In Katha Pollitt's latest Nation column (7/15/09), she finds it "not hard to poke holes in" the July 2 Time magazine cover story by "Caitlin Flanagan--professional antifeminist, author of a whole book of essays attacking working mothers, herself excepted"--being full of "Flanagan's predictions of universal doom for the children of divorced or never-married parents":

After all, President Clinton and President Obama turned out all right. Most children of divorce do. There are plenty of countries where divorce and unmarried parenthood are common, but children do fine--Sweden, France, Germany, the Netherlands. Some of the measured bad effects on kids are more about the way we divorce than the divorce itself--unstable living arrangements, disappearance of the father into a new family, moves and changes of school, new parental partners who don't stick around, loss of income, less attention from a mother who is now working all the time. It may be ideal for kids to grow up in a loving, sane, happy, stable, two-parent home, but that is not the alternative for couples contemplating divorce, still less for most never-married single mothers....

If the concern is really with children, especially poor children, we could improve their lives tremendously by concentrating on the things we actually can achieve. Healthcare. Excellent schools with music and drama and art and gym and after-school programs. Neighborhoods safe enough for kids to play outdoors and air clean enough so they don't get asthma. Libraries. Summer camp. Counseling for kids in trouble--and their parents. Economic support for families, married or not. Housing for all. Free college. A public works job for anyone who wants one. All those necessities that, in America, are seen as the responsibility of individual families.

On such subjects, Pollitt has "noticed that conservatives express concern for low-income and especially black people--'the underclass'--only when they want to attack liberals." She writes that this actually is "a specialty of Flanagan's--the only time she writes about cleaning women is when she is blaming feminists for paying them too little."

Listen to the new edition of the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Katha Pollitt on Caitlin Flanagan in Time" (7/17/09).

Guest blogging at Double X (7/2/09), Linda Hirshman takes on a Time magazine "cover story by working mother-scourge Caitlin Flanagan" that uses "the occasion of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford's staggeringly banal adultery to tell America that 'Marriage Matters.'" Specifically, Hirshman writes of Flanagan's contention that

Marriage matters, because single-parent families are bad for children, the only people who count. "Drastically" bad: "On every single significant outcome ... children from intact, two-parent families outperform those from single-parent households.... If you can measure it, a sociologist has; and in all cases, the kids living with both parents drastically outperform the others."

OK, maybe poor people, more often single than their critics from the elite Flanagan class, have worse outcomes, but aren't those problems more about, say, poverty than single-parent families? And, in fact, sociologists have been looking for reliable data that sorts that out since the invention of sociology in the 19th century and as recently as 2005.

But instead of looking at the recent work, Flanagan gives us her usual brew of autobiography (my parents' 50-year marriage, my husband’s caretaking), outmoded studies and interviews with experts from right-wing foundations such as David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute for American Values (and a loud spokesman against marriage for same-sex people), and Heritage's Robert Rector.

Hirshman points to a 2005 report from "the centrist Brookings Institution" that apparently is "unbeknownst to Flanagan": "Looking at a decade's work, [Penn State Professor of Family Sociology and Demography Paul R.] Amato reported 'the results of individual studies vary considerably: Some suggest serious negative effects of divorce, others suggest modest effects, and yet others suggest no effects.'"

One of Amato's conclusions is that "if the share of adolescents living in two-parent families returned to its 1970 level, it would have ... a relatively small effect on the share of children experiencing these problems." His educated guess that "in general, these findings... are likely to disappoint some readers" appears true enough, except when corporate media pundits like Flanagan choose not to read them at all. See the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Career Women, Go Home: Media Return to a Favorite Obsession" (11–12/06) by Keely Savoie.

Reading Caitlin Flanagan's Time magazine cover story (7/2/09) on the "increasingly fragile construct" of marriage--which claims that "the divorce culture became a fact of life" over "the past 2½ decades"--one would never guess that U.S. divorce rates have actually dropped by almost a third since 1992, from 4.8 per thousand people to 3.5.

Caitlin Flanagan, primarily known (and embraced by mainstream media) for her anti-feminist writings, was back in the New York Times this weekend--this time attacking former '70s radical Sara Jane Olson. As a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army, Olson (born Kathleen Soliah) was indicted for plotting to bomb LAPD patrol cars; she evaded capture until 1999, during which time she built a life under her new name in Minnesota. She's now been allowed to serve her parole at home in Minnesota rather than in California, where she served her time.

Flanagan's peeved, because, she would have us believe, she sees a double standard.

"Thanks to Sara Jane Olson and her return to the spacious house and gracious life she’s made for herself in St. Paul," she writes in the Times, "we know what it's called when a rich, white woman gets convicted of trying to kill cops and robbing a bank: 'idealism.'" Flanagan concludes her piece:

The irreducible starting point of the SLA's agenda was the belief that the justice system treated blacks differently from whites. By offering herself up to serve her parole in the state, she will do her part to ensure that there are not two standards of justice, one for the white women who have Tudor-style houses and shadowed lawns to return to in a distant state--let us call such women the "fascist insect"--and the other for African-American women--let us call them "the people"--who enter the system with very little and leave it with even less.

Of course, if Flanagan was actually concerned about people being discriminated against by the parole system and institutional racism, the logical thing to advocate for would be changes in the criminal justice system so that they too were able to serve parole in their homes. Instead, African-American women here are just a useful tool for Flanagan to attack a white female leftist.

It's her specialty, after all: Her first big break was a piece on nannies, arguing basically that rich white feminists are hypocrites because they're only able to both pursue careers and have children by exploiting poor women as underpaid nannies. There, too, her point was really about bashing the white feminists, not about concern for the nannies--as Barbara Ehrenreich noted in a lengthy exchange with Flanagan about the article, "If your 10,000-word piece was about how employers should pay their nannies’ Social Security taxes, then my reading skills are in serious decline."