Disparate Housewives

Why young women should beware of being pulled into the “mommy wars.”

By Lauren Pruneski

Women graduating from colleges and universities these past few weeks have had a rough year. At the start of their fall semester, last September, the front page of the New York Times declared that women at elite colleges were setting a career path to motherhood. Not two months later, Maureen Dowd released a book lamenting that Pulitzer Prize-winning women couldn’t get dates. Most recently, in April, Caitlin Flanagan published a series of essays that chronicle her love affair with domesticity. And all the while, the debate over the fate of the modern woman has raged on, inspiring a whole host of studies, television specials, an endless number of op-eds, and an entire generation of educated young women who are anxious about growing up.

While the “Mommy Wars” may have become the most overused media term of the year it means little for many of us younger women. We have conservative commentators like Danielle Crittenden claiming that the lives of women without children will merely add up to “a pile of pay stubs.” And then we have former professor and writer Linda Hirshman about to release Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World, which argues that women quitting their jobs for the domestic life are making a serious, and sexist, mistake. As Katie Couric tries to tease out the complications between the supposed Superwoman vs. Supermom dichotomy, many of us don’t have plans past next month, and it is difficult to try to envision what our life might look like in a few years, much less a few decades. But still, the popular panic over kids and jobs and whether the twain shall ever meet isn’t exactly inspiring confidence in a new generation of female graduates.

Flanagan’s book, To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife, has the potential to do the most damage to the morale of the recently graduated female. It answers the modern woman dilemma with an account of what Flanagan has observed in her own (very well to do) socio-economic world, and it is also deeply personal, examining the trying and complex relationships she has had with her mother, her family, and her hired help. It is difficult at times, even for a childless twenty-something with no motherly ambitions, not to be mesmerized by her love for her children or her candid reflections on the way her family has changed her. But, only moments later, my own warm, domestic feelings would evaporate when Flanagan would bluntly proclaim that “women have a deeply felt emotional connection to housekeeping.”

That single line captures the overall outlook of her book, which is something of a proposition that women are genetically predisposed to housewifery. She suggests that the women’s movement of the 70’s was in part a denial of one’s inner-housekeeper, and she blames it for the unhappy, anxious state of the modern mother-career woman. In her own words, To Hell with All That “is about what conservatives call the feminist agenda and what I call the new prescription for female unhappiness.…It is less a book about what we have gained than it is a book about what we have lost.”

It is no wonder, then, that Flanagan has become a punching bag lately for liberal female journalists and reviewers. Assumed to be conservative by most of her readers, she launched an unconvincing defense of her liberalism a few weeks ago in Time, responding in part to the liberal women who have criticized her decisions. “I have made a lifestyle choice that they can’t stand,” she declares, “and I’m not cowering in the closet because of it.” Flanagan then attempts to turn this personal conflict into a larger argument about why the Democratic Party is losing the votes of housewives and traditional families everywhere. “The Democrats made a huge tactical error a few decades ago,” she contends. “In the middle of doing the great work of the ‘60s—civil rights, women’s liberation, gay inclusion—we decided to stigmatize the white male.”

Her argument is accompanied by remorse over the conservative victory in the family values debate, a sentiment that implicitly criticizes the Democrats for having, as Flanagan puts it, “vast sympathy for many other kinds of alternative lifestyles.” The problem here is not that liberals can’t project a unified face to the public, as Flanagan suggests, but that its’ more moderate members can’t reconcile the terms “traditional” and “alternative.” And Flanagan, who seems to embody a number of clashing personas—housewife and career woman, domestic goddess and social justice seeker—could be just the person to prove that it is possible to be both. But she does nothing to convince her audience of the places where tradition and morality meet the progressive agenda, and she spends an entire book arguing that it is not in anyone’s best interest to be a mother who juggles a career and a family. “What few will admit,” she writes, “because it is painful, because it reveals the unpleasant truth that life presents a series of choices, each of which precludes a host of other attractive possibilities—is that whichever decision a woman makes, she will lose something of incalculable value.”

