The real Mommy Wars: both left and right attack mothers for the choices they make.

• Author: Chamberlain, Shannon
• Position: To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife - The Politically Incorrect Guide to Women, Sex and Feminism - Book review

To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife, by Caitlin Flanagan, New York: Little, Brown, 272 pages, $22.95

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Women, Sex, and Feminism, by Carrie Lukas, Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 221 pages, $19.95

IN AN ALARMING sin of omission, pollsters have yet to tell us anything definitive about the so-called Mommy Wars, that haft-imagined battle between the working mothers of overscheduled upper-middle-class children and the stay-at-home mothers of overscheduled upper-middleclass children. Every op-ed scold therefore is free to speculate about what women outside the commentarial really think of this fight they may not know they're fighting.

Women who enjoy the luxury of choosing between full-time motherhood and full-time office work seem perfectly capable of filling their spare hours with round-the-clock ballet-class shuttles and yoga for toddlers. For those without the choice or the children, both the question and the verbiage it has spawned are comically irrelevant.

But like many battles fought on distant shores, this one resonates in the homeland. Thus was To Hell with All That, Caitlin Flanagan's slender collection of reworked Atlantic and New Yorker essays, greeted with a review in nearly every major media outlet still reviewing books--most of which furiously denounced the volume. It is unclear how much this reaction has to do with Flanagan's tepid back-of-the-book endorsement of stay-at-home mothering. The San Francisco Chronicle took the opportunity to remind us that the Equal Rights Amendment failed to pass. At least three newspapers heaped catty scorn on Flanagan's admission that she and her husband have never changed their own sheets--an attractive proposition, to be sure, but hardly a pivotal moment in the essay that contains it.

The real pivot of that essay is Mara Stewart, "stuff of a thousand jokes and parodies" whom Flanagan sees as an emblem of a uniquely female longing for waxed floors, pressed sheets, and windowsills without those telltale paint flecks of neglect. Here Flanagan slips in a typically well-expressed critique of all the Betty Freidanesque obsession with gender roles: "If you want to make a feminist sputter with rage, remind her of those dark days in America's past when girls took home ec classes and boys took shop. But to watch yuppie parents squirm with dread and confusion when anything in their households goes on the fritz is to wonder whether it was such a bad thing for one half of the marriageable population to know how to mend a fallen hem and the other half to have rudimentary knowledge of the workings of a fuse box."

That's a typical Flanagan sentiment, as well as a typical Flanagan construction: quiet observation, couched in homey common sense, rolled together in a spit wad aimed at the feminist theory of housework that has dominated the movement since the inaugural days of Ms. More often than not, the spit wad contains a fair measure of nostalgia for the days when women still possessed a Martha-like knowledge of the curious process, somehow involving sashes, of airing a room. (I remain unconvinced that this...