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Like I said:
Loving and loathing Caitlin Flanagan

A review of "To Hell with All That," plus collected short essays on Caitlin Flanagan, 2003 - 2004

By Judith Stadtman Tucker

April 2006

Don't say I didn't warn you. Caitlin Flanagan's long-awaited book on "modern motherhood" is finally out -- but you can put the flame-proof suit back in storage. To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife (Little, Brown, 2006) is mainly a light reworking of essays which originally appeared in the Atlantic Monthly and New Yorker, with most of the sting taken out.

Flanagan gained her reputation as a red-hot writer by eulogizing the cult of domesticity: the joys of a good life are brutally diminished, she suggests, when breadcrumbs linger indefinitely on the kitchen counter and dish towels are not folded just so. The trait that made Flanagan the darling of posh magazine editors, however, is the pleasure she takes in piercing the hearts of career-oriented women with the refrain that "something is lost" when mothers work outside the home. Readers hoping to find a version of Flanagan's famously irritating "How Serfdom Saved the Women's Movement" in this collection will be disappointed. While Flanagan recycles several passages from "Serfdom" (which she dismisses as a "convoluted and slightly insane cover story" about why employers should pay Social Security and unemployment taxes for domestic workers), To Hell with All That is a little vague about what, exactly, goes irretrievably missing when mothers divide their allegiance between work and family. Flanagan's chief preoccupation seems to be the importance of having a pleasing dinner ready at a reasonable hour (although she makes it clear that cooking -- along with routine housework, full-time child tending and doing laundry -- is really not her thing).

Other reviewers have described Flanagan's book as muddled, and it is -- in more ways than one. Right out of the starting gate, it's obvious that Flanagan's characteristically sparkling prose owes a great deal to the oversight of editors at the Atlantic and New Yorker. To Hell with All That is looser and more pedantic than Flanagan's best essays; the overall effect is less caustic, but less entertaining as well. Flanagan implies in a recent interview that To Hell with All That was not intended to be "a big book," but it's hard to tease out what kind of book it is meant to be: It's not strictly cultural critique or memoir, although it contains elements of both. The chapters are patched together in a kind of sequence, yet there's no real narrative. Flanagan aims for satire, but comes off as more of a nag. And with much of the venom sucked out of the previously published material that makes up the backbone of the book, the end result is only mildly interesting and provocative. Which leaves the possibility that To Hell with All That is best taken as a character study of its author, who seems perpetually unhinged by the responsibilities of adult life.

One could feel empathy for Flanagan, who's had her share of grief and disappointment: the loss of both parents before she turned forty, a diagnosis of breast cancer in 2003, and the unhappy discovery that even though giving birth to twins boys awakened, for the first time, a sense of real purpose in her life, she lacked the temperament for the rigors of infant care. Reading a well-rendered account of any one of these emotional challenges might evoke a twinge or two of sisterly sympathy. And yet, it doesn't. Flanagan takes too much delight in gunning down those around her, and never fashions an appealing persona for herself. While chastening "yuppie" women for their egoism and other shortcomings as wives and mothers, Flanagan presents herself as charmingly indisposed to self-reliance, "the girl who always needed to be bailed out of things… the one whose helplessness was among her most attractive qualities:"

I didn't want to run the household. I wanted to live in it the way I had once lived in my mother's house: lightly and with ease, sleeping on fresh sheets and eating good meals and not having to account for how those things came into existence. I didn't have the mind or the patience for housekeeping. I am not an orderly or organized person.

Beyond her child-like self-absorption -- which, in fact, is rarely endearing in a middle-aged woman, or anyone over the age of six -- Flanagan is blinded by her own privilege to an unfathomable degree. As if to establish her familiarity with the concept of social justice, Flanagan extols her late mother's activism on behalf of migrant farm workers and sweat shop seamstresses. Yet she is astounded to discover (after neglecting to pay employment taxes for her Latina nanny) that "Social Security isn't a little extra check to sweeten the retirement of well-married ladies. It's the whole game plan for a lot of people: retirement, disability insurance, a plan to support the worker's children if the worker dies." Perhaps such obliviousness is not unexpected for someone whose fond memories include having intimate chats with her Honduran nanny "about my college years in the South, when bales of snowy sheets and towels were delivered to the dorms each Monday, and the dining hall chef made omelets to order, and my mother sent money for a new ball gown each spring." One can only hope Flanagan appreciates her good fortune in landing a husband who was willing to take "a big corporate job to pay for the kind of motherhood I had chosen to pursue, which included round-the-clock worry about the babies and extremely infrequent separations from them," not to mention the full-time nanny. If her luck holds out, she may never have to mingle with the common folk who occupy the real world.

