it's not a mommy war, it's a culture war; or, Happy Mother's Day, Caitlin Flanagan!

My housekeeper didn't show up today; she called after lunch to say that her daughter had broken her arm and she had just gotten home from the doctor and could she come tomorrow instead? How about Monday? I asked, thinking that this would be easier for her and for us. Yes, she said, Monday.

But of course this morning I had done MY half of the housework to get ready for the houskeeper to come and do the OTHER half, and because this week I wanted her to do some extra things, I had gone ahead and stripped the boys' beds and cleaned the kitchen--you know, to make up for the extra things. So this afternoon, I had to finish what I started, because despite their protestations, the boys can't sleep on bare mattresses tonight, and then I thought that while I was at it I could take a Clorox wipe to the fixtures in our bathroom which made me think that, really, it was the BOYS' bathroom I ought to be wiping up and maybe spraying with Lysol before I put out clean hand towels and bath rugs. I did all that, and now my house is in some funny limbo where it's not REALLY clean, but it SMELLS kind of clean and the bathrooms are fairly germ-free--in other words, I spent an hour doing the kind of half-assed houskeeping that led me to hire the cleaning lady in the first place.

All of which made me think that I should finally write about To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife. Caitlin Flanagan has been taken to task by liberals and Democrats and feminists (and liberal Democrat feminists, which is where I put myself on the spectrum) for being classist and racist and sexist, and I agree with all these criticisms. But honestly, they weren't what struck me the most about this book.

Flanagan writes that this book "is about the stubborn longing for an earlier way of life, and about the way that longing manifests and reasserts itself in the imagination of so many modern women. It is less a book about what we have gained than it is a book about what we have lost" (xxiii). In her exploration of "what we have lost," Flanagan offers some really insightful observations about the cultural swing towards idealizing domesticity (the return of the BIG white wedding, the middle class adoption of the nanny, the deification of Martha Stewart); these parts of the book--the historical and sociological readings--are fascinating and spot-on. But each of these observations is followed by a story from Flangan's own life--my personal horrific favorite being the one in which she encourages her nanny to protest the government's treatment of domestic workers, but refuses to pay the nanny when she wants the day off to participate in a strike.

Through all of this, I kept waiting for Flanagan to make some larger connection to other cultural trends, because I think there is a clear link between this longing for Donna Reed and bans on gay marriage and abortion, and fears about sexual predators and the safety of our public schools, and our obsession with SuperNanny and plastic surgery shows--all of which evidence, to me, a longing for the kind of past that Flanagan mourns. But instead of following through and reading this in some definitive and useful way (the home--and by default the, wife and mother, who is always identified with the home--is the site of the new culture war, for example, which I think it is), she writes about how she responded to her son's bout with stomach flu by summoning the nanny to clean up the mess. No wonder the feminists are angry.

Flanagan is dead on that what we are seeing is a nostalgia for a bygone era, but her happy claims about how she is embracing her traditional marriage don't do anything to allay--or even identify--the fears that are causing this nostalgia. In the wake of Columbine and Elizabeth Smart and 9/11, we are all desperate for a time and place where home felt like a safe haven, and we are looking to women--to mothers--to make the world safe again. When things go wrong at home--in the house, in our schools, in our country--women are blamed. After the Columbine shootings, the media asked over and over how it was possible that the shooters' parents--particularly their mothers--didn't know what was going on. When Elizabeth Smart was kidnapped from her own bedroom, it was her mother's fault because she was the one who brought the crazy man into the house in the first place. And most wrenching of all is the story of Laura Manning, who was badly burned in the 9/11 attacks at the World Trade Center and spent nearly a year in hospital recovering--a year in which, media reports emphasized over and over, her infant son learned to walk and celebrated his first birthday without her--because, see, she risked her life to go to work instead of staying home with her baby.

We live in a culture of fear and the media's obsession with the "Mommy wars" plays on this fear by insinuating--or, really, saying right out--that women are failing their children no matter what they do. The domestic sphere has always been associated with women, while the public sphere is the province of men. When women leave the home and step into the public sphere, bad things happen. Likewise, when men settle too comfortably into the domestic, the world goes to hell. I think Flanagan is absolutely right that we are longing for a time when things were simple--but she is overlooking the reality that "simple" often meant "unjust" and "oppressive."

To Hell With All That is well written and often funny, but it was a baffling read for me. Over and over, Flanagan seems to be on the verge of some fascinating revelation about our society--about how living in a credit-based culture means that anyone can buy class, about how nannies walk the line between members of the family and hired help, about how breast cancer threatens to rob women of their essential femininity--but she doesn't follow through. And this, more than her politics, was what I found so disappointing.