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• Monday, April 10, 2006 09:30 AM

  Angel in the house

  I envy Rebecca Traister and wish more women (including me) were like her. I can't stand the clutter, and probably for the same reason that Flanagan articulates: I feel as though someone is watching and disapproving. But that's because someone has been watching me and disapproving of me all my life: my mother, my mother-in-law, my sister, other girls, the ladies at my parents' church, Them, whoever They are.

  So maybe it really is true that the vast majority of women hate clutter and disorder. That's irrelevant. The point is that Flanagan thinks that it should go on being true. She's the modern day Angel in the House, the one Virginia Woolf proudly announced she'd strangled (but which probably helped kill her in the end), the being who whispers in all our ears that we should forget writing and silly things like careers, because our true role is to be little helpmeets at home, and oh, by the way, we're not doing it right.

  And the kicker is that Flanagan herself is an utter fraud. We should point this out over and over, the way we keep repeating until we're blue in the face that there never were any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Flanagan does not cook her husband's dinners and apparently never did. Flanagan does not do any housework herself. Flanagan didn't even take care of her small children without the help of a nanny. And, interestingly enough, according to the Columbia Journalism Review Flanagan may even have "borrowed" someone else's research for an article she wrote about Mary Poppins a couple years back for the New Yorker (http://www.cjr.org/issues/2006/1/lettertoeditor.asp), which would have made her a fraud as a researcher and writer as well as a housekeeper. She is not the shining paragon of self-sacrifice she'd like us all to believe she is, and if those allegations are true, she's not even the exemplar of Virtue Rewarded. She's just a little girl in a forty-something body who's still rebelling, as I suppose we all are, against her mommy.

  —Marianna Trench Read Marianna Trench's other letters
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