Flanagan v. Feminism

Even Flanagan's detractors admit she's an exceptionally talented and imaginative writer, but her contempt for feminism is what cemented her celebrity. Flanagan prefers the gospel of Martha Stewart to that of Betty Friedan, and complains that women's sudden interest in self-actualization, circa 1970, was the death knell of pleasant living:

Women were getting into ceramics and militant poetry writing. Talent was a prerequisite for neither occupation; all that was needed was smoldering anger. Putting on lipstick was an oppressive act. Cooking nourishing dinners was an oppressive act. The mothers in those houses were sullen and absent, or they were wrapped in batik and committed to cooking ethnic dishes. They would have hideous caches of broken eggshells and wet coffee grounds squirreled away on kitchen counters, waiting to be delivered to compost heaps. One girl I knew came to school with matted hair every day because her mother had given up brushing it -- too oppressive. …There was nothing to admire about these women, nothing about their lives that inspired dreaminess. They were half-liberated, half-imprisoned, angry all the time.

Since Flanagan and I hail from the same hometown, I can vouch for her observation that the eggshell-and-coffee-ground combination was not at all pretty (organic composting being a practice my mother took up in the late '60s and continues to this day). On the bright side, our backyard vegetable garden provided fresh produce all summer long, which my mother whipped up into many a tasty dinner, ethnic and otherwise. (Mom was never a batik-y type though -- she favored easy-care pantsuits in colors that could make your eyes water.) I take exception, however, with Flanagan's conclusion that "there was nothing to admire" about those women in transition and their disorganized households. Perhaps our mothers did not inspire "dreaminess" -- although as someone who spent her high school years filling notebooks with moody poetry and listening to Joni Mitchell, I'd venture that a shortage of dreaminess was not a chronic problem for young women of the day. But the disillusioned housewives who cast off their aprons in the late '60s and early '70s deserve credit for choosing to move into an uncertain future -- a future promising that, someday, maybe soon, a woman's worth would be measured by the full range of her capacities and the depth of her character, and not exclusively by her sex appeal (if she was single) and devotion to others (if she was married). Yet Flanagan decries feminists for encouraging the abdication of domestic responsibility:

What's missing from so many affluent American households is the one thing you can't buy: the presence of someone who cares deeply and principally about that home and the people who live in it; who is willing to spend a significant portion of each day thinking about what those people are going to eat and what clothes they will need for which occasions; who knows when it's time to turn the mattresses and when the baby needs to be taken out for fresh air and sunshine. Because I have no desire to be burned in effigy by the National Organization of Women, I am impelled to say that this is work either Mom or Dad could do, but in my experience women seem to have more of a connection to the work -- and the way it should be done -- than men do.

I'm convinced the great promise of feminism -- and perhaps why Flanagan, in her cultivated dependency, is so rabidly opposed to it -- is not the dictum that men and women ought to divvy up housework 50-50, but that its principles defend a woman's right to take responsibility for defining the terms of her own life and to act accordingly. Feminism proposes that meaning and wholeness are something we achieve through self-acceptance, something we bring to our relationships -- with our husbands, our children, our parents, our chosen work -- not what we squeeze out of them. This idea actually predates the era when (by Flanagan's reckoning) an alarming number of once-respectable Berkeley matrons gave in to the temptation to liberate themselves. Elizabeth Cady Stanton laid it all out in 1892: "The strongest reason for giving women all the opportunities for higher education, for the full development of her faculties, forces of mind and body; for giving her the most enlarged freedom of thought and action; a complete emancipation from all forms of bondage, of custom, dependence, superstition; from all the crippling influences of fear, is the solitude and personal responsibility of her own individual life."