For every conclusion she draws about the sacrifices and agonizing dilemmas of the modern woman, Flanagan also traps herself in offensive stereotypes about the condition, desires, and history of that woman. She describes her own mother as an unsatisfied housewife who went back to work, abandoning her daughter to “the quiet gloom of the empty living room” after school, and who returned to being a mother after her father found success as a novelist. The portrait lacks any kind of meaningful complexity. She provides nothing in the way of options, alternatives, and advice to young women who now have to make their way in the heyday of this agonizing dilemma that she is castigating most of her readers for creating. She offers us only a bleak choice between a loveless career and a partially-satisfying domestic life—a choice that is only available, of course, to those lucky elites with the social and economic circumstances that make meaningful “choices” possible.

The most interesting essay in Flanagan’s book is about Martha Stewart and her role in shaping our modern concept of housekeeping. “Stewart presents a vision of domesticity … that is filled with allure and prettiness rather than the drudgery and exhaustion of which we are all so wary.” This, in turn, makes being a mother or staying at home today a much different choice than it was for the women who first fought for equality. Women like Flanagan have plenty of economic resources at their disposal and are able to maintain an enviable level of luxury. Like Flanagan, they can hire housekeepers and professional organizers and never clean up after their children or do their own laundry. (And, as a result, they will probably also find time to write articles for places like The New Yorker explaining why women shouldn’t work.)

For many women, that still doesn’t mean that staying at home is the proper choice to make. Contrary to the current hype about women who “opt out,” labor trends show that educated women are actually pursuing careers and finding ways to stick with them. “The truth is that a greater fraction of college women today are mixing family life and career than ever before,” wrote Harvard economist Claudia Goldin in the New York Times this spring. “Denying that fact is ignoring the facts.” A recent Newsweek cover story, too, asserted that women today are finding more opportunities to balance work and family. But whether more educated women are choosing motherhood is not the phenomenon that deserves attention. It is important to consider that the women’s movement, and the society in which we have come of age, has liberated us from the belief that young women belong in the domestic sphere. Flanagan and others seem concerned with backlash from feminists—the nasty, snarling glares Flanagan suggests are tossed at educated women who choose families over careers. But I would argue that our generation is past all that. We have come to a place where the choice to become a mother is really a choice and no longer a socially-imposed constraint.

And, moreover, when a woman does choose to become a full-time mother, it doesn’t behoove other women to pillory her or use her as a political metaphor. (See, in a very recent example, Elizabeth Vargas, co-anchor of ABC’s World News Tonight, causing an uproar with her decision to step down, in part because of the demands of being a pregnant mother; the National Organization for Women (NOW) and other organizations have responded with protest. “If she can’t have it all,” lamented Kim Gandy, NOW”s president, “who among us could?”)

But, in a mirroring of several other conundrums of American identity politics, if we actively choose an identity that for so long was, perhaps, unwillingly imposed on us, does that make it ok? Before recent college grads waste more pages and years agonizing over the choice between housewifery and career, someone needs to argue for a middle ground. As the media continues to pit career women and mothers against one another, what is needed is not more fodder for the fight, but a thorough examination of what it is, in our modern society, that makes motherhood and careers seem like mutually exclusive, even antithetical, choices. Already our pop culture is doing it: watch one episode of Sex and the City or Desperate Housewives and you will see women grappling with this very problem in ways that can be surprisingly sincere and even illuminating. The people who write these shows—and, hopefully, the people who watch them—are examining ways that it could be possible, in this modern age, to balance children and careers without fear that women will “lose something of incalculable value.”

Today’s twenty-something woman, having grown up being told that she can do anything, should not enter the workforce believing that she has to make a choice—that among the endless opportunities in front of her, there is not some way to have it all, to feel like she’s not missing out. Our generation may not, at this point in life, be face to face with the problem just yet, but I am certain that, if we continue to push for more opportunities and choice, in the workplace and at home, and if we work harder to debunk the myth of the media-driven mommy wars, we will begin a real dialogue and find a practical solution.

 

Lauren Pruneski graduated from Wesleyan University in May 2004. She works for the National Georgraphic Society and has written for the Washington City Paper.

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