Speaking of upper-class, head-in-the-sand happy housewife nonsense...

[atommom]

This woman takes the cake. She's a self-proclaimed "housewife" who has nannies and housekeepers to deal with the details, while she writes articles about the evils of working motherhood. I could only post a few snips here, but the whole thing is worth reading, in a makes-your-teeth-hurt kind of way...

We've gotten here because though Flanagan moons over the domestic arts in her writing, she also jauntily reports that in her married life, she has never so much as changed a sheet or been asked to sew on a button, nor could she tell you the price of a single item in her refrigerator. (She also tells me that she's not a “big doer of laundry.”) I ask her why she glorifies housewifery when she shuns its tasks. “For the '50s housewife, the standards in a sense were a lot lower. You know she's putting the roast into the oven or whatever,” she offers. “Modern standards of housekeeping are deplorably low—when you go into these houses, they do not eat hot food.” Her voice drops, as if she's telling a devastating secret. “They do not eat hot food!” she repeats in staccato. “Things are getting nuked. They're eating subpar, rotten food, but then you go to a dinner party at their house and you think Paul Bocuse has been there.” She sounds genuinely disgusted.

For the next few minutes, Flanagan expounds on home-cooked meals, saying how much she missed them when she was sharing an apartment just out of college, working some “dopey job” in Washington, DC. “I felt so lonely, and so sad, and so unwelcome, and I just think it's really great when, if someone's out all day and working, and working, and working—and some days he might be late,” she adds, the “he” being her husband, Rob, whose last name Flanagan does not like to reveal but who, as has been written elsewhere, is a Mattel executive who produced Barbie in the Nutcracker and Barbie of Swan Lake. “I always have his dinner out. It's not fancy. But someone had a hot meal waiting for him. Someone loved him. Someone thought he was out all day dealing with business. It's like you come through that door, Yeah, a hot meal,” she says dreamily.

“Media executives love the idea of a quote-unquote catfight between the stay-at-home mother and the working mother,” says Ehrenreich, who also debated Flanagan online about her “Serfdom” essay. “The media love a fight, and they'll do anything to pick it, including fielding people like her.”

Another reason Flanagan might find much favor in the male-dominated magazine-of-ideas milieu is that her compassion for the plight of men is boundless, while women, frequently, should just shut up and put out. “In the old days,” Flanagan writes, “a housewife understood that in addition to ironing her husband's shirts and cooking the Sunday roast, she was, with some regularity, going to have relations with the man of the house.”

http://www.elle.com/article.asp?section_id=37&article_id=8556&page_number=1

[lukasahero]

1. What a witch.

That was my first thought reading the last line of the essay. What a witch. She is deliberately hurtful to the interviewer using a situation that she originally told the interviewer not to fret over, SHE turns around and uses it in judgment of her. :mad:

This was a good article - I was surprised since I wasn't sure the interviewer had it in her at first. When I read this description of her writing "arch humor, and a cheeky, un-P.C. willingness to, for example, call teenage girls who give blow jobs “little whores,” ", I thought the interviewer bought into what she was selling. But then she really took her on and turned all of her inconsistencies and hypocrisies against her. Good job.

[atommom]

3. That last line really struck me too.

Her venomous nature really came shining through there. I thought the interviewer did a good job of letting her hang herself with her own rope. ;)

[Warpy]

2. Pants warmer!

Every big Irish family had one. She was the little dear who would get up ahead of everybody else, make a big fire, and not heat water for tea but arrange all the men's pants in front of the fire so their dear little arses wouldn't get cold when they'd get out of bed. (dripping with venomous sarcasm that the DU smiley isn't capable of conveying) Then the rest of the women would rise and find there was no fuel in the house for them to cook breakfast with.

I'm barely able to stifle an urge to reach through my computer screen, grab her by the throat, pull her through into my life, scrub her face of all that trophy wife makeup, get her into jeans and a sweat shirt, and hand her a MOP. She's one of those well manicured and coifed women who has the maid polish those acres of granite and stainless steel in her kitchen, while she's unable to produce a boiled egg in it. She deplores the frozen dinners of the working class while she thinks nothing of zapping a catered dinner from a restaurant for her poor, struggling husband.

Of course, she'll fade into obscurity before that dose of reality that happens to nearly all of us, finding out that her poor, put upon husband is consistently late because he's auditioning her replacement, her looks are gone, and all she has to offer the world is a lifetime of being an utterly useless human being with a hateful mouth.

[geniph]

4. That woman has some serious emotional issues

not least of which is projection - she projects her own insecurities and neuroses on others. What struck me is a) her extreme reaction to her mother going to work when she was TWELVE. Separation anxiety of that sort is expected in a toddler; if a 12-year-old can't deal with mom being at work for a couple of hours after she gets home from school, that child is in need of counseling. And b) she admits herself that she is nearly pathological about being alone in the house, ever. So she then projects those anxieties onto her children, and makes the inferential leap of illogic that ALL children are left anxious and neurotic by their mother working outside the home.

I've got a newsflash for her: I liked being alone when I was a child. I've grown into an adult who treasures my solitude.

