by JULIET WATERS

I get asked all the time whether or not I’m going to review a certain author, but not usually six months ahead of a book’s release date. Such, however, is the advance buzz—or more accurately bile—that comes with Caitlin Flanagan’s To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Your Inner Housewife. And the friend who asked me this isn’t even a wife or mother.

No. I swore. I would not review Flanagan’s defence of motherlove because as she herself has put it: “The tiresome question of whether or not women ought to stay home with their children has become the stuff of an endless, fruitless debate framed around the assumption that with enough talk, talk, talk ( the woman’s cure-all), the correct solution to the puzzle can be divined and the whole subject laid to rest.”

Also, I have learned from bitter experience after crucifying a book by Danielle Crittenden which also argued that mothers should stay home with their children and not work outside the home [“Axis of bitch,” June 19, 2003]. Try to prune out one strident advocate of motherlove and two more will pop up. And this time they won’t be obvious targets like the wife of David Frum. One of them will probably front a punk rock band, or in Flanagan’s case, one of them will be a self-described feminist and liberal who is a staff writer for The New Yorker.

I believe wholeheartedly, without any guilt or doubt, that I am a far better mother than I ever could have been thanks to Quebec’s high quality universal daycare. Just as I believe wholeheartedly that if it is ever going to be available in the rest of North America, it’s not going to come about through a consensus among women. It’s going to come about as it did here, a consensus among enough women, plus one woman with the political clout of a Pauline Marois—mother of four and senior minister of every government portfolio short of Premier. Until then, women on the rest of the continent can debate this until they’re blue in the face. Until they have a generation who are equally nostalgic about their great daycares and their great mothers, they probably will.

Still I couldn’t resist, and then I couldn’t stop. Like the way I sometimes can’t resist conservative columnist David Brooks in The New York Times. There’s just something special about the kind of columnist who manages to piss off almost as many people inside his own camp as outside. Like Brooks, Flanagan has a great nose for the sociological absurdities of middle and upper middle class living. It’s not hard to see how she’s made a niche for herself in high-culture rags like The New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly with topics that have traditionally been relegated to women’s magazines and newspapers (and if nothing else that might be a hopeful sign that these issues are poking their way up in the political agenda.)

Within a page or two she reels you in with her acerbic take on the excessive stress of those convinced they can have it all: the wealth, the family, the career and the perfectly intact social conscience. Plus you have to give her a point or two for securing social security for her Guatemalan nanny. Then, just as she has you nodding your head with contended pity towards tragic trends like sexless marriages, debt-monster weddings and nanny betrayal, she lobs a giant sentimental spitball at you. Like: “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.”

Sorry. Not convinced. Not even a little. I still think what’s really missing is someone in government who also cares deeply, principally and genuinely about the home and the people who live in it. When more women have that, motherlove will cease to become such a hot button. And from my experience, the spit just won’t stick.

To Hell with All That by Caitlin Flanagan,
Little, Brown. hc, 288pp, $29.95