I loved this book and author review this morning in the National Post. It’s about writer Caitlin Flanagan and her new book To Hell with All That: Fearing and Loathing Our Inner Housewife
As a respected staff writer for The New Yorker, Caitlin Flanagan doesn’t seem like the type of person who would make feminist blood boil, but that’s exactly what her new book is doing
Samantha Grice, National Post
Published: Wednesday, April 26, 2006Caitlin Flanagan has made a lot of women very angry—and has positively outraged a few more after that.
Flanagan, a wife, mother of eight-year-old twin boys and staff writer at The New Yorker, did this by stating one bitter pill of truth: “When a mother works, something is lost.” It is her opinion that the gold standard for raising children is at home with a mother who loves them, and the feminists hate her for it.
“I said the truth, and you always get in trouble when you say the truth,” explained Flanagan, in Toronto last week to talk about her book To Hell with All That: Fearing and Loathing Our Inner Housewife.
“I said one true thing about a little piece of American life and that is: If you love your work and you love your child and you decide to give your child less of you to go to work, you missed something big and important and so did your child.”
Of course, what really lights a fire under Flanagan’s critics is that the writer is enjoying a successful career and wittily repeating her thoughts on a range of womanly topics such as weddings (she’s had two), mothering, nannies (she had one), sex and, as the title suggests, ironing (women have an emotional connection to it) while on a book tour—thousands of miles away from her sons. This is not lost on the fiery Flanagan.
“People say to me, ‘Caitlin Flanagan, your book is full of contradictions.’ Well, A+, that’s right. It’s a book about contradictions. It’s a book about the fact that right now I’m here living my career and I have two little boys thousands of miles away, and this is kind of a great moment in my career and a horrible moment in my life as a mother. If I was sitting here with a feminist, she would say, ‘Your kids will love this because you are so happy now! And one day they’ll know their mom was someone important in the world!’
“My kids don’t give a shit,” she says baldly. “They are eight years old. They want their mom around and I don’t blame them and that’s why I’ve had 27 interviews in one day—because I made the book tour short and my publisher angry because I said I’m going to give up some of my career.”
[…]
The article includes some critiques from various media across America. This one from the liberal-left entertainment industry pamphlet called Entertainment Weekly caught my attention. It’s so fair and balanced and oh, not revealing of the typical liberal media writer’s typically leftist political leanings at all:
Every time I read antifeminist firebrand Caitlin Flanagan, I fight with her in my head for days. And so the appearance of her radioactive New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly essays—on nannies, housework, sex—in To Hell With All That has had me fibrillating for a week.
Jennifer Reese, Entertainment Weekly
You might want to grab a defibrillator and a little perspective, in addition to a little tolerance for a non-liberal feminist point-of-view, Reese.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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