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To Hell With All That
Loving And Loathing Our Inner Housewife
by Caitlin Flanagan

4.2 based on 12 reviews read critic reviews how did we calculate this? based on 5 votes read user comments rate this book

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• Official Publisher Site

New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly writer Caitlin Flanagan offers an anti-feminist look at modern-day motherhood.

Little, Brown, 272 pages
04/17/2006
$22.95

ISBN: 0316736872

Nonfiction
Social Sciences

All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...

The New York Times Book Review Pamela Paul

What makes Flanagan's book original and vital is that she is a realist, willing to acknowledge the essential gray areas in too often polarized positions. As it stands, sensitivities are so attuned to the slightest insult of any one of women's myriad work-life choices that Flanagan's simplest observations — for example, when a woman works something is lost — are taken as an indictment of working women. Yet any working mother can see the truth in such a statement: time spent working = less time with children = something lost. What's appalling is that pointing this out raises such ire.

LA Weekly Ella Taylor

Even women who can’t stand what Flanagan has to say concede that she’s a terrific writer. I wish we had more like her on the left — her trenchant wit and breezily fluid prose make Maureen Dowd’s look like the work of a shrill amateur.

Wall Street Journal Jennifer Graham

Shrewdly, Ms. Flanagan does not attempt to offer a solution to the tension between at-home and at-office mothers. It would be difficult for her to garner support from one side or the other, since she doesn't belong to either.

Publishers Weekly

Flanagan's take on why modern mothers are conflicted about their roles is so witty and well researched...that it's easy to overlook that she offers no evidence to back up her chief notion "that women have a deeply felt emotional connection to housekeeping." [27 Feb 2006, p.51]

Entertainment Weekly Jennifer Reese

Her unforgiving portraits of women, and the free pass issued to their mates, make my blood boil.

New York Observer Alexandra Jacobs

But just when you expect to find chocolate chips in her sweet little prose treats, there are little rat-poison pellets instead.

Washington Post Emily Bazelon

Flanagan is tediously 1950s about gender roles: Girls should take home economics; boys should take shop. Also maddening is her penchant for whittling down her audience to a very small number of wealthy Americans. Forget the high-end preschool that her sons attend; this is a woman who writes of herself and her husband, "To my certain knowledge, neither one of us ever has changed the sheets." Ever?

Chicago Tribune Lauren F. Winner

The central contradiction of Flanagan's life and work is that she doesn't do any of the cooking or housekeeping she so lauds, and she doesn't seem to do much of the parenting.

Salon Joan Walsh

I put the book aside for almost two months because even though I'm tough, I'm not tough enough to kick someone with cancer, and Flanagan deserves a kick for the dishonest and divisive gloss these new essays give the book, and her whole career.

San Francisco Chronicle Sheerly Avni

The problem is not the unwavering demands of motherhood, but the unwavering demands of parenthood matched with the unwavering demands of the workplace and a culture still not willing to grant equal rights and privileges to its citizens (the Equal Rights Amendment did fail to pass, after all). In an honest book, men would be a part of this story.

Slate Ann Hulbert

The problem was also that her polemic, coming from a preening mother with flexible hours and an all but invisible husband, undercut itself. Instead of a serious call to action, it boiled down to paternalist posturing by a lady who had belatedly discovered how good it felt to be legal: Social Security for the help was her rallying cry. To which it was tempting to retort: Change your own sheets, and spare us the preaching.

Los Angeles Times Susan Salter Reynolds

But when Flanagan shifts focus to hiring a nanny, her writing becomes so whiny, self-indulgent and frankly bizarre that it capsizes the book entirely.

The average user rating for this book is 4.2 (out of 10) based on 5 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Julie J gave it a2:
she IS a good writer, just not a very good thinker. She never considers the possibility that having children is a choice, and that you may choose not to have them.

Nancy M gave it an8:
Did we read the same book? Speaking as "the average stay-at-home-mom" I totally related to many parts of Flanagan's book. She's managed to pin point an ironic contradictiin that plagues woman today. We've moved on from the bad old days when the domestic sphere didn't really matter to anyone except the women who were trapped in it due to the discrimination they met whenever they tried to leave it to a time when how women spend their time has become the focus of intense debate. Women who stay at home now ostensibly do so by choice, justifying it in terms of their children, (the only vaguely socially acceptable reason for doing so), women who work may or may not do it by choice, but those who do make the case that they don't feel comfortable wasting their talent and potential at home with the kids, never mind giving up the status that drawing a wage conveys. The falicy is that we have meaningful choices at all. For instance, when the debate about legalizing nannies comes up, as it often does, no one, including Flanagan ever makes the point that chlidcare is too expensive, full stop. For many women paying off the books makes the difference between being able to afford a nanny or not. The current sitionation does nothing to improve things for working women or nannies. As far as housekeeping is concerned, again Flanagan exploits another contradiction. We're supposed to spend all our time with our children (never leave child unattended) but we struggle to do all the household tasks that mark the continuity between past and present. If we're lucky and can hire help or have some natural affinity for it, we're okay. More often we're not and long for and in our imaginations create a mythical household that runs as if the person keeping house were a professional, with standards and some social recognition of the work place. Working women often have the same notion since they usually organize domestic work on top of their jobs. How Flanagan works, got her job, looks after her kids is actually irrelevant but because we have inherited this naive notion that the personal is political (never mind the social context) many people are apparently happier to reading into her work than actually read it. There's something in what she says. Give the book a chance.

Cindy G gave it a1:
What's your point exactly? Flanagan tries to make a case for reinventing the art of housework, using herself as the poster child. She's the anti-feminist, waxing poetic on how the women's movement has damaged the ancient art of housewifery. But what she fails to see is the very hypocrisy in portraying herself as the ultimate, self-sacrificing stay-at-home mom ... with a full-time nanny. Where she writes of her prowess in putting her chldren first, I read woman of privilege who can afford a nanny, maid and gardener. She even says that when the children were sick, the nanny did the hard work. How does the average stay-at-home relate to this? They can't and they won't. Flangan's writing is more about herself than the world that real women face.

Michael L gave it a1:
I can't give this book a zero; it has occasional flashes of wit, in a snarkily Tory kind of way. I might even have gone up to a two, if she hadn't tried to elicit our pity with her special pleading for herself as a cancer victim. This pampered nitwit and self-described "happy hypocrite" is not incompetent as a writer, merely as a human being. Flanagan has made a career as a reactionary satirist seemingly incapable of perceiving the needs of others less wealthy than herself, writing for other smug, self-satisfied daughters of privilege wealthy enough not to be forced to make the choices she mocks with acid "humor." I wonder how poorly someone like this does in raising her own children. Oh! I forgot! She's paid others to do the tough stuff for her. Pfaughh!

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