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Thursday, March 16, 2006

Flanagan Rant-again

So Elle magazine is showing some teeth. The April issue has an article about the unpleasant non-phenomenon that is Caitlin Flanagan. Flanagan, about whom I ranted in passing in the opening essay to this blog, is a conservative writer whose standard lines read something like this: feminism is bad for marriage, feminism is bad for children, women with children shouldn't work.

Since she writes for the Atlantic Monthly and sadly, the New Yorker, Flanagan has a wide audience and her bold statements and jokey, consumable style seem to be just the thing to get her quoted everywhere and get everyone's dander up. Don't misunderstand me, she is awful (though an Atlantic piece she wrote called The Wedding Merchants wasn't miserable), but what I find more awful than her awful opinions and excessive sentimentality is how stupid the world is to shove her into the limelight to spout her platitudes.

I'm not going to synopsize her articles or pick apart her arguments here. That's actually been done quite well in a fascinating Slate dialogue from February, 2004 in which Sara Mosle and Barbara Ehrenreich do a good job demonstrating how stupid and sloppy her thinking is.

But what I will say are two things that the Elle piece made me think. The first is that Flanagan's attitudes are so convenient for the American right. The idea that women with children simply shouldn't be working solves all the problems that get kicked around so much. Women wouldn't need to fight for subsidized childcare if they'd just stay home. But of course, Flanagan is talking about a dream world where everyone shares her particular ambitions and financial abilities. It is rather easy to be prescriptive when you are assuming everyone is just like you. One of the central tenets of Judith Warner's book Perfect Madness is that as a culture we do not fight to make circumstances easier for women who work because we don't seem to think it is important enough. Flanagan's writing supports all of those who would say that childcare wouldn’t have to be a "problem" if it weren't for crazy, spoiled feminists who ask for too much and don't do what they're supposed to do. These notions are so dim it is hard to understand why such lofty publications put her stuff out there.

Except, of course, that it sells. As Ehrenreich says in the Elle article: "Media executives love the ides of a quote-unquote catfight between the stay-at-home mother and the working mother... The media love a fight and they do anything to pick it, including fielding people like her." As someone who has just started to pick through the just-published essay collection Mommy Wars, I have to agree.

An interview with the Mommy Wars editor revealed none of the essay writers wanted to come out swinging against other women who had made different choices. The book title is misleading, but ensured sales ("If we called it `26 Moms Explain Their Life Stories and How We Should Love and Support Each Other,' no one would buy it.".) The "war," is largely internal and anonymously political. People aren't reaching for their swords. They're looking for their Xanax.

But I think they key to the Flanagan madness is revealed at the end of the Elle piece where Flanagan talks about how, during chemotherapy treatments for breast cancer, her husband had to carry her from her doctor's office to the car. That gesture, she says, is the result of her having "banked" so many hours of being a dedicated wife to her husband. If she hadn't sacrificed some work time to make him hot meals and be the kind of wife she romanticizes based on a 1950's stereotype, she doesn't feel he would have picked her up when she needed it.

What does this say? It says that Flanagan has so little faith in herself that she has to count on years of accumulated guilt to ensure that her husband will help her when she's sick. This comment is tragic. Anyone who is partnered with someone who refuses to help in the face of illness or weakness because there wasn't a decades-long history of timely pot roasts and clean living rooms has chosen a particularly bad mate indeed.

And that is one generalization I can make with great confidence.

posted by Elise at 3:40 AM

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6 Comments:

Elisheva said...

Is Flanagan really serious? I cannot imagine any wife saying "if it weren't for years of well-cooked turkeys and well-cleaned toilet bowls, my husband would have told me to call a cab on my way back from chemo because he had a game of squash he couldn't cancel."

She seems truly caught in a 50s timewarp, not only trying to recreate the stay-at-home liefstyle, but also recreating the kind of skewed, unsympathetic gender relations that existed then. The kind of gender relations that insisted on keeping men in the bar while their wives were in labour. Or that kept women spending their husband's hard earned dollar even as he showed signs of burn-out stress.

I can sort of understand why some women and men would be proponents of strongly-defined gender roles. Whether or not it fits every temperament, life is more easily organised if everyone has only one well-defined and expected role to play. However, empathy and sympathy for one's partner and his/her contribution to the relationship is a less-vaunted improvement brought upon by modern feminism which I cannot see anyone wanting to live without.

3/17/2006 7:59 AM

Elise said...

Well, obviously there is something ridiculous about a writer prescribing what she considers her own "successful" behavior to everyone. It's absurd.

And there is also something odd and not necessarily healthy about the way in which these writers, feel that their own examples are even useful to other people. All Flanagan fosters is extreme defiance or guilt and in no way does she address any of the social circumstances that most people really have to deal with.

That is what makes her writing largely dismissable, I think.

I am largely baffled at the fact that she gets any attention at all. Her argument is not helpful or interesting, compassionate or revelatory. It is just a shabby polemic.

3/17/2006 11:00 AM

Elisheva said...

Excellent point. It's the "anecdote-as-theory" solution. It's far easier to tell the world to follow what you know best (your own example) than to study, research and theorise. It's the same for the media. They prefer to tell stories than to explore a subject more deeply.

These writers and the media that follow them seem to ignore that there's a reason why we had a modern feminist revolution. Come on people! All those bras weren't burned because everyone was happy with the status quo.

3/17/2006 11:25 AM

Jen said...

Great posts and comments. Unfortunately, Flanagan gets attention because everyone respecting each other is hardly provocative. Watch any of the talk/"news" shows on Fox (or any other major news network, for that matter), filled with bulldog-style bullying, and it's easy to understand why today's media seems to be far more interested in conflict than in respect and support. What a sad commentary on our society that it seems to be conflict that sells.

And for what it's worth, I have yet to ever make a pot roast (for which anyone who knows me is undoubtedly thankful!), and if my husband wasn't supportive during a major illness, he'd be looking for a new wife in short order. My value as a wife and mother is not defined by my cooking or cleaning abilities.

3/21/2006 7:21 AM

Beth said...

The mothers who are being pressured to quit their jobs and stay home "for the sake of the children" are invariably the educated, successful women who are able to demand equal pay and other rights as professionals. The tune is quite different for poor moms and those who use public assistance - they are pressured (indeed, forced) to return to work in the name of "personal responsibility". As Ariel Gore writes, all of this seems to have more to do with the good of the stock market than the "good of the children".

3/29/2006 1:56 PM

Anonymous said...

Caitlin Flanagan chats with Judyth Piazza on the American Perspective and the Student Operated Press.

http://www.thesop.org/article.php?id=972

4/27/2006 8:56 PM

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