4.
Predicatably, the thing I found most exasperating— and also disingenuous—
about Perfect Madness was Warner’s constant refrain
that all American mothers (unless they happen to have lived
and worked in France when their children were small) are sadly
uninformed about the social and economic conditions that reinforce their wretchedness. Warner offers no hope that there is a spectrum
of resistance, that some mothers are actively describing and analyzing
the internal and external factors which feed their discontent,
that they are thinking and writing about motherhood as a social problem
in books, memoirs, essays, commentaries— and all over the
internet on web sites like HipMama, LiteraryMama and the MMO, not to mention hundreds, if not thousands, of personal weblogs.
Given her topic, Warner seems inexplicably oblivious to evidence that
even though there is (as yet) no centrally organized, progressive
“mothers’ movement,” plenty of American mothers see the need for social change and are starting to do something about it.
Miriam Peskowitz, a feminist scholar and author of the forthcoming The Truth Behind The “Mommy Wars”: Who Decides What
Makes A Good Mother (April 2005), is concerned that Perfect
Madness portrays the motherhood problem as a lifestyle issue,
and not an economic one. “Warner tells us that the problem
is that too many moms are hand-painting plates for their kids’
birthdays. In real life, mothers are most frustrated because they’re
doing too much work, not getting enough support at home, and not
getting support at work in the form of fairly-paid part time work.
The problem is not that some mothers like to do crafts, but that
mothers face an all-or-nothing job market that makes it nearly impossible
for them to parent and support their families at the sam time.”
To top it all off, Peskowitz says, “We’re told that
another country gives us an easy answer, in this case, France. We
know the answers aren’t that easy. I’ve written a book
that focuses on ordinary women who are acting for change—
former welfare mothers who organize, and well-educated attorneys
who organize. I want there to be room in our culture to talk about
this. I see us all as a movement, articulated in different ways.
My fear, of course, is that the media doesn’t want to hear
about a movement, it only wants to hear about a single author, and
about affluent women.”
It’s possible that Warner did not know about any of this
rumbling, this setting-things-in-motion, that’s going on
under the radar of the mainstream media. But if not, why not? Then
again, it’s possible that she dismissed this uprising of consciousness
as too fringe to have any real impact on the future of society.
But given Warner’s conviction that “all mothers in America”
are somehow trapped in the same crazy-making motherhood mess
as the narrow sample of upper middle-class women she interviewed,
it’s also possible she deliberately excluded examples
of mothers who just say no to the mandates of intensive motherhood—
many of whom might consider themselves feminist mothers— because
it contradicts her core assumption that, politically speaking, every
mother in 21st century America has her head buried in the sand.
This may be why a reference to the Mothers
Ought To Have Equal Rights (MOTHERS) initiative is nowhere to
be found in Perfect Madness— even though Warner cites
the work of Naomi Wolf, co-founder of MOTHERS, several
times. Warner’s failure to mention this project seems puzzling,
given that of all the groups promoting organized action on behalf
of mothers, MOTHERS has received considerable media attention and
has the kind of proactive policy agenda Warner favors. And
MOTHERS co-founder Ann Crittenden’s book, The
Price of Motherhood (2001), has undoubtedly galvanized the political consciousness
of thousands of middle-class mothers, another detail Warner fails
to note.
It also seems strange that, apparently, Warner never took the trouble
to speak with anyone in the motherhood field— not Wolf or
Crittenden or Jana Malamud Smith, not Susan Maushart, Andi Buchanan
or Faulkner Fox, not Susan Douglas, Meredith Michaels or Daphne
De Marneffe— or any other writers who’ve touched on
critical issues relevant to Warner’s subject, and whose voices
might have added texture and authority to Warner’s analysis.
(It's duly noted that Warner did speak with Joan Williams, author
of Unbending Gender.)
“I like, very much, how Warner argues that the lack of a
meaningful social net is a large part of what makes contemporary
mothers so stressed out,” says Faulkner
Fox, author of Dispatches
From A Not So Perfect Life. “This seems completely
true to me. And I’m glad if Warner’s book is getting
this point more national attention. Mothers are doing an extraordinary
amount on our own, and the lack of support can make at least some
of us obsessive.”But, Fox adds, the 1970s were not a time of unmitigated empowerment
for women. “The way Warner makes sweeping generalizations
about what ‘we’ did in a given decade is quite problematic.
