Caitlin Flanagan is an American writer and social critic. A contributor to The Atlantic since February 2001, she was a staff writer for The New Yorker in 2004 and 2005, contributing five articles, including To Hell with All That. In 2019, she was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary award. She is the author of To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife and Girl Land.
Before becoming a writer, Flanagan was an English teacher and college counselor at the Harvard-Westlake School in North Hollywood, a theme she later returned to in her articles about college admissions. Flanagan's writing and social criticism frequently explore the intersection of public and private, and seek to expose hypocrisies in social narratives of the powerful and the prominent. Although such critiques sometimes use traditionally conservative arguments, Flanagan has referred to herself as a Democrat and a liberal. Bitch magazine awarded Flanagan its "Douchebag of the Century" award for her criticism of feminism. She has written, for example, about contradictory currents in the lives of American women, including herself, who discovered later in life a joy in motherhood and social value in domesticity that ran counter to the view of women's domestic lives as oppressive. Some of her essays underscore the emotional rewards and social value of a housewife's role. Consequently, she has been criticized, for instance by Joan Walsh, for misrepresenting her life choices and then condemning other women for not choosing a lifestyle Flanagan herself did not choose either. In her article "How Serfdom Saved the Women's Movement", Flanagan challenged the narrative of economic and social liberation of women credited to feminism by accusing middle-class women of succeeding at the expense of foreign nannies and illegal workers who replaced them in mothering roles. She argued that these women, while claiming to be virtuous and concerned for others, simultaneously robbed these workers by not paying Social Security taxes. Flanagan has appeared as a guest on The Colbert Report and Real Time with Bill Maher. Flanagan's book To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife was published by Little, Brown in 2006. The book was developed from a New Yorker essay by the same title, as well as other magazine pieces by Flanagan and new writing. In 2012, she published a book about teenage girls, Girl Land.
Personal life
Flanagan lives in Los Angeles. She has twin sons. When her children were in preschool, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, which later metastasized to other parts of her body.
