Deep down do women want to be housewives?

These days we scoff at the ‘50s housewife who doted on her husband, kept a spotless home, managed her children’s after-school schedules, and put a homemade dinner on the table every night.Caitlan Flanaghan, a writer for The New Yorker, compares that quintessential housewife to the modern mom in her new book, “To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife." She writes that women have a deep emotional bond to housekeeping, but over the last few generations they have lost that connection. Flanaghan, who was invited on “Today,” believes today’s women have elevated motherhood at the expense of housekeeping. Her book is a controversial reassessment of the rituals and events that shape women’s lives: weddings, sex, housekeeping, and motherhood. Here’s an excerpt:

The Virgin Bride
I DO NOT PLAN to have another wedding; I’m standing pat at two. But I must confess that after spending a pleasant hour gazing at the photographs in a recent crop of wedding guides, I began to feel a bit of the old itch. There is something deeply seductive about a wedding: romance in its great last stand, not yet sullied by routine and responsibility. Even a photograph of that ill-fated girl Diana Spencer, standing on the steps of St. Paul’s, her veil caught in a gust of wind and her father waiting to take her hand, can provoke in me a vague yet undeniable longing. But it took only a few minutes of actually reading the texts of these manuals to bring me to my senses. More than fondness for my husband keeps me from getting on the phone to price tea roses and a tent.

NBC VIDEO Do women long to be happy housewives? April 19: "Today" show host Katie Couric talks with Caitlin Flanagan about her new book, "To Hell With That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife." Today show

Planning a wedding is hell. Things are said. Doors are slammed. Quarrels about the most inconsequential things — yellow tablecloths or white? hors d’oeuvres set out on tables or passed around on trays? — are often pitched at such a level that it seems the combatants may never recover from them. Much of the anxiety, of course, is tribal. It is wrenching to have to open the sacred circle to admit an outsider. If, as Joan Didion once wrote, “marriage is the classic betrayal,” a wedding is the Judas kiss, public and terrible. But what brings people almost to the breaking point (emotional, social, financial) is that white weddings as they are currently practiced in America — with flocks of attendants, dinner dances for hundreds of guests, and a code governing every moment of the proceedings — don’t come naturally to most. Perhaps they don’t come naturally to anybody other than the members of the $70-billion-a-year wedding industry, who seem to have all but created the contemporary event, weaving together attractive bits of genuine tradition and bolts of pure invention.

Before World War II the idea that a girl of modest means would expect any of today’s purchased grandeur would have been laughable. She would have been familiar with the elements of such a ceremony, would have seen lavish movie weddings and photographs of society and royal ones, but she would not have imagined that those events had much to do with her own plans. She would have been married much as her mother had been: with her best friend standing up for her and everyone looking forward to a nice party at the bride’s home, the two mothers wearing corsages and ladling punch.

But times have changed, and middle-class couples are routinely trading the down payment on a first house for a single eye-popping party. Ilene Beckerman ponders the shift in the charming little book Mother of the Bride: The Dream, the Reality, the Search for a Perfect Dress. After being confronted with her daughter’s hideously complex reception menu, Beckerman can’t help herself: “When your father and I were married at your grandmother’s house in Queens,” she tells her aggrieved daughter, “we served deli platters. Everybody loved them.”

Nowadays every aspect of a formal wedding has become so intensely merchandized as to render its original design and purpose almost unrecognizable. The bridal registry, for example, was once a means by which a young couple could acquire the basic accoutrements of good housekeeping. Now couples old enough to have fully stocked homes — not to mention full-grown children — register for loot. They can be seen trolling through Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn, and Target, carrying bar code scanners and zapping anything that looks good. The trend toward multiple showers means that a guest may return to a couple’s registry several times. Web sites such as WeddingChannel.com and The Knot provide an opportunity for couples to showcase their weddings for their friends — and to put those friends a click away from the bride’s registry, where a gift can be selected and paid for in a matter of minutes.

Everything is big. The wedding invitation, once the model of a certain kind of brevity, is now often a mere component of a thick dossier with multiple stamps. “What’s this fat, unsolicited envelope in your mail, packed with forms that you must fill out and instructions that you must obey?” asks Judith Martin in her Miss Manners on Weddings. She concludes that it is, in fact, a wedding invitation from “people who have gone around the bend.” In the many published accounts of people’s experiences planning and hosting weddings, couples are constantly getting blindsided by the professionals, never imagining the pressure that vendors would put on them to consider various trifles absolutely essential. Just as the morticians whom Jessica Mitford described in The American Way of Death preyed on the grief and guilt of mourners, so do the wedding merchants capitalize on the emotional vulnerability and social anxiety that afflict people planning a formal wedding. If you love her, shouldn’t you spend two months’ salary on the diamond she’s going to wear forever? Would you deny a cherished daughter the same sort of party that all her friends have had?

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