I just finished the book To Hell with All That and I must say that I'm mostly flummoxed. The praise on the jacket, as well as the reviews (good and bad) on Amazon lead me to believe that other people actually got a coherent and controversial message out of this book, but I can't seem to figure out what the author actually thinks.
Perhaps that is the point, in a way, but I don't think it is worthy of a published book. Flanagan attempts to address the conflict that many women feel between wanting to work and feel accomplished and worthwhile outside the home and pining over starched sheets and Martha Stewart-inspired handicrafts. Obviously, Flanagan herself is conflicted- she extols the virtue of being a stay-at-home mom and her desire to get dinner made for her kids, but she has had nannies and a maid ever since she had children. Actually, there was a maid employed before the children, too, but she feels terrible and conflicted about this. But she was writing and felt good about it. But she wishes that her mother wouldn't have gone back to work when she was young. But her mom was happier once she went back to work. But, but, but...
WE GET IT!!! You're conflicted, women are conflicted- everyone is fighting over the right answer, but a flowing, articulate book clearly cannot come from this issue. At least not from this author. This would have made a lovely, short article in a magazine, but somehow this mess got approved and printed. For not the first time this year, I moan over the apparent lack of sober editors, and I guess over the state of the book world in general. The people who submitted their blurbs for the jacket clearly didn't read the book, and the reviewers all seem to have pulled one or two sentences out of thin air on which to base their opinions- something not so rare anymore.
Flanagan is called an "anti-feminist" and seems to ruffle quite a few feathers, but I say to those rabble-rousers, "How can you tell?!"
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From Publishers Weekly
Flanagan's take on why modern mothers are conflicted about their roles is so witty and well researched—she quotes sources ranging from Queen Elizabeth's childhood nanny to Total Woman Marabel Morgan—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." Coming from someone who admits she doesn't change her sheets or clean her house (the maid does it), it's hard to take this assertion seriously. But then, while Flanagan is a staff writer for the New Yorker and a regular essayist for the Atlantic, she's more a polemicist here than journalist. The problem is her self-contradictions. Flanagan is fed up with what she sees as self-indulgent upper-middle-class mommies (like herself and unlike her mother's generation) who have elevated motherhood at the expense of housekeeping, which she sees as a lost art. Yet she goes into great and fascinating detail about her relationship with the nanny she hired after giving birth to twins. Flanagan is particularly disdainful of feminists who "imposed" a narrative of oppression on women. The author claims she's not a cook, but in her debut book she proves herself to be one heck of a pot-stirrer. (Apr. 17)
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