Caitlin Flanagan

By Caitlin FlanaganLittle, Brown , $22.95
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Caitlin Flanagan, as it turns out, is no happy housewife quietly tending to husband and child, but a "domestic diva" who delegates the actual housework to the less fortunate, leaving her free to wax eloquent about the virtues of homemaking in lengthy essays in the New Yorker.

Yet the very order, harmony and meticulous attention to detail she lauds in the lost arts of housekeeping are conspicuously missing in her own seductive but intellectually sloppy prose.Her new book, To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife, reveals Flanagan as less an intellectual than a literary acrobat, who offers up contorted lines of reasoning and vertiginous leaps of logic, delivered with a fearless indifference to facts.

Every discussion of the woes of upper middle class life-sexless marriages, overscheduled children, maternal anxiety-ends with the same unlikely and wholly unsubstantiated conclusion: "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."(This doesn't seem to have stopped Flanagan from "buying" the services of a personal organizer, nanny, gardener and housekeeper to do all that deep caring on her behalf.)

Flanagan may be easy to mock, but her ideas are not as easily dismissed.She is best understood as an eloquent raconteur of a pervasive cultural narrative that recasts modern middle class life as the proverbial fall from the Eden represented by '50s America:
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Motherhood today, as Flanagan describes it, is experienced as "an exquisitely over-wrought enterprise, full of guilt-wracked, sleepless nights and over-worried-about children and the never-ending sense that I'm doing too little or too much or the wrong thing, missing the crucial moments, or somehow warping these perfect creatures."This all-consuming angst stands in contrast to the "unworried ease" and serene sense of purpose exhibited by mothers of yore-benefits, Flanagan implies, that accrue from their "sense of having somehow been charged with the care of others," which made them paragons of "competence, benevolence, calm authority."
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The various domestic manuals that Flanagan so admiringly quotes as evidence of '50s family life were, in fact, attempts to soothe the nagging sense of ambivalence among American mothers.