Thank you! I read Abraham's article in Elle and by the end of it I was infuriated. How dare she preach to working mothers that we're damaging our children while insisting *she* is lavishing her family with all of her love and devotion. Doing what? I'd love to be a "traditional wife and mother" if that meant never doing any laundry or cleaning. If you have a full-time nanny, then a babysitter, and a housekeeper, so you can write (at the kitchen table, snort!), how does that mean you are NOT a working mother? Give me a break. And in spite of all that help, she was *still* depressed. She should have tried being home ALONE for 16 hour stretches every week with energetic boy twins for 2 years straight. My darling sister has done just that with no outside help, just a loving husband. But she has NEVER judged me for working outside the home *and* at home while others took care of my children. Both of us are devoted to our children and our husbands in completely different ways but we RESPECT each other's choices. Flanagan's holier-than-thou attitude is only a manifestation of her own traumas and insecurities. Brava Joan!

I'm constantly amazed by these so-called traditional moms. I was raised by a stay-at-home mom in the sixties, and I would have died of mortification if she had stepped foot in my classroom. School was where we learned to be independent; hovering mommies were not considered a good thing. Stay-at-home moms that I recall did not live and die to be mommies. They pushed kids out the door after breakfast and expected that we would take care of ourselves till dinnertime. If they were lucky enough not to have to work, the moms managed the house and the kids, but they also had clubs and hobbies for themselves. Some, unfortnately, got dumped by their once loving traditional husbands.

I also had friends whose mothers worked (even back in the ol' traditional days!). These friends seemed to do fine. They didn't grow up to be ax murderers, or resentful magazine writers with crazy ideas about social roles.

The stay-at-home moms today aren't traditional so much as hyper-neurotic. What kid could be comfortable causing such self-sacrifice? It's a smothering idea of motherhood, and it's no wonder that Caitlin Flanagan and few others can actually live up to it, except in their own fevered brains.

Flanagan and others like her imagine that most women working outside of the home have made their choices based solely on the notion (which they malign) of self-fulfillment. This is a specious argument because she knows very well that most women work outside their homes because they and their families need a second income to pay for their mortgages, health insurance, education expenses for their kids, and put food on the table. I suspect that what she means when she talks about women, is women like herself, those who can subcontract out the less pleasant parts of the stay at home mother/wife job to other women, to attend to the things that they find self-fulfilling, like writing. I would welcome an article that discusses how men find it difficult to come home in the evening and find the energy to nurture their wives and children in the hopes that they are putting enough in the relationship bank to draw upon it when they get cancer. What a crock.

Nora Cain

Bravo to Joan Walsh for nailing Caitlin Flanagan's hypocrisy on its braindead little head. Unlike Flanagan, I'm a full-time mother who also runs a business without a nanny or a housekeeper. Since, unlike Flanagan, I know just how hard it is to really take care of your child full time, I've never had much patience with her sanctimonious guilt-tripping. She's not a full-time mother, she's a lady of leisure who dabbles in writing. She really has nothing to say about real full-time mothering nor mothers who work outside the home.

As someone whose working mother (and grandmother) died of breast cancer, Flanagan's exploitation of her own illness to score cheap shots is grotesque. Yeah, my mother worked and was (gasp!)a feminist. She also took care of her mother when she was dying. My family did the same and we were heartbroken when she died. Is Flanagan's understanding of love really so limited that she thinks only women who fit safe stereotypes are loved and cared for? With such a benighted view of humanited, no wonder she's depressed.

This is the type of article Salon should present often, one that takes on a deserving target and demolishes in a stylish, professional fashion. Every word of this story rings true, and any article that does the holy work of exposing a charlatan, conman, and superstitious demagogue in America is the equivalent of the highest charity work. Whether you consider it personally relevant or not does not take away from its salubrious effect.

Great article, one that makes me realize why Joan Walsh is the editor-in-chief of Salon. I have often been a critic of Salon's often shallow and narcissistic treatment of women's issues and have been called misogynist in response, but this is the type of article that shows how this type of piece should be done: with considered thought, literary flare, and universal appeal.

Good job, Salon.

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.