Item: 1 loaf pan
I made a loaf of banana bread yesterday, noting how good it smelled when it was baking and reflecting, as I often do, how satisfying working in the kitchen can be. I might not feel that way if I had to do it every day, but it's the way I feel about it now.
Just about every publication I read on a regular basis has featured comments (mostly complaints) this week about Caitlin Flanagan's new book, which is called To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing our Inner Housewife. It's everywhere I turn. Ms. Flanagan, for those who don't know, suggests that being a housewife/stay-at-home mom is a good thing and that feminism has led to exhaustion.
Proviso for what follows: I'm not speaking as a wife or a mother, and also I haven't read the book (a lot of the criticism points out inconsistencies between what the author says and how she actually lives). But I've known mothers who worked whose hearts were at home, and mothers who were staying at home who were longing to get back to their careers. I thought it was well-established by now that mothers do what they can with the circumstances they're given, and that you're supposed to respect that.
Every single article I've seen mentions a particular line that has generated a lot of anger, a line from one of her earlier articles: "What few will admit--because it's painful, because it reveals the unpleasant truth that life presents a series of choices, each of which precludes a host of other attractive possibilities--is that when a mother works, something is lost." I've read this over and over, and I still can't see why this sentence, on its own, is so outrageous. Because it was apparently "toned down" for this book. To what, I wonder.
For one thing, how can you even tell what the context is? What if the next sentence is about how the gains of a mother working are so much greater than the losses? What if the argument is that this loss is in fact one of the necessary losses of life, so that the mother and child can move into the next stage of a relationship? What if the argument is that whatever is lost wasn't even really worth having?
But mainly, this statement seems so self-evident that it's silly to argue about it. Of course something is lost when a mother works. How can you possibly argue otherwise? The sentence is about the fact that choosing something closes a person off from something else. This is a simple statement about the way the world works. It's unfortunate that there are judgmental connotations to that sometimes, but pretending that any path has no cost to it doesn't help get past that at all.
In the days when I was student-teaching, I observed a class where the professor was in fits because none of the female students in the class was willing to identify herself as a feminist.
"But why?" she was pressing one student, pointing out that she was willing to associate herself with various other groups (in this student's case, the Democratic party) even though she didn't agree with every part of their platform.
Maybe this is why. The message I get from the above is that being a feminist means not being allowed to tell the truth.
Just about every publication I read on a regular basis has featured comments (mostly complaints) this week about Caitlin Flanagan's new book, which is called To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing our Inner Housewife. It's everywhere I turn. Ms. Flanagan, for those who don't know, suggests that being a housewife/stay-at-home mom is a good thing and that feminism has led to exhaustion.
Proviso for what follows: I'm not speaking as a wife or a mother, and also I haven't read the book (a lot of the criticism points out inconsistencies between what the author says and how she actually lives). But I've known mothers who worked whose hearts were at home, and mothers who were staying at home who were longing to get back to their careers. I thought it was well-established by now that mothers do what they can with the circumstances they're given, and that you're supposed to respect that.
Every single article I've seen mentions a particular line that has generated a lot of anger, a line from one of her earlier articles: "What few will admit--because it's painful, because it reveals the unpleasant truth that life presents a series of choices, each of which precludes a host of other attractive possibilities--is that when a mother works, something is lost." I've read this over and over, and I still can't see why this sentence, on its own, is so outrageous. Because it was apparently "toned down" for this book. To what, I wonder.
For one thing, how can you even tell what the context is? What if the next sentence is about how the gains of a mother working are so much greater than the losses? What if the argument is that this loss is in fact one of the necessary losses of life, so that the mother and child can move into the next stage of a relationship? What if the argument is that whatever is lost wasn't even really worth having?
But mainly, this statement seems so self-evident that it's silly to argue about it. Of course something is lost when a mother works. How can you possibly argue otherwise? The sentence is about the fact that choosing something closes a person off from something else. This is a simple statement about the way the world works. It's unfortunate that there are judgmental connotations to that sometimes, but pretending that any path has no cost to it doesn't help get past that at all.
In the days when I was student-teaching, I observed a class where the professor was in fits because none of the female students in the class was willing to identify herself as a feminist.
"But why?" she was pressing one student, pointing out that she was willing to associate herself with various other groups (in this student's case, the Democratic party) even though she didn't agree with every part of their platform.
Maybe this is why. The message I get from the above is that being a feminist means not being allowed to tell the truth.
posted by Karen at 8:08 PM
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