To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife [Hardcover]

Caitlin Flanagan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 17, 2006

Caitlin Flanagan, the hilarious and hotly disputed social critic, compares the rituals and experiences that shaped the fifties housewife with those that have forged the modern woman, and arrives at some surprising conclusions. In her signature prose -- bitingly funny and brutally honest -- Flanagan examines everything from the contemporary white wedding craze to the epidemic of undersexed marriages. Whether she is reporting on the mommy wars, the anti-clutter movement, or America's new nanny culture, her book reveals both the high cost women pay for devoting themselves to the people they love, and also the matchless rewards that come from such a sacrifice. Caitlin Flanagan began her magazine-writing career at the Atlantic Monthly in 2001 with a series of essays on modern family life that became an immediate sensation and the subject of an ongoing and heated national discussion. Now a staff writer for The New Yorker, her essays are passed from friend to friend, challenged and championed in the media, and often made the subject of book group discussions. With its insightful observations and trenchant conclusions, To Hell With All That will generate controversy and serious media attention while it also delights and enlightens readers across the country.

Editorial Reviews

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)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

A true wit providing tons of gentle "aha!" moments, New Yorker writer Flanagan has outdone herself and is sure to evoke smiles and tears from her readers. This series of stories is as old as our humanity: the push-pull between the privileges of womanhood versus the power of masculinity. The remedy is the logical sequence of life events, beginning with the wedding--"A place setting of Lennox is, after all, a liquid asset"--and punctuated by Flanagan's cogent observations. Every rumination is, in fact, a microcosm of today's headlines and self-help books. Is sleep, as Dr. Phil asserts, the new sex? Are nannies all that necessary to the raising of a professional woman's children? And at what time, during what event, does a woman truly recognize the reality of all her various roles, whether mother, wife, or aunt? An insightful, incisive look at the multiple demands on American women in the new millennium. Barbara Jacobs
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; First Edition edition (April 17, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316736872
• ISBN-13: 978-0316736879
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (61 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #699,409 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

71 of 75 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars To He** with this Book...What an Irksome Read, January 19, 2007

By 

Amy Graham (Scottsdale, AZ) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife (Hardcover)

The description on Amazon says that "Flanagan's take on why modern mothers are conflicted about their roles is witty and well researched." I can't say that I agree...I'd say that Flannagan's take on why modern mothers are conflicted is, well...conflicted itself. For me, the title: To Hell With All that: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife was about the most interesting and exciting thing about Flannagan's book. It serves to draw you in and makes you think you are in for something different and interesting, sadly this feeling doesn't extend beyond the title page. Hell With All that: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife is ten chapters of loosely related information that sounds promising, but never pay off. They ramble along allowing a glimpse into Flanagan's very pampered and privileged version of stay-at-home motherhood that left me shaking my head and wondering what the heck was the point she really wanted to make here.

Originally she quit her teaching gig to write a novel, and when she couldn't successfully do that she decided to have kids instead. The premise here seems to be that since she was failing at writing a novel and couldn't bring herself to just go back to teaching, she'd have kids because that would give her an "excuse" to not have to worry about the novel or deal with the feelings that failure held for her...it'd be OK if she found some measure of success as a parent. She might not have turned out a novel, but she DID squeeze out a kid...the logic is unfathomable. In reading the first few chapters, I didn't get the feeling that she wanted to be a mother, I got the sense that being a mother was a means to the end of continuing to stay at home...an excuse not to go back to work or find something else more meaningful to do with her time. Not all mothers (I might even say MOST) come to the decision to have children like this...it's either planned or it just happens...we don't think to ourselves...hmmmmmmm, I'm bored with my job or I've not been successful enough at what I really wanted to do and rather than admit that and find something else to do with my life, I think I'll have a kid and let my husband support me so I can continue stay at home. Can you tell I was irritated by this book?!

Additionally, she says in several places in the book that she doesn't believe that there is a "better" when it comes to being a stay-at-home mom or a working mother, but the entire book seems to be a pat on the back for her decision to stay at home with her kids, but not REALLY stay at home with them...she's got a nanny to do the boring, menial part of parenting, a maid, a gardener, and even an organizer by the end of the book...she's not really raising those kids herself, she's got an entire support staff (and bully for those who can afford it or know they need it and thus use it)...but I don't feel it's right to pat yourself on the back for being a stay-at-home mom while you spend about as much time with your kids as most working parents do.