If a woman realizes that her grandest gift and greatest pleasure is caring for her husband and children -- rather than studying art history, or teaching high school English, or novel-writing -- so be it. Surely, no on else can make that call. If she's financially secure and has the right kind of social capital, she may even be able to create something close to her ideal of family life (but since the course of true love has been known to take a nosedive, she'd be wise to plan for a future that might not include the adoring husband). What Flanagan deplores most is the notion that honoring one's authentic self is license to disregard the emotional and material needs of those who are bound to us by love and blood -- and no person of good conscience could disagree. Nor does it give permission to proselytize a chosen lifestyle -- particularly when one's chosen lifestyle is defined by desires and anxieties not all women share.

mmo : april 2006

Related reading:

Who's the fairest wife of all?
Laurie Abraham, Elle, April 2006
"For many women of my acquaintance, reading essayist Caitlin Flanagan is like deciding to take a walk through the woods in the fall during hunting season."

The happy hypocrite
Joan Walsh, Salon, 12.apr.06
I never cared that Caitlin Flanagan calls herself an at-home mother, even though she's a magazine writer with a staff of helpers. But now she's using her battle with cancer to denounce feminism and extol her traditional virtues -- and I've had it.

Caitlin Flanagan Watch, 2003 - 2004
Collected short essays

Bringing Up Baby
November 2004

Several MMO readers have confided that they take special pleasure in my periodic tirades about Caitlin Flanagan's provocative commentary on modern motherhood. And I hate to disappoint, but I do not have a single snarky thing to say about Flanagan's latest piece for the New Yorker ("Bringing Up Baby," November 15, 2004). Flanagan wryly observes that having a baby seems to transform normal people into obsessed supershoppers who simply must have one of everything in the newest, trendiest, most state-of-the-art baby gear.

Other writers and journalists have duly noted that today's mode of middle-class parenting seems to entail membership in a high-end and aggressively marketed consumer culture, and Flanagan follows suit by suggesting that a fair number of the gizmos and gadgets new parents believe they can't possibly live without will end up as so much yard sale fodder after minimal use. She adds that companies manufacturing and marketing baby products prey on the primal fears of parents and parents-to-be as well as their All-American acquisitiveness. It's not a pretty picture; yet I wonder (as Flanagan does not) whether parents are particularly vulnerable to frenetic over-consumption because they've bought into the cruel fantasy that child-rearing can be wonderfully fun and relaxing if you have the all right stuff to keep baby busy, safe and dry. After all, the alternative -- that caring for infants and toddlers is is rarely fun and normally exhausting -- is unthinkable.

Flanagan does not express her usual yearning for the more gracious and uncomplicated lifestyle of her childhood years even once in this essay (well, perhaps once), nor does she allude to her abiding ambivalence about whether it's best for young children to have mother at home full-time.. Perhaps Flanagan has mellowed -- or perhaps her editors at the New Yorker are reining in her oppositional edge -- but "Bringing Up Baby" is unlikely to create much of a stir. If this keeps up, we may start missing the old Caitlin and the controversy that trails in her wake.

"Bringing Up Baby" by Caitlin Flanagan,
The New Yorker, November 15, 2004
The New Yorker does not archive content online.

To Hell with All That
August 2004

Judging from the recent influx of emails, I was not the only mother/writer anxiously awaiting (or dreading, as the case may be) Caitlin Flanagan's formal debut as a new staff writer for The New Yorker. Flanagan, a forty-something mother of twin boys, earned her reputation by penning nostalgic and often cutting commentaries on the sorry state of modern motherhood for he Atlantic Monthly. Her central premise is that the new breed of mothers -- with all their ill-tempered yammering about the drudgery of housework, child-rearing and conjugal sex -- lack the composure and gentle good humor of the "happy housewives" of our mothers' (or grandmothers') generation. According to Flanagan, today's mothers are, by and large, missing the whole point of marriage and family life. Flanagan mourns the loss of the small touches of gracious living that were once the stock and trade of accomplished homemakers -- such as taking the trouble to make an attractive place setting, even for '60s-style frozen dinners served in tacky foil trays -- but she also has a penchant for hectoring affluent, career-oriented mothers who (she contends) heartlessly abandon their innocent children to the care of exploited third-world nannies without so much as turning a hair. In Flanagan's pampered and privileged world, second wave feminists really screwed things up for everybody when they convinced middle-class wives and mothers that there was more to life than making chopped salad and waxing the floor.

