Kerry Howley

I’m not in the habit of praising Caitlin Flanagan. Her paeans to housewifery are supposed to make me want to work less and bake more; instead, they make me want to bury my face in a stack of Linda Hirshman essays. I thought her attack on Hillary Clinton as misogynistic as anything written about the Senator, and her obsession with the sexual modesty of young girls only reinforces the prurience she professes to loathe.

She’s also an enormously talented, deeply intelligent and perceptive essayist. Her pacing is brilliant, her sense of structure confident and fluid. A page in, I had no idea what her January Atlantic essay “A Woman’s Place: Katie Couric’s long day’s journey into evening” was about (I knew it wasn’t about Katie Couric); by the end, I was utterly convinced of a point I hadn’t realized she was carrying us toward. More than a few people have been turned off by Flanagan’s “I’m the grown-up here” pose, but I find it convincing: She really is the grown-up. She has weighed the options available to her, she swears allegiance to no faction or movement, and in the end she is perfectly happy to embrace the gender norms that she was shaped by and forced into. Bound by no ideology, she is honest about the trade-offs women face, the alternate lives they forgo, and so her essays are laced with melancholy. That’s probably why her Couric essay works as well as it does: Couric’s forced, half-psychotic perkiness strained through Flanagan’s melancholy is just devastating. Writes Caitlin, describing her need, as a housewife, for the company of Katie:

The Today show creates a bond with its overwhelmingly female viewers because so many of them watch it, as I did, during one of the most psychologically complex and lonely—and most emotionally fulfilling—times of their lives: their tenure as mothers to small children. Indeed, one reason the show is so successful and profitable is that long ago its producers realized that American households follow a rhythm: early in the morning, there is a great bustling of activity as the working members of families propel themselves out of the cocoon and into the cold world of commerce and adult preoccupation, and then there is a quiet settling down, once the cars have backed out of the driveways and the neighborhoods have been drained of their breadwinners. This is a delicate moment for any mother who spends her days home with children: on the one hand, the number of household residents who feel they own a piece of her has just diminished; on the other hand, she’s been left behind with the babies and the pets.

It is into this emotional void that the Today show’s second hour comes to the rescue, trumpets blaring: out go the first hour’s reports on war and politics and economic trends, and in come pieces on family and shopping and decorating. “The men are gone,” the show seems to tell us. “Now we can talk about the things we love”: the exact way to sneak vegetables into the diet of a finicky toddler, the trick to putting aside a little money for a family treat, the essential components of a first-aid kit for the car—all the minutiae of running a household, presented without irony or scorn by hugely compensated media celebrities. It is the loneliness of at-home motherhood—the loneliness for other adults, for the adult way of life, for the work clothes and schedules and employment itself—that makes the hosts of the Today show crucial. When you turn on the program, there they are: your friends. You half-listen to them, the way you half-listen to your children playing on the floor in the next room, and together the two worlds make up the whole of your enterprise: theory and practice. The host discusses shoes that are supposed to help toddlers walk more steadily, and you turn to your own baby and wonder if you ought to buy him a pair. The Today show pours into the house through the kitchen-counter television or the bedroom television (because the main TV, the big one, is tuned to Arthur or Clifford the Big Red Dog, and you’re half-watching those shows as well), and it is different from other shows. When it is on, the television screen is no longer a barrier separating real life from TV land; the television screen is a window into another room of the house, the one where the grown-ups are.

I have the utmost respect for the late Betty Friedan, but I found those two paragraphs much more affecting, much more descriptive of my own intuitions about the atomism of family life and the isolation of motherhood, than any glib reference to a concentration camp. This, from a woman constantly trying to convince us that stay-at-home motherhood is preferable to corporate lawyering.

Flanagan is not a self-indulgent writer, and the victim here is Couric, not the essayist who once needed her company. Couric, at work, needs to act perkily interested in the minutia of home life, day after day, just like the housewives who smile, inexplicably, through potty training and playdates. Maybe the indignity of segment after segment on infant outerwear is what drove Couric to take a paycut and move to CBS, which, Flanagan argues convincingly, was a colossal mistake, a step down, not up, and a sorry attempt to compete in a dated male status race premised on the culturally clueless assumption that someone, somewhere, is still watching the evening news.