Crackling with the author’s edgy wit and wisdom, Caitlin Flanagan’s To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife is a collection of essays examining the key trends, issues and stereotypes surrounding today’s wives and mothers. Through reports on topics like nannies, white weddings and the demands of housekeeping, she traces the evolution of the maternal role in American society. Contrasting the past specifically the 1950s with the present, she provides unique insights into the domestic arts and how our culture’s perception of them has changed.
In Drudges and Celebrities: The New Housekeeping, an ironic examination of Martha Stewart and the packaging of the perfect household, Flanagan writes, almost any project Stewart cooks up is less daunting than the one it is meant to replace: keeping a family together, under one roof, home. Throughout the book, she mourns the passing of traditional domesticity, wherein the measure of a home was found in the woman who ran it. A frequent contributor to The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker, Flanagan is herself a mother and a wife, and she brings experience and intimacy to these essays. Flustered mothers and frustrated wives will find just what they need here: a little camaraderie.