In her new essay for the New Yorker -- which is artfully written and really quite poignant -- we learn a bit more about why Flanagan is so out of sorts. In "To Hell With All That" (July 5, 2004), Flanagan writes that she was overcome by a soul-shattering sense of abandonment when her own homemaking mother (who, Flanagan once believed, "was happiest …when she was standing at her ironing board transforming a chaotic basket of wash into a set of sleek and polished garments") abruptly decided to quit scrubbing the kitchen wallpaper and get a job. When her mother's employment left 12-year old Caitlin at loose ends after school, the poor little thing was first traumatized by losing her house key (Flanagan admits she's "a hysteric by nature") and subsequently feared that she would be kidnapped by militant revolutionaries while her mother was in absentia. "The rhetoric of liberation," Flanagan writes, "exhorted women to go to work not in spite of their children but -- at least partly -- because of them. …Being on my own recognizance was supposed to toughen me up, to deliver me from my mother's crippling cosseting and vault me to new levels of independence -- not an unreasonable theory. If I had had a different temperament, it might have worked." Flanagan's mother eventually quit her job -- not to make life less stressful for young Caitlin, but to support her husband's career.

Flanagan expresses a degree of ambivalence about her own decision to stay at home full-time when her sons were born. Initially, she gushes with maternal feeling ("the emotion I felt staring down into their bassinettes was something akin to romantic fervor"), but later discovers that spending day-in and day-out with small children can be excruciatingly banal: "If the last gasp of my youth was to be spent sitting in a lawn chair in a tiny back yard watching little boys poke things with sticks, so be it."

What makes Flanagan's writing so interesting is not her infuriating attitude, but the arc of her personal history. Still somewhat shell-shocked by her mother's sudden bolt from the family's well-stocked kitchen, Flanagan is determined to shield her young sons from the presumed deprivations of maternal absence, even when the isolation and aimlessness of staying home makes her a little bit crazy. She's dead certain there will be a big pay off for her sacrifice; but when her sons enter nursery school, Flanagan admits, "I naively assumed the children would fall into two easily recognizable camps: the wan and neurotic kids of working mothers and the emotionally hardy, confident kids of stay-at-home mothers. What a bust. There was no difference at all that I could divine -- if anything, the kids of working mothers were more on the ball." In an especially revealing passage, she confesses to switch-hitting in the mommy wars at a pre-school fundraiser. Still, Flanagan's weakness is imagining that the weight of her private anxieties affects mothers at large. As MMO contributor Abby Arnold remarked in an email, "I found Flanagan's new article insidious: I enjoyed it, thought it balanced… until I had time to pull away from it and think of all the ways it was manipulating me to agree that the stay at home mom is best."

As in several of her essays for the Atlantic, Flanagan's latest wraps back around to the death of her mother. One might conclude that Flanagan's core subject is not motherhood per se, but motherlessness; we can only pray that the editors at the New Yorker have the good sense to keep her on track. Meanwhile, not all readers were terribly impressed by Flanagan's take on the strains of modern mothering. In the magazine's July 26, 2004 issue, a letter-writer observes: "Flanagan seems to believe that, because she was miserable when her mother went out to work, all children everywhere feel the same… Having worked her mother's choice into a sad psychodrama, she writes that for mothers -- not fathers, a subject she barely mentions -- the decision to work outside the home 'will always be the stuff of grinding anxiety and regret.' For her maybe, but not for everyone."

At this point, I should disclose that one of the reasons I'm completely fascinated by Flanagan's work (in addition to the fact that she writes about motherhood and I tend to disagree with her major points) is that our respective childhoods overlap to a surprising degree. We both grew up in Berkeley, California during the '60s and '70s (I'm a few years older), and we both had homemaker mothers and writer fathers who worked at the University. As it happens, my mom was brutally candid about her dislike of ironing and generally disdained the extra work of maintaining a fashionable home in favor of reading novels (and later completing her graduate studies). By the time I was 12, my after-school hours were frequently occupied caring for other people's little children -- a real job for which I was paid. However, I knew and admired girls like Flanagan, and I knew and admired women like her mother. I often wished our chaotic, no-frills household displayed some of the informal elegance and attention to detail that seemed to imbue those homes with love and warmth. But instead of inspiring a longing for the cozy comforts of yesteryear, becoming a mother sensitized me to the source of my own mother's frustration with confinement to homemaking and mothering, and reinforced my respect for the surge of political consciousness that partly freed the housewives of her generation -- and the generations that followed -- to pursue a different kind of self-fulfillment. And Flanagan may disagree with me, but I think it's time we finished the job that earlier wave of feminists started.