I have ZERO empathy with these high-maintenance, upper-class, dogmatic WASPy types who simply assume that all children are better off with constant parental involvement and that mothers who work are doing so out of some sort of selfishness. Lady, goddammit, MY MOTHER DIDN'T HAVE A CHOICE WHETHER OR NOT TO WORK. It was either work, or have all six of her children fucking starve to death. My husband's mother tried to stay home with her three children, but her husband was an itinerant Pentecostal minister, and again, they'd have starved without her income. To inflict the additional burden of guilt on such women - working-class women slaving at McJobs for minimum wage while leaving their kids to be cared for by a patchwork of friends, relatives, and other caregivers - is simply unconscionable cruelty or horrific ignorance or both.

WORKING-CLASS MOTHERS HAVE ALWAYS WORKED OUTSIDE THE HOME. IT IS ONLY THE PAMPERED UPPER CLASSES WHO HAVE EVER, EVER, EVER HAD THE CHOICE AND WHO COULD THEN SMUGLY PREACH THE RIGHTNESS OF THEIR CHOICE TO OTHERS!!!

I HATE it when these pampered pusses assume their experience is somehow universal, and ignore the very different needs of a working-class family. Spoilt little beeyotch. How DARE she make her dogmatic declarations about the motivations of all women? HOW DARE SHE?!

:mad:

[Katherine Brengle]

5. Feel better?

Great rant--I was with you all the way.

These women... Phyllis Schlafly, the dingbat in the article, Ann Coulter...

Traveling all the time preaching to us, writing all the time, hiring help, or not even bothering to get married and have children in the first place, much less stay home and take care of them...

Reminds me of the wife in The Handmaid's Tale... went everywhere telling people how things should be, and ended up getting exactly what she asked for--stuck at home all day with a crappy garden and another woman living in her house and fucking her husband.

You just keep on fighting the good fight ladies--sooner or later, you'll get what you want for everyone else.

[atommom]

6. Another interesting thing... notice how she threw her mom a bone

by saying that at least she didn't go back to work because of (ewwwww!) the feminist movement. Her mother scarred her for life, apparently, but at least she wasn't a feminist! I think this woman is a good candidate for psychotherapy, and I'm still trying to figure out how she landed this job. When I try to picture her in action, I keep seeing the unbearably neurotic wife from Spanglish.

[Hello_Kitty]

7. The sad thing is

The vast majority of women who will read that article are not from her socio-economic class and aren't even in a position to make the kind of choice she has. But some readers may absorb some guilt or insecurity from it nonetheless. Which is total bullshit. Flanagan's essay's should have some kind of disclaimer before them that says something like "If you have never vacationed in the Hamptons, disregard the contents of this as personal advice" Well, if you do vacation in the Hamptons you should also ignore it.

I thought the article was very well done. The writer really nailed Flanagan on her hypocrisy and arrogance.

[Finder]

8. I think the article and the responses...

outline the diversity of thought on mothering and feminism. Flanagan comes across as a caricature at times(through her own words)but also hits the nail on the head at times. As others point out, she dismisses the economics of many families/women who do not have the same options she does. That said, I don't think they are her target demographic. Flanagan also seems to forget there are many female lawyers, physicians, executives, etc. who in many cases are the main bread winners in some families. Do their husbands have a hot meal waiting for them?

I do think many "soccer mom" types will agree with her on many points. Employing nannies, housekeepers, personal assistants, etc are very much a part of the "have it all" demographic.

[Katherine Brengle]

12. Good point here:

"I do think many "soccer mom" types will agree with her on many points. Employing nannies, housekeepers, personal assistants, etc are very much a part of the "have it all" demographic."

I think you are onto something there... If you have it all already, then you can actually have it all, lol...

[ismnotwasm]

9. Oh good god

The way she puts the "closeness" she cultivates with her son's creeps me out. Hope she let's 'em fly when it's time.
She reminds me a bit of "Elizabeth and her German Garden"
http://65.36.245.95/book_detail.asp?ISBN=1596056770&IDauthor=358
I remember reading that many years ago,(maybe I should read it again)I remember thinking how out of touch she was-- no doubt the norm for German Countessess. She wrote very nicely though.
This one is far more manipulative and is using her talent to damage others. Sick.

[Warpy]

10. If the country holds together for another 15 years or so

I think we can expect two new "Mommie, Dearest" books to hit the shelves.

[NMMNG]

11. What a big freaking hypocrite

:eyes:

[Finder]

13. Bumping, since she was on Colbert last night.

She wasn't what I expected...no beehive hairdo.lol

The audience reaction was interesting. So much of what she said seemed to be tongue in cheek, I think a lot of what she writes and says may be to get a much needed dialogue going.

[geniph]

14. The trouble is,

even if she IS actually mostly speaking tongue in cheek - and I don't agree that that is what she's doing, other than on a Comedy Central show - there are still people who will use her book to say, "See, even former feminists are saying feminism sucks and you need to just stay home with the kiddies and give your husband nooky."

I was reading a review of her book in another magazine - can't remember which one - and the reviewer mentioned a particular anecdote of the author standing in the doorway yelling for the nanny because one of the children was puking. She related how she stood in the doorway and "made funny faces" to her son to comfort him while the nanny cleaned him up and changed his bed. The author of the book review said, "you know, I may put my kids in day care, but I never stood at arm's length and yelled for someone else when one of them was sick."

She's a hypocrite.

[bliss_eternal]

15. I agree--

and quite dangerous. Women like this are all too happy to appeal to the Coulters' and Limbaughs' of the world.

:puke: She's just fuckin' it up for everyone.