Caitlin Flanagan
Pamela Paul reviews Flanagan’s book. Paul has nearly the same assessment of Flanagan that I do. She contradicts herself left and right. She doesn’t have a worldview of her own. But she is also very entertaining and says true things that others are too chicken-shit to say. Flanagan gets a mixed review from Paul and myself.
Tim Burke had a similar assessment last week. Ann Bartow gives thumbs down to the review and Flanagan. Amanda Marcotte gives a giant thumbs down to Flanagan.
I’ve got a sore throat again. I’m going to make this into an open thread. Something about Flanagan really gets people all batty. So, rant on here.
Apt. 11d 
Aside from the crystalline perfection of most of her magazine work, I respect Caitlin Flanagan for her upfrontness in pointing out her weakest spots, handing her enemies the sharpest weapons available, and daring them to strike. It takes guts (in our society, which is fatally addicted to consistency) to publicly defend principles that one hasn’t lived up too or has difficulty living with.
Flanagan takes a lot of heat for having had a nanny for her twins’ first three years. I gasped over that (as well as the never changing sheets thing), but upon reflection, with TWINS and her resources, I would be strongly tempted to do the same. Just reading the description in her book of doing the 5 AM to 9 AM shift with the twins by herself, and then coming home and her joy and relief at finding her nanny there made me suddenly much more sympathetic to her–she’s already put in half a days normal work, who am I to cast stones? I don’t know how much her kids were awake during the day, but conservatively, if either was awake 14 hours a day, that’s 91 hours a week, 40 of which was covered by her nanny. And part of the time her nanny brought her own two kids to work and the two women took care of all four together. Flanagan herself mentions her fear of being left alone to take care of two kids by herself, something I can readily understand and sympathize with. One can easily wind up marooned at home, it being so difficult to collect oneself and the kids and get outside. Furthermore, in Flanagan’s work, you will find little mention of sister, mother, or mother-in-law, the traditional (free) sources of help for mothers in difficulty. The sisterhood is not there, and if you want help, you will pay for every minute of it. And that’s what Flanagan did.
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I guess it takes guts to do that. But you know, most of the time, people who have that acutely developed a sense of their own contradictions and unresolved arguments also become a bit more complex and nuanced in their reasoning about What Is To Be Done. Flanagan, it seems to me, almost always has a moment in every essay where she moves from a state of useful skepticism about many issues and a state of self-awareness to a point where she arrives at strenuous near-certainty and a total suppression of contradiction or complication.
In certain ways, she reminds me of some of the smarter people who worked themselves up to supporting the Iraq War: acknowledgement of complexity, nuance and then a sudden phase transition to suppression or denigration of contradiction in the name of “being resolute” or avoiding “appeasement”, as if a complex understanding of the world necessarily leads to an inability to usefully affect it.
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Is “fatally addicted to consistency” such a bad thing? Is it just me, or is that the opposite of hypocrisy?
Let’s face it — Flanagan is a wack job. She somehow cannot forgive her mother for going back to work 30 years ago, and is spending all her effort trying to rebuild the Traditional Family as some sort of Taj Mahal to her mother’s memory.
Worse than that, without any credentials or qualifications she has become a mouthpiece in the Mommy Wars. This simply because she sat next to an Atlantic editor at a dinner party. Honestly, it’s an insult to any woman who actually has an informed opinion, or who produces work that transcends snarky commentary.
We are more than our gender. Flanagan’s type of self-confessional “reportage” would not be tolerated were “family issues” considered real news.
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I’m pretty much with you and Tim:
http://not-quite-sure.blogspot.com/2006/01/caitlin-flanagan-takes-on-oral-sex.html
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Jen,
Although you can’t really tell it from Flanagan’s book (which has in my opinion declawed and gutted some of her best magazine work), her writing goes way beyond “snarky commentary.” Flanagan wears her research very lightly, but she has obviously done an amazing lot of reading on her chosen subject, and her pieces are full of killer quotes and skillful handling of sources. This is a woman who reads, reads, reads! She just makes it look easy. I’m just hoping that her fame doesn’t lead her to start cutting corners.
Also, with regard to Flanagan’s relationship with her dead mother, let she who has the perfect relationship with her mom throw the first stone. Anybody?
