To Hell With All That

It was an impulse buy. I picked up Caitlin Flanagan's To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife on a whim and started reading it while the kids picked out toys at Big Lots. (Yes, Big Lots. And it was only $3.00.)

My seven year-old daughter was scandalized by the title: "That's a bad word, Mama!" But, of course, that's what makes the title so good. Who hasn't felt that way at some time or other? Especially about being a housewife!

If the title hooked me, the jacket flap reeled me in: "In To Hell with All That, [Flanagan] examines the central concerns of women's private lives—weddings, sex, nannies, housekeeping, marriage, children—in a blazingly fresh light that turns a familiar discourse on its head." And I knew I absolutely had to buy it when I found myself crying in the aisle upon reading Flanagan’s rationale for hanging on to her eleventh grade report card, which her recently deceased mother had kept for so many years: "The slip of paper was not a testament of past academic glory, only of a hard new fact: there was no longer anyone in the world who loved me enough to save my report cards and school pictures and Christmas poems. I wasn't anyone's daughter anymore."

I expected the book to continue in that meditative and emotional realm. However, it ended up engaging not only my emotions, but also my intellect. It caused me to think about my values in light of what I’ve learned in the past eleven years of married life and seven years of motherhood. Flanagan describes this as "a book about what we [women] have lost," and she says that this loss happened as a result of "what conservatives call the feminist agenda and what I call the new prescription for female unhappiness."

Although I don't want to, I agree with so much in this book.

Much of it goes against the grain of my feminist consciousness. This consciousness was raised in the twelfth grade when, at a classmate's suggestion, I read The Women's Room by Marilyn French, and it was reinforced by four years of a Vassar education. And I certainly don't regret that consciousness-raising. It’s been an integral part of my identity and has shaped many of my goals and expectations. I am incredibly grateful to the women who came before me and demanded that women be respected not only in the home but in the workplace. But I do think this came with some costs, and Flanagan articulates those costs clearly, without anger or derision but with a sense of befuddlement and longing to which I relate.

Like me, she was raised by a woman who excelled at and seemed to come naturally to housework. My mother, about a decade younger than Flanagan's, has always (as far as I know) been a graceful cook and housekeeper, while at the same time literate and engaged in the outside world. She washed the sheets each week, kept the house spotless, divided up the chores between my brother and me, made lists, packed lunches, gathered the family for breakfast and supper every day. She seemed to have a strong sense of self as housewife and mother, even after she returned to teaching when I was in the ninth grade. I never saw her get angry or seem lonely or express resentment. Other than a brief outburst about everyone taking their own dishes to the kitchen—which, as far as I remember, we did from that moment on—all I remember witnessing was domestic harmony. And I am grateful for having grown up this way.

But, as much as I try to give my own children a similarly harmonious and carefree childhood, I find myself questioning if this is happening when I shove the occasional breakfast bars in their hands on the way out the door or remember approximately once a month to wash the sheets. I manage to make supper most nights, but with soccer and music schedules and my weekly night class and my husband's meetings, we don't always end up eating it at the same time. I often end up comparing myself—and not measuring up—to the standard set by my mother.

Most days I'm content with the fact that my children are happy and healthy, that with my teaching schedule I can contribute to our household finances and do work that keeps me intellectually engaged, while also having more time for family and "homemaking" than most working moms. And there are plenty of transcendent moments when I marvel at my children and thank God for trusting me with them. But there's a voice from another place that tells me I may be doing too much, that I work just as hard outside the home as my husband and that he should be doing more to help out in this drudgery that is housework and parenting. And on the days when I have too many essays to grade and a sick child and a mound of laundry and... and... and... well, sometimes resentment builds—occasionally towards my husband, but mostly towards myself, for somehow unwittingly putting myself in this overwhelming situation.

I don't completely identify with Flanagan. She states honestly that she's never had to do much housework; she has always had "help." The idea of sharing housework and childcare with her husband is purely theoretical because they have a maid and a nanny. While we do have a maid who comes once a week for a few hours (a condition of my going back to work full-time when our younger child turned one), there is still quite a bit of daily maintenance that needs to be done. And it doesn’t always get done.

Flanagan lives in a world that on the surface is quite different from my everyday reality. She lives in suburban Los Angeles; I live in a small town in Mississippi. She works from home; I work outside the home. Her husband's salary alone can pay for what most two-income families (including mine) can barely, if at all, afford. And yet, the quandary she describes seems applicable to women in most locales and many tax brackets.

Flanagan presents two familiar but conflicting visions/expectations of women that have emerged over the past forty years or so:
(1) woman as equal partner in marriage and parenting, as powerful agent in the workforce, and
(2) woman as nurturer and homemaker.

She describes the impressive and swift changes brought on by the women's movement, and asserts that they have come with some costs (and this is what I don't want to acknowledge, but my gut tells me it is true). While this fact would exasperate old-school feminists, I believe her writing would resonate with many of my friends as it does with me.

Her writing is nuanced. Caitlin Flanagan is no Phyllis Schlafly admonishing women to stay at home and kowtow to their husbands (all the while jetsetting around on the lecture circuit). Flanagan is a liberal-minded woman who found her experience with motherhood completely flabbergasting and her relationship with housework frustratingly complex. Having been told that housework is drudgery, there's no desire to do it, and yet there's the appreciation and awe for a well-kept house á la Martha Stewart. Flanagan longs for the life that Erma Bombeck wrote about with such humor and self-effacement. Bombeck, already an independent working mother, was shocked and offended when Betty Friedan admonished her and her friends that that they were living oppressed lives of quiet desperation.

Flanagan doesn’t argue that things should revert to the (not-necessarily-so-) good old days. She claims this to be a sort of elegy for what is lost forever. And what’s lost is gone even to those women who have taken on the traditional role of homemaker, because this is now a choice, set in relief to other possibilities. But she does seem to suggest that we could reclaim some of the lost simplicity. What I read into To Hell With All That is that we could be a little more sacrificial in our lives, recognizing that maybe we can't quite have it all, as well as reclaiming a Bombeck-esque sense of humor over the little things.

Flanagan boils down her philosophy in a paragraph in the last chapter, and, in my opinion, this should be the motto of parents everywhere:

"It turns out that many aspects of adult life that I have always considered complicated and messy and finely nuanced are in fact simple and clear-cut: life can be lived in pursuit of that old dog, happiness, or it can be neatly fitted around obligation and sacrifice. Happiness may be a by-product of doing the right thing. But even if it’s not, what matters—once you have had children, once you have decided to make a good life for them—is that you behave yourself."

When Flanagan first published these essays in The New Yorker and The Atlantic, I was trying to get pregnant (and not wanting to think about any conflicting emotions motherhood might engender) and then experiencing motherhood for the first time, in all its complexity and wonderment and exhaustion. So if I saw the essays, I didn't pay much attention. But the cover flap says that the essays "became an immediate sensation and the subject of an ongoing and heated national discussion." I'm not surprised.