"To Hell With All That: One woman's decision to go back to work,"
Caitlin Flanagan, The New Yorker, July 5, 2004

"Leaving Home," letters to the editor on Flanagan's "To Hell with All That"
The New Yorker, July 26, 2004

The New Yorker does not archive content online.

Caitlin Flanagan's Nanny Problem
February 2004

Caitlin Flanagan is an exquisitely talented essayist who, as a young girl growing up in Berkeley during the 1960s and '70s, dreamed of being just like her mom -- in other words, she wanted to get married, pop out a couple of kids, and concentrate her finest energies on taking care of her family. But fate intervened, and Flanagan (who continues to refer to herself as a stay-at-home mother) was offered a job at the Atlantic Monthly, where she specializes in an interesting blend of literary criticism, nostalgic reflection and social commentary. Her most recent works -- including a controversial cover story for the January/February issue, "How Serfdom Saved the Women's Movement" -- are flavored by Flanagan's affectionate admiration for the life of her own housewife/activist mother, and her conviction that feminism is really not as good for women as it's cracked up to be.

According to Flanagan's latest critique, the Faustian bargain of the women's movement is that the professional achievement of a select group of highly privileged, well-educated women depends on the cheap caregiving labor of legions of economically marginalized, emotionally exploited women of color. Flanagan's outrage is somewhat perplexing, of course, since she cops to hiring a full-time nanny to care for her twins and deal with the grubbier housework, even before her job at the Atlantic materialized. (Rumor has it Flanagan is also hard at work on a book about "modern motherhood.") But what Flanagan glosses over is that in between the big winners (white, high-earning professional-class women) and the biggest losers of the women's movement (the low-income women they pay to take over the "women's work" in their households), there are millions and millions of mothers who reap the benefits of feminist activism -- from white collar women down to women working in the service sector, who have rights and protections in the workplace that did not exist in the era of happy housewives. As far as the ruling class exploiting the labor of underprivileged women, one can reasonably argue it's been ever thus. Historic precedent doesn't make it right, but it certainly undermines Flanagan's assertion that the current mistreatment of domestic workers is all feminist's fault.

Flanagan holds the moral high ground by insisting that the unregulated employment of third-world domestic workers is a serious social problem, and one that any feminist or mothers' advocate worth his or her salt must actively address. It's a valid point, especially since the domestic workforce is overwhelmingly female and many low-wage domestic workers are also mothers. The lamentable fact is that some nannies and housekeepers are made to work long, irregular hours, are paid less than a living wage, suffer extended separations from their own children and families, and experience poverty in old age when employers fail to pay the employment taxes required by law. But just how pervasive is this deplorable situation?

Not very, it turns out. According to 1999 data from the U.S. Census Bureau, just over 3 percent of all preschool children were cared for by a non-relative in their own homes. That would be in comparison to 50 percent of children under five who were cared for by parents or relatives while their mothers worked, and another 18 percent who received center-based day care. Of preschool children whose employed mothers have four or more years of college, a mere 8 percent were cared for by nannies or in-home baby sitters. And we can assume that in at least some of these arrangements, nannies are treated fairly and decently since their work is indispensable to the well-being of the families who employ them.

Flanagan's real message is that professional mothers can't expect to have their cake and eat it, too. She wants to make sure women know exactly what they've sacrificed to make it in a man's world -- which, of course, is the perfect and unspoiled love of their children. Flanagan is in an excellent position to bring this to our attention, since she apparently has a paranormal sensitivity to the interior life of the child, as when she writes: "There isn't a nanny in the world who has not received a measure of love that a child would rather have bestowed on his mother."

Given that children arrive in the world as entirely separate and self-contained beings, and seem to be (based on close observation) in full possession of their own little hearts and minds, it's rather startling to see anyone make such a sweeping pronouncement with unshakable confidence. Setting aside the fantastic idea that good mothers always know, with unwavering certainty, the precise nature of their children's private worlds, how on earth can we take such wild projection about the source of a child's joy or longing at face value? Is a child's love a finite, non-renewable resource? Is there really only just so much of it to go around? How much of our knowledge about the nature of the intimate bond between mother and child is incontrovertibly true, and how much is merely truism that serves a larger ideological agenda? Are we feeling guilty yet?

