New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly writer Caitlin Flanagan offers an anti-feminist look at modern-day motherhood.
Critic Reviews
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Favorable
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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.
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Favorable
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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.
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Mixed
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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.
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Mixed
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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]
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Mixed
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Entertainment Weekly Jennifer Reese
Her unforgiving portraits of women, and the free pass issued to their mates, make my blood boil.
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Unfavorable
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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.
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Unfavorable
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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?
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Unfavorable
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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.
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Terrible
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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.
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Terrible
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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.
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Terrible
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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.
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Terrible
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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.
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