Kitchen Confidential

If, for summer reading, you are looking for a witty, elegantly written, and charming mix of self-deprecation and social commentary, here’s a book for you. Caitlin Flanagan is a wonderfully readable observer of the peculiarities of modern domestic life, and in To Hell with All That she builds on essays she originally wrote for the Atlantic Monthly to construct an amusing, and sometimes startlingly candid, memoir.

I am aware that the words “candid memoir” have come to imply, in our memoir-littered literary landscape, ever-darker revelations of neglect, debauchery, and (if the publisher is lucky) incest. That’s what people seem to want to read, but, mercifully, Flanagan does not reveal anything so gruesome. What she does reveal, though, is in its effect plenty grim. You may laugh out loud at many passages–I certainly did–but what the book says about modern American women may make you want to bang your head against a wall.

First, the good news: Flanagan is a sparkling stylist, and she is definitely on to something with her idea of an “inner housewife,” that secret part of emancipated womanhood that clings to old-fashioned feminine roles even as the outer lawyer, or whatever, rejects them. For who among us doesn’t resent the drudgery of battling squalor through repetitive acts of washing, wiping, and tidying? At the same time, what woman, in her heart of hearts, doesn’t get a weird charge out of a pile of freshly laundered and scented linens, nicely folded?

Flanagan is at her best when remarking on paradoxes such as this, along with the absurdity of sexually adventurous career gals insisting on virginal white gowns and six-figure wedding bashes paid for by their fathers. In these observations, she’s generally not saying anything new, but she is highly entertaining.

For a self-identified liberal, Flanagan is also pleasantly scathing about the distortions sold to women by the phalanxes of feminism. She writes: The general idea, implied in countless books and articles and in a variety of popular movies, is that shortly after President Truman dropped the big one on Nagasaki, an entire generation of brave, brilliant women–many of them enjoying the deep satisfaction of doing shift work in munitions factories (the extent to which the riveters’ lot is glorified by professional-class feminists who have never set foot on a factory floor is shameful)–was kidnapped by a bunch of rat-bastard men, deposited in Levittown, and told to mop. . . . That women in large numbers were eagerly, joyfully complicit in this life plan, that women helped to create the plan, is rarely considered.

Of the wifely duty in postwar marriages, she observes saucily: “Perhaps, as some feminists would have us believe, these were grimly efficient interludes during which the poor humped-upon wife stared at the ceiling and silently composed the grocery list. Or perhaps not. Maybe . . . once you get the canoe out in the water, everybody starts happily paddling.”

But–and here we come to the head-banging part–for all her bravado versus the feminists, it is dispiriting to learn the extent to which even a clever counterculturalist such as Caitlin Flanagan had her maternal sensibilities hijacked by the revolution. She admits that it took her five years after the birth of her twins before she realized–and then only with the catalyst of a terrifying calamity–what it means to be fully a mother.

For forty years, feminists have swung their broadswords against women’s natural love for, protectiveness towards, and willingness to sacrifice for their children. In no way am I suggesting that all women make delightful mothers, nor am I arguing here against women going out to work, and I’m not saying that feminists don’t love their babies. But from Betty Friedan onwards, we’ve had a series of grim-visaged battleaxes assailing society with demands that mothers put aside tender feelings so as not to impede the ambitions of the sisterhood.

The latest exemplar of this unappealing bunch is the Robespierrian philosopher Linda Hirschhorn. Her contempt for traditional womanhood is such that she argues that raising children is an unworthy, ignoble pursuit for an educated or intelligent woman. According to Hirschhorn, if you’re smart and you’ve been to college, you owe it to other dames to disregard your own desires and stow your kiddies in a facility staffed by stupid, ill-educated puddings.

Years of tricked-out “philosophy” of this sort has had many sad effects, not least to confuse many women utterly about how, exactly, they ought to behave. In a chapter of impressive frankness, Flanagan talks about hiring a nanny to care for her infant twin sons–and the uneasy inertia that descended on her the moment the hired help arrived:

So she hung around the apartment while the nanny was there, “exhausted and ragged,” feeling that she was supposed to exert her presence and “make sure my beloved sons were imbibing as much of me as they were of her.”

Thanks a bunch, Betty Friedan!

But it is only at the very end of the book when Flanagan’s sons are reaching their fifth birthday that the deepest and, to my mind, most tragic confusion produced by all these years of feminist dogma becomes manifest. Caitlin Flanagan goes in for a routine mammogram and comes out with a diagnosis of cancer. Horrible, debilitating chemotherapy ensues.

“Those life-and-death months of cancer treatment were the making of me as a mother,” she realizes. This is, remember, five years after her children were born. It takes cancer to show that “I was a mother, not someone playing at homemaking.”

Only remorseless brainwashing can inure women to the powerful instinctive urge to motherly love. Sadly, that is exactly what our society has endured for several decades.

Meghan Cox Gurdon is a writer in Washington.