How Serfdom Saved the Women's Movement
Caitlin Flanagan, The Atlantic Monthly, March 2004

An interview with Caitlin Flanagan
on The Atlantic Monthly Web site (www.theatlantic.com)

Related commentary:

Professionals Who Are Mothers Take a Hit (Again)
Emily Bazelon, Women's eNews, 18.feb.04
Caitlin Flanagan's call for feminists to renew their commitment to social activism in this month's Atlantic Monthly strikes our commentator as worthy. But she flinches at the slamming of "professional-class" mothers.

On Slate: Am I Abusing My Nanny?
A conversation in four parts with Caitlin Flanagan, Barbara Ehrenreich and Sara Mosle. February 2004.

Back to the Kitchen, Circa 1950, with Caitlin Flanagan
Hillary Frey, Ms. Magazine, Winter 2004
Frey complains that Flanagan "has staked her career on accusing the women's movement of ruining relations between women and their children, not to mention women and men. With her memories of baking cookies and the smell of cinnamon wafting through her more nostalgic passages of prose, she seems to say that life could be easy if we all just surrendered to motherhood and apple pie."

"What Flanagan has dismissed as a genre of whining," Frey continues, "is what many of us would like to see more of, in The New Yorker and The Atlantic, for instance: women and men writing about the challenges they face as they try to balance careers and home lives."

Wistful thinking
A flurry of new articles focus on an earlier generation of mothers writing about motherhood
April 2003

"Mother Lit" is hot. The publishing world has discovered motherhood, and mothers are snapping up new works that reflect the emotional contours of their messy -- and sometimes messed-up -- lives. Editors speculate that the popularity of books such as Ann Crittenden's The Price of Motherhood, Allison Pearson's I Don't Know How She Does It and Cathi Hanauer's The Bitch In the House marked the beginning of a profitable bookselling trend.

This, of course, is great news for women who hope to blend the work of writing with mothering -- and we seem to be everywhere nowadays. The sudden proliferation of mother-writers is not necessarily opportunistic, since women poets, authors and journalists can and often do become mothers. But there's also a dearly held theory that the writing life can be successfully incorporated into a daily routine which includes attending to the needs of young children -- not easily and not always merrily, but rumor has it that it can be done. Although a private space, if not a room of one's own, is highly recommended, authoring is not an activity the requires the kind of expensive or delicate equipment that provokes the destructive impulses of a two-year-old, or one that's unusually time sensitive (until an editorial deadline looms). Unlike occupations that depend on the job-holder's ability to satisfy irritable clients on demand or comply with a rigid schedule, writing seems to tolerate the necessary trade offs between working time and parenting time reasonably well.

Personally, I like to think motherhood opens up mental space for the kind of introspection that stimulates the creative process -- that perhaps as we go through the frequently grinding and unglamorous duties of mothering, we become more attuned to the complicated and changing ways our present lives are connected to our children, our partners and our pasts. Motherhood becomes a new lens through which to view the world, and, for good or ill (but mostly for good), a fair number of mothers are determined to write about it.

Mothers write about motherhood in any number of ways, but there's a particular genre of humorous writing about the daily challenges of child-rearing and homemaking that reached its pinnacle in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Mothers still write about amusing entanglements with the kids, the house, the husband and the pets in a manner that replays their experience as both harrowing and hilarious -- short stories and personal essays in this style are the mainstay of every popular women's magazine, and the best of these works are a pleasure to read. But several thoughtful reviewers have come forward to suggest that none of the new contenders can compare to the true masters of domestic wit -- Jean Kerr, Erma Bombeck, and Shirley Jackson.

In the Summer 2003 issue of Brain, Child Magazine, Sundae Horn offers a retrospective of the works of Bombeck, Kerr (whose best known work is Please Don't Eat the Daisies) and Jackson -- who, in addition to writing The Lottery and other sinister fiction, penned two charming books about the trials and tribulations of family life in small town Vermont. Horn wonders why these fifty-year old books still make us laugh: "Sure women have more options now," she writes, "but revisiting these chronicles of domestic life before the revolution shows that motherhood and marriage, and especially housekeeping, haven't changed much at all."

