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• Thursday, March 23, 2006 11:30 AM

  Flanagan to be pitied, not hated

  Caitlin Flanagan's message is bullshit. That's the real thing.

  Right, but how can she even make those claims if she can't live up to them herself? Why should anyone listen to that?

  Granted, some women are truly happy at home, taking care of the kids. And some women make great nursery school teachers. But I am not one of them, and I suspect that many Salon readers aren't, either.

  I think my real response to her is simply pity, that she has set standards so high that she can't live up to them. It's fine to have a cook and a housekeeper and someone to take care of the kids so you can write. That's the equivalent, I think, of Virginia Woolf's room of one's own and five hundred pounds a year. It's not fine to claim that other women should put their husbands and children before their own concerns, when one has not done so oneself and has no need to do so. Take away her writing career, her personal organizer (!!!--didn't she deride Oprah and Julia Morganstern in one of those essays?), leave her with the drudgery and the childcare, and she may not be quite so sanguine.

  The point is that even stay-at-home mothers--even the supposedly perfect Caitlin Flanagan--can't manage to do it all perfectly without at least a little assistance. I keep seeing this in families we know where the husband's career is put first and the wife has decided to stay home and keep house. The marriage is strained, and the wife is unhappy. Betty Friedan's feminism didn't originate in a vacuum after all.

  And that business about comparing love to a bank account--that was chilling. If she thinks she earned her husband's love through her traditional selflessness, what's going to happen when the day of reckoning comes for her sons and she expects to be able to buy their devotion with all her stored sacrifices? Oh, I feel sorry for them--and for the girls they marry. I hear a train a-comin', it's comin' round the bend...

  —Marianna Trench Read Marianna Trench's other letters
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