I want to be Caitlin Flanagan when I grow up. Her essay�How Serfdom saved the Women�s Movement: Dispatches from the Nanny Wars� in the current issue of the Atlantic should be required reading, particularly for anyone who was as irritated as I was by that article in the New York Times magazine a month or two ago about all the women who left the workplace to stay home with their kids. I always find Flanagan�s essays refreshing � recent writings that come to mind dealt with Dr. Laura and Erma Bombeck.

I�ll admit that part of my interest is the timeliness of the essay. I�m in the middle of glossing a history of women�s activism in the U.S. for an introductory chapter of my dissertation. Part of what I have been doing is a comparison between the suffrage movement and the ERA/Civil Rights era. The issues of class, almost completely ignored (or so over-simplified as to be essentially ignored), have been slapping me in the face. Plus, as a mom looking at finishing her dissertation soon, I may be soon be caught up in the same childcare conundrum.

At the heart of �Serfdom� is the paradox of the relationship of the professional woman and her nanny. Professional woman leaves the housework and dirty diapers behind for Professional Fulfillment. Her activities made possible by someone else doing the gruntwork � a nanny. Through a lens trained on the peril inherent in the professional mom/nanny relationship, Flanagan teases out a wealth of complexities about the American women�s movement: universal daycare, immigration laws, ideas of equality in marriage, slavery and white guilt. The problem, she says, is that women are treated as a single downtrodden class. And while this may have made sense in the early years of the women�s movement, it makes little sense to compare a woman going to a job as a partner at a large city law firm who has a nanny to care for her children with a Mexican immigrant working illegally in a factory and leaving her children in unlicensed daycare. It�s fascinating, engagingly written, tragic and sometimes hilarious. Most of all, though, Flanagan is sensible � she calls it like she sees it.

She does not, however, draw any real conclusions. She remains conflicted. She still needs childcare and she still gets it by taking advantage of a system that is profoundly unfair to some classes of women. While some have found this dissatisfying or irresponsible of her, I merely found it honest. This is not a problem that can be tied up in a neat and tidy package. And at the moment it is possible that there is no way to resolve the desires of our consciences with needs or our families.

Flanagan�s writing in general manages to resonate both with my work with women musicians as working women and also with my own dilemmas as a parent with career aspirations and as a feminist struggling with the expectations of my role as a wife (or vice versa). These two areas of my life frequently feel at odds with each other, so essays that incorporate aspects of both are rather comforting. While I have often seen Flanagan's tone critiqued as "self-satisfied" or "smug," I would argue that that has more to do with the aims of her pieces, which seem to be trying to justify difficult choices working mothers need to make (at least, those mothers who are in a position to be making choices -- some have their decisions thrust upon them through economics, etc.). I'm not sure I'd call that self-satisfaction. In fact, it comes across much more as justification or rationalization, something I am finding myself doing more and more of as I try to make sense of my life as a mother and a scholar.

Maybe I�ll start a fan club.

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