Horn may be exaggerating -- elements of all three authors' material do seem seriously dated -- but there's no denying their writing is still funny and smart. Stylistically, Jackson, Kerr and Bombeck had little in common, but all shared a self-deprecating style of humor that still hits the spot. Kerr had an especially wicked sense of timing and a flair for delivering a punch line dead-on. All had an ability to be genuinely touching without resorting to syrupy sentimentality, and did not bat an eye about describing their children as "horrible little beasts."

Another interesting commentary related to this trio of mother/writers comes from Caitlin Flanagan, who highlights the work of Erma Bombeck in her essay Housewife Confidential for the the Atlantic Monthly (September 2003). Flanagan muses on the contrast between the modest expectations of the "old-fashioned" housewives of our mother's generation -- the target audience for Bombeck's acerbic observations about the casual absurdities of wife and motherdom -- and the over-inflated anxieties of "stay-at-home" moms today.

In comparison to housewives of the '60s and '70s -- who, Flanagan contends, viewed child rearing as an incidental aspect of marriage and homemaking -- today's "at-home mother defines herself by her relationship to her children. She is making sacrifices on their behalf, giving up a career to give them something only she can… She must find a way to combine the traditional women's work of childrearing with the kind of shared housework arrangements and domestic liberation that working mothers enjoy. Most importantly, she must somehow draw a line in the sand between the valuable, important work she is doing and the pathetic imprisonment, the Doll's House existence, of the housewife of old."

Flanagan's critique is not entirely unsympathetic to contemporary middle-class mothers who've prioritized caregiving over careers (Flanagan describes herself as an at-home mother, even though she has a regular writing gig with the Atlantic Monthly), but she questions the self-absorption of women who've chosen the neo-traditional path of putting children first and foremost. More poignantly, Flanagan's essay is also a gentle homage to her own housewife mother, who she portrays as active, involved and blithely unaware of the incompatibility of housework and a healthy reserve of self-esteem.

Two recent essays focus on the life and work of Jean Kerr: "Giving Mirth" by Elizabeth Austin in the March 2003 issue of the Washington Monthly and "Days of Wine and Daisies: The Happy Life and Work of Jean Kerr" by Susie Currie in the April 14, 2003 edition of the Weekly Standard.

"Days of Wine and Daisies" covers some biographical ground -- in addition to her popular books on the exigencies of domestic life, Kerr was a successful playwright -- but Currie manages to merge Kerr's identity with the character played by actress Doris Day in the film version of "Please Don't Eat the Daisies." She seems slightly more entranced by Day's portrayal of Kerr's alter ego than by Kerr herself; there is a sense that Currie imagines the author's life as a kind of film set where the inevitable upsets of marriage and parenting are brighter and more amusing than anything we can possibly muster in our dreary post-feminist lives.

Elizabeth Austin seems to labor under similar sycophantic illusions when she blurs the boundaries between Jean Kerr's life and her literature in an essay for the Washington Monthly. "For modern women writers, balancing work and family is agony," she writes. "For Jean Kerr, it was an art form." We'll never know if the balancing act was agonizing for Kerr -- or for Jackson or Bombeck -- since these writers only describe the practical challenges of mixing up family with a literary career in passing, if at all. For Jackson -- who was a prolific writer, and by all accounts a highly disciplined one -- juggling the demands her rowdy household and her dark muse may indeed have been a struggle. And as Austin admits in her essay, Jean Kerr "never lets us that far inside."

Though Austin concedes even "in Kerr's heyday, that image of the harried but happy mom occasionally smacked of the emotional airbrush," she reveals that her private ambition is to emulate not the flesh-and-blood woman who was Jean Kerr, but the persona Kerr invented in her writing.