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Amy, you make good points, particularly about the twin issue. I’m sure most mothers of twins would love to have a nanny and you are right on about the sisterhood problem.
In fact, I think Pamela Paul brought up her essential loneliness as one of the compelling themes in her writing. However, I do think that a) the only answer to this is not paid help. You might have to compromise a little but there are a lot of women who appreciate cooperative babysitting, etc. and b) the problem with Flanagan and her mother is she brings her up ALL THE TIME. enough already! its like men not being able to get over their dads who didn’t come to baseball practice. Find another hook.
I think Flanagan is incredibly fun to read but not at all reasonable to actually believe.
this is slightly off topic but I thoroughly enjoyed reading Sandra Tsing Loh’s takedown of the mommy wars book: http://www.powells.com/review/2006_04_11
she nails the revolting problem with most of these types of books. Does Flanagan really care about other women? Not a whit!
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I’ll do a post on the Sandra Loh review tomorrow. I read it over the weekend and enjoyed it. Today, I’m still on sick leave from the blog. Thanks for the comments!
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I wouldn’t give Flanagan any heat about hiring a nanny if she wasn’t so judgemental about other women who get help with childcare. If she wrote about herself only, that would be one thing. It is the harsh criticism, uninformed judgments and gross generalizations about women that I find disturbing. Like Maureen Dowd, she got annointed by very patriarchal media interests to speak for large swaths of women because she says what privileged men want her to say.
I wish someone would hire her to do a Barbara Ehrenreich Nickle-and-Dimed type project, where she had to support herself through hard work for a month or so. Either she would develop a little empathy for others, or she would show herself to be the truly odious, mean, compassionless, self-absorbed character many of us already perceive her to be from her writings.
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Another thing that makes Flanagan admirable is that she tells it like she thinks it is, rather than how she thinks it should be. Consider, for instance, her treatment of the SAHM lifestyle. She thinks that being home with her boys in their early years was very important, but she gives more than equal time to the depression, boredom, and unease with other mothers that she felt then. In her telling, the fact that it was the right thing to do did not mean that she would be happy doing it. And truly, why should what you like to do have anything to do with what you ought to do? (This is in contrast to her obvious belief that having a wife at home improves a couple’s sex life. No downside there!)
Childcare is an area abounding with happy talk, so it is an obvious target for Flanagan. At least here in the DC nannysphere, one is always hearing about how the nanny is just like a “member of the family!” and is “wonderful!” I call this wonderful nanny syndrome. Have you ever noticed that nannies usually exist in only two forms: “wonderful!” and just fired. You will rarely encounter a parent who describes her nanny as “OK, I guess,” because all nannies are well above average, at least during their employment. The same is generally true of mothers’ descriptions of their kids’ daycare centers, but to a much lesser degree.
Another interesting feature of Flanagan’s writing is that she comes pre-mocked (having provided all the best lines against herself), so her enemies are left…quoting Flanagan.
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Squid56,
I think you are forgetting that Flanagan’s famous Atlantic piece on the nanny culture was entitled “How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement,” and it dealt with the exploitative side of that system, and Flanagan ultimately exhorts families to pay the social security for their nannies. I don’t have my copy of To Hell With That at hand right now, but she also has a lengthy passage in there about her own personal epiphany in realizing that she was wronging her nanny (and harming the infrastructure of Southern California) by keeping her employment off the books. And yes, I believe Barbara Ehrenreich and a number of other worthies are prominently mentioned in the Serfdom article. The bottom line of that article is that what is good for some women (employers of domestics) isn’t good for other women (domestics).
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Amy P, are you Flanagan? Or her agent? I haven’t forgotten anything. Flanagan’s Serfdom piece was aimed at vilifying women who hired nannies. I didn’t see much compassion for the nannies in it. You can self-servingly distort all you like; her (your?) writings speak for themselves. Echidne has the links: http://echidneofthesnakes.blogspot.com/2006_04_01_echidneofthesnakes_archive.html#114530521390034135
See what Flanagan REALLY said. Don’t listen to Amy P’s spin!
