Judith Warner’s back… and I agree with her
Judith Warner’s back blogging in the New York Times, and this week she takes on Caitlin Flanagan:
"The Caitlin Flanagan interview turned into a knock-down-drag-out fight. I had entirely misunderstood her book, which is, in large part, a paean to traditional wife- and motherhood, and which I had read as an extended metaphor, given that — as Flanagan makes exceedingly clear — she is a modern working mother who does no housework whatsoever."
"I’d taken her book — which begins and ends with chapters about Flanagan’s mother’s death and the author’s own bout with breast cancer — to be about love and yearning and identity and desire and memory, when, in fact, it is about cooking and cleaning and sex and child-rearing (sometimes a pressure cooker is just a pressure cooker)."
And she concludes:
"I will start by saying: I disagree with Caitlin Flanagan. I believe that the enormous investment we bring to things like “home” and “motherhood” — as to things like birthday parties and profiteroles — is metaphorical. It’s about ideas, not reality, and those ideas can’t be taken at face value. Our lives are material. We have to mine that material for the deeper truths it can reveal about ourselves and the world around us. And we have to have a sense of humor about it. For the other way, madness lies."
I didn’t think I’d ever find myself agreeing 100% with anything Warner wrote, but this comes pretty close.
I really appreciated the thoughtful comments that people left on the post about the MotherTalk event. I don’t think Flannagan makes a serious argument that any of us should feel compelled to respond to. (And if you’re really looking for a book about the satisfactions of ironed sheets and vacuumed floors, I recommend Cheryl Mendolson’s Home Comforts. ) Hirshman at least makes a case, although I think she’s fundamentally wrong in her claim that women who succeed by following traditionally male career paths are necessarily going to be better for women’s rights than their male counterparts.
May 6th, 2006 at 10:15 pm
After watching Flannagan on The Colbert Report (RebelDad had a link awhile ago), I can’t believe that anyone, anywhere takes her seriously. She’s like a character from that mediocre remake of The Stepford Wives. But somehow, she has a platform for national media attention…
Thanks for the book suggestion. That looks like something to make my secret inner Martha very happy.
May 7th, 2006 at 3:33 pm
The Mendelsohn book has intimidated me for years. That’s one damned, great, square book of housekeeping, there.
I think what’s interesting about the Flanagan business at this point is the anger and froth it’s kicking up, not Flanagan herself. More to the point, the way the mainstream media sees this fight as a novelty, how rudimentary it is. I’ve been calling Flanagan’s business her housewife operetta role, but clearly that will do for Time and the rest. It’s amazing, how amnesiac the press can be. You’d think there hadn’t been 30 years of articles on the subject already.
The mean/nice writer-mom argument still troubles me. I think it’s a mistake, believing that flaming jerks are automatically dirty fighters with non-arguments. (As far as intellectual content goes. What it does to your day is another story.) Yeah, I agree, at a certain point some survival instincts have to kick in, and even if you know a writer argues elegantly, there’s no reason to give her room when she’s seriously advocating violence against your family, say. But I don’t think these mean-mom writers go anywhere near that far. I think there’s room to hear them, see if they’re serious, and consider their arguments apart from the tone, petty sniping, and the rest of the incidentals. And I think you have to at least walk in open to the idea that they’ve got something.
It would be different if assholes were never right. Afaics, though, they play a big role in our intellectual and social life. Not because they’re power-grabbing jerks, but because assholes can have keen insight too.