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One big problem with feminism has been its virtue: it's been too tolerant for too long of people like Flanagan. You can gabble sanctimoniously on about sisterhood all you like, but when your "sister" continually undermines your "family" while presenting a placid, perfect, and utterly false countenance to the rest of the world...you know, there are some family members from whom you finally just have to walk away because they are so destructive, so manipulative. I thought "sociopathic" was kind of a strong choice of word, but on further consideration, that's exactly what a sociopath would do. I think Walsh has hit the nail right on the head in this review (and I admire her tenacity--Flanagan's Atlantic Monthly essays were hard enough for me to stomach in their original form.)
As I've said in other letters, I feel sorry for Flanagan, but she is a fraud, and--it bears repeating--not just as a mother and housewife, but possibly as a writer as well. (Google Flanagan and the CJR.) When rank-and-file Democrats got serious about giving Joseph Lieberman the boot, it wasn't seen as a catfight but as a show of solidarity: we were rooting out the enemy from our midst. This "sisterhood" business is one of those suffocating matriarchalist lies, the same kind that claim that all women are meant to be nurturing caregivers and should therefore behave nicely. When liberals started deriding and disowning the pseudo-liberals among them, when progressive Christians and other religious liberals finally got a pair and refused to tolerate the religious right any longer, they didn't become weakened by the discord; they only became stronger by asserting what they believed. There's a big difference between refusing to tolerate valid differences and refusing to tolerate people who are actively trying to discredit the movement from inside.