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squid56,
I’m not Caitlin Flanagan or one of her minions, but I can recognize strong writing and I know how hard it is to make it look easy. I’m a DC SAHM (last year’s total taxable income $545) living in a neighborhood where nannies far outnumber SAHMs at the parks and I faithfully read the posts on a major DC mothers’ listserve, many of which deal with the frets and anxieties of the nanny-employing class. That’s where I’m coming from.
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You and Flanagan should hang out and talk about how superior you both are to everyone else. Eventually she’ll write about you and your life, and she probably won’t be complimentary.
Laura writes as well as Flanagan, easily. So do a lot of women who will never get published by the Atlantic or New Yorker – becaue they are feminists. Thank the Goddess for blogs.
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squid56,
I realize it is difficult to be fair when one feels especially singled out by Flanagan, but she does give SAHMs a hard time, too. It’s not at all equal-opportunity, but she gives all upper and upper-middle class women (particularly herself) a tough time. Anyway, I hope I can laugh at myself, and know when I am being absurd!
P.S. Yes, Laura is a very fine writer and an exceedingly gracious blog-hostess (which is why I hang out here so much).
P.P.S. I made nearly all of last year’s $545 doing babysitting.
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I recommend:
http://www.msmagazine.com/winter2004/backtothekitchen.asp
Note especially the part where Flanagan seeks to conflate feminism and homophobia. She lacks a moral center and she is being exposed for what she is, a nasty fraud.
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These (the most recent several blog posts) are my favorite anti-Flanagan pieces. And Kierstan is a very gifted writer, I think, as you can see if you read some of her New Yorker submissions in the right sidebar.
Her writing on cancer and family puts Caitlin’s to shame, as far as I’m concerned.
http://kiersten.blogs.com/
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Flanagan makes us all crazy because we all know writers as good or better (or think we are), because we envy her great good fortune in getting two (two!) of the best writing gigs in the world, and for pulling her punches over and over again when we all think we (or name our favorite writer) wouldn’t. Over and over again we get sucked into her prose, which is excellent, and then whacked upside the head by her unexamined assumptions, her judgmentalism, her just plain nuttiness. (If I hear one more time about how she didn’t have to sew on buttons, as if that mattered…!)
I don’t see a mention in these comments of Joan Walsh’s good piece on the book in Salon (http://www.salon.com/books/review/2006/04/12/flanagan/). Walsh is another of those clear-eyed writers who, like Sandra Tsing Loh (though I took some issue with her piece) and Laurie Abraham (http://www.elle.com/article.asp?section_id=37&article_id=8556&page_number=1) who seem to be getting nicely at all the problems with Flanagan.
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Flanagan is a spectacularly good writer, everything I have seen that she’s written has been interesting and worth reading. I remember her ‘serfdom’ article quite well, over a year after reading it – that’s a real sign of engaging the reader.
It’s clear that she makes people grumpy, women more so than men. Still, she’s clearly done what any magazine editor would dream of – gotten a whole lot of notice for her writing, a lot of interest for the article she has written for them. I will likely buy her book, after I finish Marjorie Williams’ Woman at the Washington Zoo.
Now, is she right? Well, our kids resent Mommy working long hours at the office. They call her on it, some. If one of us won the lottery we would probably both think about whether to keep working. Of course ‘something is lost’. Marjorie Williams had a nice line, “On a personal level, and as a matter of social policy, we often seem to be waiting for the No-Fault Fairy to come and explain at last how our deepest conflict can be managed away.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30195-2002Oct1.html and part of what I like about Flanagan is that she is not pretending that perfection is out there.
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OK, I’m weighing in here. Look Flanagan loses major street cred by being home and having a nanny. Major. But then look at me. I’ve got all the street cred, but no time to write anything other than the poorly edited blog post.
She is very inconsistent. Either she’s pulling her punches or she’s wavering or she’s not smart enough to realize it. I’m not sure. But she does argue outside of both sides of her mouth. So, I’m not sure how either the right or the left can claim her as their own or completely vilify her. I could easily find quotes from her work right now that could place her in either camp.
Being inconsistent doesn’t make her a hypocrite. It does mean that she hasn’t thought things through enough or she’s too cowardly to take it home.
