Oregon Humanities Fall/Winter 2007

Cover of Oregon Humanities Fall/Winter 2007
Kathleen Holt
EDITOR
Jennifer Viviano
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Leigh van der Werff
PUBLICATIONS ASSISTANT
Allison Dubinsky
COPY EDITOR
Editorial Advisory Board
Tom Booth
Brian Doyle
Debra Gwartney
Julia Heydon
Marianne Keddington-Lang
Guy Maynard
Win McCormack
Camela Raymond
Kate Sage
Linny Stovall
Rich Wandschneider
Curt Yehnert

Oregon Humanities, a journal of ideas and perspectives about the humanities, is published biannually by the Oregon Council for the Humanities, 812 SW Washington Street, Suite 225, Portland, Oregon 97205.

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Review: Wars on Mommies?

The "Mommy Wars," as played out in a slew of recent literature, are not as simple and polarized as they seem.

by Mary Rechner

Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique is credited with sparking feminism's "second wave" in 1963 by declaring that women need more in their lives than children, marriage, and homemaking. Social changes inspired by civil rights and Friedan's liberal feminist ideals--equal opportunity for women in education and in the workplace, and reproductive freedom--have, over the last four decades, radically altered middle-class expectations about women and work.

The middle-class norm for women is now the same as it is for men: get an education and find a job. But getting pregnant and having a baby makes this norm, well, suddenly less normal for many women, leaving middle- and upper-class mothers to confront the same dilemma that working-class mothers have always faced: how do I work for money, take care of my children, and not lose my mind?

This question has fueled so many essays, articles, and books that it's arguably a publishing niche: the so-called "Mommy Wars." Though the majority of these writers are heterosexual, white, middle-class women, the voices of women of color, working-class women, and lesbians are represented as well. Such an outpouring of thought by and about mothers of all kinds seems to be a positive sign that motherhood, traditionally either a deified or devalued experience, is beginning to take up more space in the cultural psyche.

Publishing and other media tend to characterize mothers as starkly divided into differing camps, polarized by their beliefs about the best way to be a mother. While some authors do promote the joy of leaving paid work to care for their children, and others warn women not to squander economic and intellectual gains in the public sphere, most detail their own personal experience in an effort to explain (and perhaps understand) the choices they've made, but without demonizing other women's decisions. Controversy, however, helps sell magazines and books. And writers, whose livelihoods depend upon selling their work, may choose to collude.

In a 2006 interview with Salon.com, Leslie Morgan Steiner, the editor of Mommy Wars: Stay-at-Home and Career Moms Face Off on Their Choices, Their Lives, Their Families, is asked why she's chosen a title that "signaled conflict." Steiner responds, "The original title was 'Ending the Cat Fight,' but Random House didn't like it. We went through what seemed like a hundred titles before settling on 'Mommy Wars' because people understand it right away and that is really valuable in a title. If we called it '26 Moms Explain Their Life Stories and How We Should Love and Support Each Other,' no one would buy it. 'Mommy Wars' is shorthand for all the issues working moms and stay-at-home moms face. It has become a generic term."

Miriam Peskowitz, author of The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars: Who Decides What Makes a Good Mother?, finds the fixed categories of "working mom" and "stay-at-home mom" misleading because so many women, once they become mothers, combine parenting and part-time work. Part-time work often means greater flexibility, but it also means terrible pay and no benefits. According to Peskowitz, even mothers who continue to work full-time hit the "maternal wall." She cites Joan Williams, a lawyer who teaches at the Washington College of Law at American University: "In Williams' analysis, the ideal worker has no commitments and responsibilities outside the workplace."

Peskowitz's research edges her toward another factor that may not have changed enough to support working women in America: American men. "The number of mothers who leave their jobs or who work part-time are in fact resisting a system that they feel makes them work too hard," she writes. "If they live with men, they still don't get enough help from their male partners in doing this."

Linda Hirshman, author of the 2005 article "Homeward Bound," published in The American Prospect, finds fault with liberal feminism for failing to see that changing the public sphere doesn't automatically transform the private world of interpersonal relationships. "It [liberal feminism] changed the workplace but it didn't change men, and, more importantly, it didn't fundamentally change how women related to men." Hirshman lists three rules for "women who want to have sex and children with men as well as good work in interesting jobs where they may occasionally wield real social power ... prepare yourself to qualify for good work, treat work seriously, and don't put yourself in a position of unequal resources when you marry." Hirshman has a good time tossing out bon mots ("marry a starving artist" and "marry down" are just two), but she fails to acknowledge the desire some women feel (even well-educated, serious career achievers who make more money than their partners) to spend time caring for their own children.

In Maternal Desire, Daphne de Marneffe critiques liberal feminism for its tendency to equate a mother's desire to care for her children with self-negation. "The critical issue that has eluded theory and social debate is that caring for young children is something mothers often view as important both for their children and for themselves." De Marneffe, a clinical psychologist, is careful always to write about "some mothers," which gently reminds the reader that mothers are individuals first and mothers second.

The perception that all mothers belong to one big club may be fueling the Mommy Wars. Yet the only thing all mothers really have in common is that they have children. Rich mothers have different lives and options than poor mothers: a rich stay-at-home mom can employ a full-time nanny while a poor mom must work thirty hours a week in order to remain eligible for public assistance. Women whose own mothers and grandmothers earned their living performing domestic chores for other women may have different relationships to work than women whose mothers worked primarily for fulfillment rather than because they needed the money. One common denominator that does run through nearly all of the writing is ambivalence.

Sometimes ambivalence is the focus, while other times it reads like an unconscious subtext. Leslie Bennetts, author of The Feminine Mistake, chides women for relinquishing their work. "Women often decide to give up their own careers, rationalizing that choice with the thought that they would be working only to pay for childcare and that their work would therefore be pointless. But this argument completely fails to take into account the long-term development of any worker's earning potential. Your own career is an investment you make in yourself, one that--unless it is interrupted or derailed--will pay dividends throughout your life." Bennetts's, brisk and no-nonsense tone makes her acknowledgements section all the more surprising. In it, she thanks her bosses for her job at Vanity Fair, "which has permitted me to work at home, make dinner, and hear my kids' after-school reports while meeting my deadlines all these years." Apparently even a strong supporter of mothers keeping and developing their careers feels the need to reassure readers that her family never went without a home-cooked meal.

Thus far it's been primarily mothers on the children/career seesaw, but that may be changing. According to a 2002 report released by the Family and Work Institute, "while women felt about the same level of frustration when it came to balancing work and life over the last twenty-five years, men's frustrations sharply rose from 34 percent of men in dual-earning couples reporting a conflict in 1977, to 54 percent in 2002. Men born after 1965 spend 50 percent more time with their kids on workdays than their baby boomer dads did." Fathers, featured either as figures of support or revilement in many books by and about mothers, are beginning to write their own stories.

Though fathers are beginning to assume more responsibility for the work family balance, it's the mothers who are rolling up their sleeves: some, in the liberal feminist tradition, are still attempting to smash the glass ceiling, and others, like Joan Blades, author of The Motherhood Manifesto, are attempting to scale the maternal wall in novel ways. Blades has created a grassroots political action group on the web, MomsRising.org, whose mission includes "paid family leave; flexible work options; afterschool programs; healthcare for all kids; excellent childcare; realistic, fair wages; and paid sick days for all"--not too much to ask, and perhaps just what's needed to bring an end to the Mommy Wars.

Published in the Fall/Winter 2007 issue of Oregon Humanities.

© 2007 Oregon Council for the Humanities