A Recipe for Living

Agent provocateur: Author Caitlin Flanagan. Photo Seth Taras/The New Yorker/Little, Brown.

To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife
By Caitlin Flanagan
272 pages
Little, Brown and Co.
$29.95

American essayist Caitlin Flanagan has been exasperating readers since 2001, when she started writing articles in the Atlantic Monthly about family life, a subject that used to be harmlessly consigned to “the women’s pages” of newspapers and magazines and now encompasses the hottest of hot-button issues. In March 2004, Flanagan set off blogstorms and dinner-party debates with a piece entitled “How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement,” in which she suggested that the workplace gains of middle-class women have come on the backs of the poor women looking after the former’s homes and children. Clearly, Flanagan is the kind of writer who thrives on controversy.

Her new book, To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife, combines punchy provocations with disarming self-revelations to goad us into reconsidering traditional female roles. Flanagan counsels women to stop thinking of housework as oppressive, while admitting that she herself hasn’t stripped a bed or sewn on a button since she got married. (Her cleaner does that.) Flanagan asks women to consider giving up work outside the home to care for their children — she herself has twin boys — but she makes this request from the position of someone who not only has a job, but a really swell job. (Along with being a regular contributor to the Atlantic, she’s now a staff writer for The New Yorker.) Most infuriating of all, Flanagan identifies herself as a liberal and a feminist, even though lots of liberal feminists — especially those who feel they don’t have an “inner housewife” — don’t want her in the clubhouse.

It’s tempting to dismiss Flanagan as a professional PC-baiter, but something about her frank, funny writing makes it hard. Yes, she’s inconsistent, but then we’re living in inconsistent times.

Many of us who grew up middle class in the 1950s and ’60s remember families where there was one person — almost always mom — whose primary role was caring for the home and everyone in it. Since then, most of us have jettisoned that job description in our own households, yet we feel vaguely surprised when cupboards go uncleaned and supper comes out of a microwaveable bag.

For all the ideological combat over the book’s details, the central point of To Hell with All That doesn’t follow the hardened lines of the current culture wars. Flanagan argues that we haven’t come to terms with our lost sense of home, so we keep displacing our desire for comfort and order into all sorts of kooky, contradictory behaviours. Like reading Real Simple magazine to make our lives more complicated; we moon over photos of colour-blocked linen closets when we could actually be improving our living standards by vacuuming under the bed and picking up wet towels. 

Courtesy Little, Brown.

Flanagan is not trying to sort us out. To Hell with All That is the opposite of a household how-to manual, partly because Flanagan confesses that she’s “far too educated and uppity to have learned anything about stain removal or knitting or stretching recipes.” She cheerfully cedes the practical realm to Cheryl Mendelson, whose stalwart Home Comforts has become the housekeeping manual for the 21st century.

Flanagan is not a theorist or even a social critic, since for the most part she’s lacking in moral indignation. She works best as a sprightly, often insightful anecdotist, rather like Erma Bombeck, Jean Kerr (author of Please Don’t Eat the Daisies) and Peg Bracken (I Hate to Cook Book). Challenging the tendency nowadays to turn the pre-feminist ’50s and ’60s into a Stepford Wives convention, Flanagan reveals these women as rueful realists. They did what they felt they had to as housewives and mothers, and then wrote funny stories about it to keep from going buggy with boredom. Flanagan credits Bracken’s survival as a housewife to a taste for “hooch” and a snarky attitude that’s revealed in her recipe for stroganoff: “Add the flour, salt, paprika, and mushrooms, stir, and let it cook five minutes while you light a cigarette and stare sullenly at the sink.”

Flanagan also offers telling contrasts between old-school mothering and current models, particularly the kind practised by affluent late-in-life parents with pots of money, hired help and a tendency to overthink and overschedule every little thing. (Flanagan writes about a working mother who FedExed breast milk home from a business meeting.) It’s a pretty narrow little window on the world, but at least Flanagan has the good grace to recognize it as such.

She points out that kids once followed their moms around. “I whiled away a childhood leaning on the counters of dry cleaners and shoe repairmen,” Flanagan writes. “And I was happy to do it.” Now, moms follow the kids around, dutifully driving their progeny to Tumble Camp, Bright Child, T-Ball and Mad Science, a phenomenon that Flanagan discusses in the chapter “Executive Child.” Citing Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families — in which parents are encouraged to “prioritize” and “synergize” their children’s activities — Flanagan suggests it’s no surprise some moms and dads have started to “regard each other as co-presidents of an industrious little corporation,” rather than husband and wife. This busy and business-like approach to family life is, according to Flanagan, related to a spate of sexless marriages among the upper-middle class. She argues that many wives who came of age during the sexual revolution are now getting less action than June Cleaver.

Flanagan writes beautifully of the little details of her 1960s childhood — her white go-go boots and her crush on Paul McCartney — but she avoids rosy nostalgia. The book’s highly personal prologue concerns the death of Flanagan’s mother, Jean, whom she evokes as competent, unflappable, frugal, busy and purposeful — the model housewife, in fact, whose life was made up of “countless acts of service.” Jean Flanagan also had an epiphany one morning, while on a stepladder washing down the kitchen walls. She decided to get herself a job, leaving 12-year-old Caitlin in some confusion.

This confusion hasn’t quite let up. Flanagan writes with verve and vim, but she’s not as single-minded as her critics make her out to be. Her ambivalence is apparent in her own experience of motherhood, especially her relationship with her Honduran nanny Paloma. (Yes, Flanagan had a nanny; when she talks of her stay-at-home-mom days, Flanagan means staying at home with someone else to clean up the barf.) Flanagan describes the relationship among herself, Paloma and the babies as a “love triangle”; like all love triangles, it is full of complications, conflicts, passion and jealousy. She wants her boys to love the nanny, and then is dismayed when they do, proving that modern motherhood, even under the most privileged circumstances, is contested territory.

Isabella Beeton, whose Book of Household Management (1861) was the last word on 19th-century British cooking, cleaning and child-rearing, did not suffer from this kind of second-guessing and self-doubt. Flanagan’s book, and the loaded reaction to it, reflects a world less certain and more fractious than the one Beeton inhabited. Housekeeping duties might be getting lighter, but they’re not getting easier.

To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife is published by Little, Brown and is in stores now.

Alison Gillmor is a writer based in Winnipeg.

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