But she is a wonderful writer. Not in terms of putting together a perfect essay, but there are lovely passages. She has chosen a topic that clearly attracts a lot of attention. Everyone reads her.
And she says things that others are too chicken-shit to say. I like that. I like button-pushers.
Like Dave S said, she is right that “something is lost when a woman goes to work.” You spend less time with your kids. Now, that might not be a big deal for lots of women. They might be very comfortable with their daycare situation. They may be very fulfilled in their jobs. But the truth remains. You can’t work full time as an accountant and still say that you are a full time parent. You will miss important things. With every major sociological change in the world, there will be repercussions, both good and bad. I just hate people who refuse to acknowledge the bad.
And to prove that Flanagan isn’t a gloating full time parent, she also laughs at a full time parent who spent way too much time sponge painting a chair for a school auction. And she’s right. There is a lot of silliness that goes in the full time mommy circles. Lord, save me from the PTA.
She also points out that the only way most women have been able to go to work is by passing on their chores to other women — many of them are from the third world and aren’t receiving fair pay or benefits. And Flanagan isn’t the only one to point that out. Ehrenreich wrote a book on the same topic. (Ehrenreich is just pissed off at her, because she bizarrely thinks that Flanagan is attacking her daughter.)
Look, all this work and family stuff is a major problem right now. To pretend that everything is all happy and nice is stupid. I’m glad that somebody, even with her lack of street cred and her inconsistencies, is writing about it and forcing us to talk about the topic.
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One more note just to make sure that I’m not misunderstood.
I think that there are tradeoff with being home full time, as well working full time. By being home full time right now, I’m often bored out of my mind. I also have no income of my own, so that if my husband walked out, I would be screwed. I think that Flanagan also makes the bored out of one’s mind point, too.
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I hadn’t heard about Ehrenreich’s daughter. Where is that to be found? I know that back when Flanagan’s Nanny article came out in Atlantic, I read a discussion of it by Ehrenreich, expecting her to be all for it, since it explicitly draws on Ehrenreich’s work and her ideas, and was surprised that she seemed hostile to the article.
As Laura points out, the Catch-22 is that if you are full-time SAH with young children, it is exceedingly unlikely that you are going to be able to whip out witty, polished, well-researched articles for Atlantic and New Yorker–in fact, you probably aren’t reading either of those magazines to begin with. Likewise, a writer with “help” may find herself barricaded in her office writing about kids and motherhood while a babysitter tries to peel the kids off the office door. (There’s a chapter devoted to this situation in Jennifer Bingham Hull’s Beyond One, a collection of essays about being a mother of two. It’s not a perfect book, but I’ve read it a couple times.)
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what you said, Laura, about the fact that something is lost is true. I work full time, and something is lost on both ends. I can’t be a perfect parent and I can’t be a perfect employee. Some people are perfectionists…but I am not. Now that I have a kid I understand the extent to which I won’t be able to advance quite like people without kids. the truth is though, this happens to men too.
The Slate dialogue from a couple years ago is a good one. it rambles off topic but B. Ehrenreich wipes the floor with Flanagan, in my opinion, because she has a much broader understanding of the context.
And come on, shouldn’t a 12 year old get over the fact her mother is working? seriously.
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Hiding this here, but did you see Flanagan on the Colbert Report? It’s up in their video archives, and I certainly hope it was a performance, because all the nuance flew right out the window. “Date night” was icky because women should “put out” without forcing their husbands to sit through a bad Meg Ryan movie first. Flanagan herself only worked while her kids were at school, and made sure there was a home-cooked meal ready for her husband (who is the head of the household, of course) when he walked in the door. She wishes life were more like it were in the fifties. I don’t think the head-of-household/ideal homemaker stuff is remotely new (Christian evangelical women have held themselves to those sorts of standards for decades) but the point is: huh? Again, I’m sure there was some acting going on (you can’t possibly go on the Colbert Report and behave unironically, it doesn’t work) but Flanagan was presenting herself as the new Phyllis Schlafly. NOT the persona I expected at all, and not an improvement.
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yeah, I saw it too, Jody. I wasn’t sure what to make out of it. I watch the Colbert show fairly often and, as you said, you have be ironic or else Colbert goes after you. Maybe she was just spoofing herself. Maybe she really does have a problem with date night, which is just bizarro.