As a young fan of Kerr's work, Austin latched onto the idea that the "blueprint for happiness" was to "find a nice, literate husband, buy a tumbledown Victorian house, fill it with clever mischievous children and big slobbery dogs with whimsical names, and spend your leisure moments tossing off witty little essays on the vicissitudes of domestic life." From what we can glean from Austin's essay, it seems that she actually gave this method a whirl (for example, she reveals she has two large dogs, whimsically and literately named "Benchley" and "Dickens"). Austin does not go into the details of any flaws she may have stumbled upon in her optimistic life plan, but she mentions that when she called Kerr (who died in early 2003 at the age of 80) to complain that "it is far funnier to read about collapsing plaster, incontinent dogs and impertinent toddlers than it is to deal with them on a daily basis," Kerr "freely admitted that she had edited out some of the less amusing aspects of both homemaking and publishing."

Perhaps that should have been obvious from the get-go, but Austin gripes that "mother/writers of the half-century have focused on the anxieties and stresses of parenting." She also grumbles that Erma Bombeck's "wise-cracking oy-vey approach to life guaranteed her a huge audience, although it didn't do much for the psyche of the American mother. It's downright dispiriting to read much Bombeck. Her world is one of unappreciated, unfulfilled wives and mothers drudging away year after year, hoping to receive one glimmer of recognition that will make it all worthwhile." Austin's withering dismissal of Bombeck's work -- which I've always found outrageously funny -- may be due to the fact that Bombeck, unlike Kerr, was not hesitant to inhabit a world where hostility pooled close to the surface of domestic life.

In Austin's most nostalgic moment, she writes: "The thing I most love about Kerr, and the generation of women who were her most loyal readers, is that they seemed to be taking motherhood on a pass-fail basis. They weren't competing desperately for straight A's on the homefront -- nor were they 'surrendered' wives and mothers, submerging their identities in the giant gaping maw of family life." Austin's longing for a happier time when women's life choices were less conflicted seems to overlook that Kerr's side-splitting accounts of family life were, to a degree, fictionalized -- in essence if not in detail. But it's worth paying attention to what Austin writes about the perceived difference between mothers then and now.

This generation of mothers -- and writing by mothers about motherhood that's meaty enough to stick to the ribs -- does tend to project a certain aura of angst. In one way or another, most of us seem to be absorbed by our children's constant needs, or preoccupied with the effort not to be -- a proposition that's bound to create tension, either way. There's a suspicion that in the process of becoming mothers, we somehow lose our existential nametags and have to go through the process of reconstructing our distinctive identities from Square One. Then there's the constant insecurity that, when it comes to raising children in today's world, you can never be too sure you're doing the right thing. With a little uninterrupted time and enough talent, we might be able to transform some of the more aggravating or mortifying incidents of family life into a brilliantly funny essay or two, but those moments rarely feel like barrel of fun when we're living through them -- and I'd hazard a guess it wasn't a whole lot different for mothers in the '50s, '60s, or '70s.

The thing that strikes me about this collection of essays is that the writers share a sense of regret that our lives will never be as emotionally simple as we like to believe our mothers' lives were. Our options for combining work and family are liberating, but they bear down on us as well. Cultural attitudes about the health and safety of children have also changed dramatically in the last 50 years -- Shirley Jackson never had to worry that her hyperactive and high-spirited firstborn would be diagnosed as ADHD, and Kerr never bothered to say whether she frantically dialed poison control after her crafty little darlings devoured the famous flower arrangement. Life is not as light as we might like it to be -- and perhaps that's the key to the enduring popularity of women's literature that minimizes the real pain and inevitable failures of marriage and child-rearing .

Maybe mothers today do need to relax, kick back, and stop fretting so much about the kids and the meaning of it all. Obsess less and enjoy more. Allow ourselves to be imperfectionists once in awhile. Let's be happy-go-lucky, and let ourselves laugh about the fine mess we've gotten ourselves into. But let's not get so damn slaphappy that we stop writing the truth about motherhood.

Housewife Confidential:
A tribute to the old-fashioned housewife, and to Erma Bombeck, her champion and guide
Caitlin Flanagan. The Atlantic Monthly, September 2003.

The More Things Change… Revisiting the First Wave of Mother Lit
Sundae Horn, Brain, Child Magazine, Summer 2003.

Also by Sundae Horn for Brain, Child:
The Women Who Would Be Erma (and Jean and Shirley):
Modern Adventures in Writing and Mothering

Days of Wine and Daisies: The Happy Life and Work of Jean Kerr
Susie Currie, The Weekly Standard, April 2003

Giving Mirth
Elizabeth Austin, The Washington Monthly, March 2003