| Is every American mother so hopelessly preoccupied
with conforming to a manic, misery-inducing style of over-parenting
that we’ve lost the capacity to imagine a more mother-friendly
alternative? Probably not, but Judith Warner, author of Perfect
Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety,
would like us to think so. And given that Warner and her publishers
have positioned Perfect Madness as this generation’s
answer to The Feminine Mystique, it seems important to pay
close attention to Warner’s message and the unprecedented publicity
her book has received.
First things first: it’s
unlikely Perfect Madness will jump start the next big wave
of the women’s movement, or even inspire a decent surge of
righteous indignation over the astounding lack of profamily policy
in the U.S. While Warner does throw an assortment of new and thought-provoking
insights into the mix of recent writing on motherhood and society, Perfect Madness is hardly revolutionary (or even
strikingly original), nor does it compare to Friedan’s
1963 classic in either depth or scope. A certain subset of affluent
mothers may see their lives and lifestyle sharply reflected in Perfect
Madness, but whether Warner’s mildly condescending summary
of their plight is persuasive enough to trigger an explosion of
political consciousness among upper middle-class moms— and
whether that would be enough to set the world on fire— is
anyone’s guess. It could happen, but I’m not holding
my breath.
Warner suggests that a “widespread, choking cocktail of guilt
and anxiety and resentment and regret” is “poisoning
motherhood for American women today… Lowering our horizons
and limiting our minds. Sapping energy that we should have for ourselves
and our children. And drowning out thoughts that might lead us,
collectively, to formulate solutions.” Because Warner’s
children were born while she was living and working in France—
where, she reports, she was able to take advantage of excellent
low-cost childcare and mothers are expected to prioritize their
attachments to the adult world— she was taken aback by how
desperately frazzled and unfulfilled American mothers seemed to
be when she returned to the States. “I listened to my friends,
listened to talk radio, to mothers on the playground and to my daughter’s
nursery school teachers, and I found it all— the general culture
of motherhood in America— oppressive,” she writes. “The
pressure to conform, to attain levels of perfect selflessness was insane.”
To confirm her suspicion that motherhood, American-style, is driving
women around the bend, Warner interviewed 150 middle-class mothers.
Most were white, many were African American, and over half lived
in pricey neighborhoods in and around Washington, DC. And while
she assiduously avoids making any distinctions between mothers who
stay at home and those who work for pay, Warner found many of her
interview subjects through organizations which provide social networks
and support for at-home or “sequencing” moms. Despite
the obvious limitations of her sample, Warner concluded that an
entire cohort of women— those born between 1958 and the early
1970s— had devolved into a nation of obsessive-compulsive
mothers, each and every one haplessly enslaved to an unforgiving
“mommy mystique” which “rests on an almost religious
adherence to ideas about child-rearing, about marriage and sex roles
and society that supports the status quo even as mothers denounce
it, even as children complain about it, even as ‘the experts’
warn that our way of doing things is stressing our children to the
core.” Above all, Warner cautions, this regressive practice
of super-selfless mothering is “a form of self-blinding”
that prevents mothers from “thinking clearly about what is
happening to their lives and what they can do to change it.”
Based on her research, Warner decided that “all mothers in
America, in differing ways and to differing degrees” are sucking
up a toxic combination of guilt, anxiety, stress, rage and exhaustion—
all exacerbated by an especially pernicious standard of maternal
over-achievement— she describes as “the mess.”
According to Warner, mothers’ neurotic (and, she implies,
foolish) absorption in the minutiae of their children’s daily
lives leaves them suspended in a kind of infantile state, where
they are rendered incapable of thinking for or about themselves—
let alone the social, economic and cultural factors that contribute
to their distress. For as Warner observes, the mothers in her
focus groups were not happy about any of this— in fact, they
felt quite miserable and trapped in their motherhood.
Warner also contends that mothers who limit their outlet for self-expression
to x–treme hyperparenting end up preferring the playroom to
the bedroom, and their marriages suffer as a result. “I often
wonder if our ‘mommy frumps’— those awful jeans
and spit-stained shirts and dreary haircuts we sport like punitive
uniforms— aren’t a kind of protective shield. Looking
crummy all the time, being ‘just a mom,’ may be a way
to beat back the prospective demons of sexuality we don’t
want to deal with, with the sense of possibility it might awaken,
reminding us of other times, broader horizons, bigger dreams—
and happier marriages.” Warner links all this to the “undeniable”
epidemic of sexless marriages in the U.S.— she cites a report
suggesting that 15 to 20 percent of married couples have sex less
than 10 times a year— but she seems more concerned about the
unmet needs of frustrated husbands than the unmet needs of wives who
would like to have much more help around the house than they get
from their “ideal worker” spouses.
But, Warner says, “Instead of talking about their anger,
women talk about other things. How hopeless men are at taking care
of children… How lucky they are not to be like men…
How lucky their children are to have mothers like them, women who
aren’t afraid to be real moms.” There’s no denying
this compensating discourse is real and fairly common, but as Cynthia
Fuchs Epstein notes in her 1988 book Deceptive Distinctions:
Sex, Gender and the Social Order, it’s nothing new, nor
is it exclusive to unenlightened middle-class mothers. “There
has always been a theme in women’s folklore, at least in the
Western world,” Epstein writes, “that women know best
what men need, that men are often childlike and incompetent, that
their egos need bolstering because they are unsure of themselves
and easily threatened at work, that they are vulnerable weak reeds
depending on a woman’s strength in matters of emotion, and
that they cannot cope with children, the home, and other aspects
of life in the female domain.” (For more on sex, gender and
the breakdown of the ideal of shared parenting, see Doing
Difference in the MMO Motherhood
Papers.)
Warner concedes that fathers’ failure to take on more of
the grunt work of family life tends to ratchet up mothers’
levels of stress and fatigue, but like the mothers she interviewed,
she’s inclined to let men off the hook. In a recent
interview in Salon, Warner comments that trying to get fathers
to do their fair share of child care and housework is “largely
a lost cause for our generation. It’s too late.” In
fact, recent
studies from the Families and Work Institute indicate that post-boomer
fathers are far more invested in family life than older male workers,
and that fathers in dual-earner couples are, in general, spending
more non-work time on household chores and child-minding—
not
nearly enough, but the situation is hardly as intractable as
Warner makes it out to be.
The real answer, Warner says, is for society to give mothers some
much-needed relief in the form of policies that lead to the
creation of more flexible, affordable, well-regulated, high-quality
child care. This, she reasons, would increase the comfort level
of employed mothers— who might otherwise worry about the quality
of care their kids are getting while mom’s at her job—
and permit at-home mothers to get out of the house once in a while
and get a life. Finally, Warner offers a vague proposal that society
could take steps to make life “less expensive and stressful
for middle class families so that mothers (and fathers) could work
less without risking their children’s financial futures.”
But to accomplish any of this, Warner suggest, mothers need to get
a grip on themselves and wake up to the fact that, well, some things
are much better in France.
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