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On the Brian Lehrer Show (WNYC), the interviewer initially asks Caitlin Flanagan a question about her whole “when a woman works, something is lost” thing — why she changed the wording of that sentence from the Atlantic article to the book. And this is what she says:
“Well, the earlier comment (referring to the when a woman works thing) was part of a paragraph that said when a mother works, something is lost, and when a mother stays home, something is lost. Nobody thought it was very controversial to say when a mother stays home, something is lost. Everybody thought it was extremely controversial to say when a mother works, something is lost. And so that became a very politized and oft-repeated comment.”
However, I still have the Atlantic article and here is that paragraph:
“What few will admit—because it is painful, because it reveals the unpleasant truth that life presents a series of choices, each of which precludes a host of other attractive possibilities—is that when a mother works, something is lost. Children crave their mothers. They always have and they always will. And women fortunate enough to live in a society where they have access to that greatest of levelers, education, will always have the burning dream of doing something more exciting and important than tidying Lego blocks and running loads of laundry. If you want to make an upper-middle-class woman squeal in indignation, tell her she can’t have something. If she works she can’t have as deep and connected a relationship with her child as she would if she stayed home and raised him. She can’t have the glamour and respect conferred on career women if she chooses instead to spend her days at “Mommy and Me” classes. She can’t have both things. I have read numerous accounts of the anguish women have felt leaving small babies with caregivers so that they could go to work, and I don’t discount those stories for a moment. That the separation of a woman from her child produces agony for both is one of the most enduring and impressive features of the human experience, and it probably accounts for why we’ve made it as far as we have. I’ve read just as many accounts of the despair that descends on some women when their world is abruptly narrowed to the tedium and exhaustion of the nursery; neither do I discount these stories: I’ve felt that self-same despair.”
Is it any wonder that the “politized, oft-repeated comment” is the part about when a mother works, something is lost when she never states the other side of the coin, that is, when a mother stays home, something is lost? How are people supposed to repeat and/or politize something she NEVER said?
Do I disagree with her? No. I believe that when a mother works, something is lost. But life is all about choices, and whenever you make a choice you lose out on the possibilities of the choice you pushed aside. Doesn’t mean you made the wrong choice, or the selfish choice, or the evil choice, all of which she continuously implies in her writing about the choices that working women have made.
What really irks me, however, is how she can make all these statements as if she’s above all this. Talking about upper middle class women squealing in indignation as if she’s not one of them. Talking about the need to force feminists to stop focusing on work-life balance and the mommy wars and start focusing — exclusively, BTW — on the struggle of poor women in this country as if she’s not one of the upper middle class women — and feminists, for gawd’s sake, as she calls herself — who should be doing this.
“When a mother works, something is lost.” Unless you’re Caitlin Flanagan, in which case you’re not losing out on anything, except the “hard stuff” that the nanny does for you, like taking care of your son after he pukes. Pah!
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“Like Dave S said, she is right that “something is lost when a woman goes to work.” You spend less time with your kids. Now, that might not be a big deal for lots of women. They might be very comfortable with their daycare situation. They may be very fulfilled in their jobs. But the truth remains. You can’t work full time as an accountant and still say that you are a full time parent. You will miss important things. With every major sociological change in the world, there will be repercussions, both good and bad. I just hate people who refuse to acknowledge the bad.”
I think the problem is in terminology. I am a pregnant woman who would go insane staying home full-time for more than my 6-month maternity leave. Will I miss events? Will I miss milestones? Certainly! Obviously! But I can see people objecting the phrasing “something is lost” because it’s vagueness implies, to me, that something huge and crucial is lost. Yes, I might miss out on seeing the first time my child climbs the slide ladder by herself. But I’ll see her do it later that night on the playground. And I’ll see many other firsts. I can’t wrap my head around the expectation that I should be upset that I won’t be there every minute of her life.
I think people who are very invested in SAHMing might be overestimating the importance, both to themselves and especially to their children, of being there for every little first.
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This is well known that money makes people free. But what to do when someone doesn’t have money? The only one way is to try to get the loan and collateral loan.
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