I’m a big fan of Caitlin Flanagan, who, for the past few years, first for the Atlantic and now for the New Yorker, has been nicely skewering the extremely well-compensated media-elite feminists who claims to speak for Everywoman and have no patience for stay-at-home mothers. Unlike the media-elite career fems who hector other women to nag their husbands into doing more housework (all the while off-loading their own household and child-care chores onto nannies, au pairs, and other hired help), Caitlin makes no bones about the fact that she’s not only a stay-at-home mother but a well-fixed denizen of Los Angeles’s high-end Pacific Palisades neighborhood with full-time help.


Caitlin has a new book out, “To Hell With That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife.” And so she’s been profiled by the L.A. Weekly (thanks for the alert from Beliefnet blogger Rod Dreher–scroll down to “Caitlin, Mon Amour”). What’s fascinating about Caitlin, who describes herself as a political liberal but a social conservative, is how much the professional media-fems just hate her.


What ticks them off are these views of Flanagan’s:


“I am really glad that there are working mothers in the professions,” she says earnestly. “But do I think that society should bend itself backward to give them more time with their children and to do this profession? I’m not sure I am at all.” She goes on: “It’s different to spend a lot of time with your child. If you stay home with your child, you’re going to have a lot of frustrating moments and quite a few transcendental moments. The kid can’t schedule his days so that the transcendental moments occur from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.” A regular churchgoer herself, she thinks it was great that in the old days men who traded in their wives for younger models were shunned by their religious communities until they shaped up. “If a man dumps a woman now,” she says disapprovingly, “it’s ‘Hello, Bob, nice to see you, Bob,’ and we meet the new wife, because that’s what you do. We’re nonjudgmental, and we’ve created a world that’s very safe for men to do that. I think it’s terrible.”


Here’s Barbara Ehrenreich:


“She’s a little like Phyllis Schlafly, this high-achieving woman who advocates domesticity for the rest of us,” she says tartly. “My sisterhood doesn’t extend to feeling the pain of stay-at-home mothers with nannies.”


And here’s self-described “Redstocking” from the 1960s Ellen Willis (remember her?):


“When I bring up an acerbic exchange Flanagan had with Ellen Willis in the letters column of The Atlantic over her nanny piece (she called Willis’ child’s co-op preschool ‘risibly egalitarian’), she barely remembers the episode and seems unaware that Willis is one of the great dames of the women’s movement. Willis, for her part, finds Flanagan’s ideas on women, feminism, sex and the family ‘not merely wrong but teeth-grindingly shallow and clichéd. And she is one of those people who seems to think she and her six friends represent the world.'”


And even Ella Walters, author of the L.A. Weekly profile, can’t help getting a few snide licks of her own:


“For her part, Flanagan seems to be feeling the pain of backlash from those she has judged…. ‘I am pro-choice, anti-war, anti-Bush, I’m a Democrat, and only a conservative on family issues,’ she says plaintively. “I’ve got nothing but derision from the left – you’ve got to check everything on the menu to please them. But the right has been good to me, even though they disagree with me about abortion. I can go on Tucker Carlson and he’s respectful. The head of the Southern Baptist Convention had me on the radio. But the feminists humiliate me. We, the Democrats, have a real small tent. The Republicans have a big tent.’ She must have in mind those beacons of open-minded tolerance, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and Ann Coulter.”


I guess Caitlin just doesn’t “check everything” on the professional-feminist menu, a menu that has no room for full-time motherhood or traditional values.