away from the home each day--had she shown us how much luckier, healthier, and happier all of our children are today by comparison.
The self-described feminists who oppose her would do well to turn their sights on the work yet to be done for the working poor and middle class women in this country. Their finger-pointing and shouting is part of another class-blind argument that insists on the inherently ennobling nature of employment and decries the evils of traditional marriage—an institution designed as much to protect the interests of women and their children as men’s. Can they really claim, without a clutch of the heart, to have made great strides when they see the statistics revealing the vast number of single mothers out there? When they know what sort of financial and personal fate awaits most of these women as they struggle to hold down two minimum-wage jobs with no insurance? Surely the finer points of this debate (Is Flanagan a hypocrite? Does she drive her readers crazy?) can wait until a more leisurely hour, when, top-down, all women (their children and their men) have access to the fruits of the Women’s Rights Movement. Hold up, sisters, and take look around.