I was less than half way through the book when I began to realize that this book wasn't making a point, it was just another well-to-do white woman bemoaning how hard it is to be a wife and mother (either of the working or stay-at-home variety) while going on and on about her nanny, her maid and her organizer and how hard it is to organize the little tikes schedule of activities while still maintaining a sense of self...not all of us can afford those expensive classes and extracurricular activities for our kids. On the one hand she bemoans over scheduling kids but does it herself...she says for her staying at home with the kids is the best choice, but once she's published she spends time mocking other stay-at-home moms with two working mothers (the cool girls of the motherhood world, whom she desperately wanted to be "in" with)...basically she wanted the best of both worlds and luckily for her, her husband (who is rarely mentioned in the book outside of being the provider and wallet in the Flannagan family) can afford to make this a reality for her, so she never has to make those touch choices that most of the rest of us HAVE to make.

Overall, I felt that each chapter would have made a fine stand alone essay without the inclusion of all the personal information and what she perceived as the difficulties of motherhood. Taken as a whole, this book never make a point and I found it to be personally irksome to read, Hell With All that: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife is a jumble of individual points and rambling personal exposition that never coalesces into a cohesive or satisfying whole. I wound up giving it two stars...I just couldn't see my way to three stars. Sure it was humorous and interesting for what it is, but it doesn't really go very far in making a cohesive point about why modern mothers are conflicted about their roles, it's clear that Flannagan IS conflicted herself and is unable to discern WHY that is exactly. In the end, I was more annoyed than entertained or informed.

54 of 59 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars What's your point, exactly?, June 8, 2006

By 

Cindy Gerlach Mueller "So Many Books, So Litt... (Houston, Texas) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife (Hardcover)

After reading this book, I have one big question: What's your point?

Flanagan, the anti-feminist, has set out to convince us that the women's movement has done women a disservice in showing that women might be dissatisfied with merely performing perfunctory household duties. Being a housewife should be celebrated, she says; women should be glad to fix dinner and do the laundry. Child-rearing has been elevated to an art and needs to be scaled back a notch, back to the days when being a wife was first and foremost and the children a mere by-product.

Excuse me? She really expects me to believe this tripe?

And she is the poster child?

Flanagan writes of the evils of nannies, the amount of discomfort they can bring to a household. And this in the same book where she devotes an entire chapter to the relationship she has with -- you guessed it -- her nanny. The woman she hired to care for her children for three years when she wasn't even working. It is the noblest thing to be home with one's children, she says, and points out that she stayed home with her children. But in the same breath she tells us that she had a 9-5 nanny and that she was practically paralyzed, unable to function, between 7 and 9 a.m. before the nanny's arrival. She makes it clear that children need their mother their when they're sick in the night ... but that she did not actually put the sheets in the washer -- that was the nanny's job.

She talks of the amount of satisfaction a woman should get from taking care of her home and her family. Then tells you of the maid and gardener who actually do most of said housework.

Sometimes it seems as if her point is to make it clear that she is a woman of privilege -- she can afford to be home, to pay all this household help. She and her husband can send their two boys to a soigné preschool, on whose very élan was disrupted by an outbreak of head lice. What -- parents of children who go to public kindergarten aren't disrupted by such things? Do we merely take it in stride?

Flanagan's writing style, praised by some, is a bit pretentious for me ("soignée? Élan?). She seems more interested in painting a picture of herself as having made the right choices than in looking at what is good for all women. Her own mother tossed aside the apron in the early 70s in order to have a job and some time for herself, and all Flanagan can see is that she felt abandoned. In retrospect, can't she see that maybe it was the only way for her mother to survive?

I don't see a need to pit working mothers against stay-at-home moms -- we all have our children's very best interests at heart. To her credit, Flanagan does confess the realities of her life -- the privilege that eludes most stay-at-home mothers of preschoolers -- but she doesn't quite see that they set her apart. She honestly sees herself as an ordinary sacrificing mother, even when she had full-time help. And today, as a staff writer for the New Yorker, she does not consider herself a working mother.

Not a book I could recommend. And not only because I didn't agree with her point, but more importantly, because I couldn't discern that she had one.

117 of 135 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Worth a read even if it ticks you off, April 15, 2006

By 

Jen Singer "Author, You're a Good Mom (and Yo... (Kinnelon, NJ USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife (Hardcover)

If you're a stay-at-home mom with a nanny who cleans the sheets after the kids have the stomach flu, this book is for you.

For the rest of us, though, "To Hell with All That" is a curious look at stay-at-home motherhood through the eyes of a wealthy anti-feminist who has the time and the energy to actually consider following Martha Stewart's over-the-top housekeeping suggestions.

I found myself agreeing with Flanagan in some places and snorting disapprovingly in others, while being entertained throughout much of the book. At the very least, Flanagan writes beautifully. And her larger-than-life persona has helped land her a segment on the Today Show. If only she were speaking for us.

If you're looking for validation in your choice to stay home with your kids, you won't find much of it in this book. Flanagan likely has never endured a toddler temper tantrum in the post office, wondered if she can afford to buy a brand name cereal without a coupon or volunteered to make cupcakes for 500 kids at the school rally.

If you want to find out how the other half live, though, enjoy this book.