The Mummy Wars

I am coming late to this issue not because I haven’t followed it but because I wasn’t sure I had anything new to add to it – and perhaps I still don’t, but here goes.

I continue to be amazed at and puzzled by the scorn heaped on both Caitlin Flanagan and Linda Hirshman for doing little more than expressing their opinions. The basic negative reaction to Flanagan, whose main crime seems to be telling women that “when a mother works something is lost,” and to Hirshman, whose transgression was telling privileged, educated women that they have a duty to work and not to opt out, seems to be a combination of “I hate you because you hurt my feelings” and “Where do you get off telling me how to run my life?” A chorus of angry wounded women want revenge on Flanagan and Hirshman for daring to question their personal “choices.”

The reaction of Jen Lawrence, who interviewed Flanagan for the website Literary Mama, is a pretty typical one. She is upset that Flanagan writes to “incite rage, generate buzz, increase her stock" while caring little that "her words leave deep wounds among her fellow mothers."

First of all I disagree that Flanagan writes to "incite rage" and what writer out there does not want to generate buzz? (OK, Kafka) But most problematic of all to me is this idea that it's normal to be deeply wounded just because Flanagan says, "When a mother works, something is lost. Children crave their mothers, they always have and they always will."

Honestly, is there a mother out there who didn’t already know this? And are we working mothers so fragile that we can’t bear to hear it said? There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that my daughter, now 11, would have preferred me to be a SAHM, but, alas, that wasn’t the hand she was dealt. Instead, she got a working mom who pays her plenty of attention and would go out of her mind with boredom staying home. Because working is and always has been a financial necessity for me, I don’t have to justify my decision with aphorisms like “what’s best for the mom is best for the child,” however, had I had a choice, I can’t imagine not opting to work.

Yes, something has been lost by my working, no question, but something is lost, too, for the child who sees a mother incapable of functioning autonomously in the world outside the home. All major life decisions are complicated and something is almost always lost along the path not taken.

In none of the work I have read by Flanagan, however, does she actually tell a woman who wants to work to stay home. She’s more of a social critic commenting on the tendency of the upper middle class woman to hypocritically hire an illegal nanny and, as she puts it, “squeal in indignation (if you) tell her she can't have something.” I’ve got to say that pretty much jibes with my experience of the social class she describes, and if that’s all you have to say to get yourself branded a provocateur these days, the threshold seems pretty low.

Hirshman is definitely more outlandish, suggesting, among other things, that women “marry down,” have just one child and opt for careers that pay serious money. She states unequivocally that that we should care about the opt-out trend seen among privileged educated moms because “what they do is bad for them, is certainly bad for society, and is widely imitated… This last is called the “regime effect,” and it means that even if women don’t quit their jobs for their families, they think they should and feel guilty about not doing it.”

She also writes: “The family -- with its repetitious, socially invisible, physical tasks -- is a necessary part of life, but it allows fewer opportunities for full human flourishing than public spheres like the market or the government. Like the right to work and the right to vote, the right to have a flourishing life that includes but is not limited to family cannot be addressed with language of choice.”

This message that a woman should be able to earn a living and that family life is not everything seems to have come as a heavy blow for women who need desperately to believe that you can be a feminist and stay home. They are apoplectic that anyone dare to question their “choices.” But as they vent their rage over Hirshman’s polemic, there is something deeply contradictory about so many women insisting so loudly that their choices are their own, yet, with their enraged reactions, showing that they do indeed believe that one writer’s opinion can matter.

The question that reaction raises for me is if one writer’s words matter so much to others and contain so much power to wound and outrage, how can it be then that one woman’s actions matter so very little that no outsider may dare to so much as even comment on them?
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mommy wars caitlin flanagan linda hirshman