Every decade is complex and full of mixed messages. And people have
always had varied ways of interacting with these messages, ways
decidedly more complicated than just blindly accepting them. Likewise,
she extrapolates from a highly exclusive group of women— upper
middle class women living in a tony DC suburb, who all seem to be
married to incredibly ambitious men— and makes it seem like
every American mother shares their values. Now this is perfectly
mad. There are many, many parents— a majority, I feel certain—
whose expectations fall between incredibly ambitious and not ambitious
at all.”
“The response to Warner’s book suggests that women
continue to be eager to hear that they are functioning within a
particular, historically produced set of expectations about mothering,”
observes Meredith Michaels. “Susan [Douglas] and I have certainly
found that to be true. On the other hand, Warner does not provide
an account of the situation that is sufficiently nuanced to explain
how it is that some women evade the expectations, why others are
excluded from them and how many are working actively against them.”
The truth is that not all the mothers Warner interviewed for Perfect
Madness fit into the frantic control-freak model she claims
is so pervasive. I can say this with great certainty because I
participated in (and moderated) Warner’s online focus group
with members of Mothers
& More in December 2002. I can’t reveal the content
of the 30 or so extremely thoughtful responses to Warner’s
questionnaire. But I can report that while almost every mother who
weighed in on the discussion agreed that “there is currently
an ideal of perfect motherhood in the United States,” the
vast majority also contested the validity of unrealistic standards
of mothering and described how they were actively negotiating and/or
resisting pressures to be All Mommy, All Of The Time.
Several members did confess they felt that their own perfectionist
personalities made motherhood unnecessarily difficult for them,
and one or two spoke openly about their encounters with debilitating
anxiety. But during the two weeks Warner was a guest on the Mothers
& More discussion forum, this same group of mothers also had lively exchanges
about feminism, the influence of urban design and suburban sprawl
on the mobility of young children and the shrinking maternal
comfort zone, growing income inequality in the U.S. and the root
causes of poverty, the fine points of progressive, conservative
and libertarian ideology, part-time parity, and even “quality
of life” as a political ethic. They swapped news stories and
commentaries on the phenomenon of over-protective parenting, the
pressing need for a national child-care program, and a Wall
Street Journal article about mothers working to end the “Mommy Wars.” Whatever conclusions one might draw about this select group of highly
privileged women, it would be difficult to accuse any one of them
of lacking political consciousness. And while a number of these
mothers were quite strident in their opinions, all seemed resolutely
sane.
What is it about Warner’s version of the story— a story
postulating that due to some twisted inner drive, American mothers
are succumbing en masse to an irrational impulse to sacrifice
themselves on the alter of über-motherhood, wrecking
their children’s lives and marriages in the process—
that holds such popular appeal? I suppose the reality— that
every mother struggles to incorporate motherhood into her adult
identity, that some go through this complicated and prolonged process
more mindfully than others, but no two mothers ever go through it
in exactly the same way, that American mothers’ biggest
problem is living in a culture that refuses to support their work,
either in or outside the home— simply isn’t as shocking
and buzzworthy as Warner’s dire warnings of an epidemic of
maternal derangement. The reality doesn’t aggravate creeping
cultural anxieties about personal and public safety, economic insecurity,
the erosion of the middle class, and the diminishing vitality of
the American stock.
We could tell a different
story about American motherhood. We could tell the story that mothers
are imperfect, human and complicated beings who are fully endowed
with volition, desire and the capacity to reason. That motherhood
burdens them with more responsibilities, but doesn’t make
them less competent. That their inner lives exist inside and outside
the boundaries of motherhood. And while they may not openly
protest all the social and economic conditions that make motherhood
and equality incompatible in the 21st century, many mothers—
if not most— sense that something which is not of their
own making is constantly working against them. And for the
most part, they are not as helpless and befuddled as some might
like to think.
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