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MMO:
You place the media-driven “Mommy Wars” squarely
in a social and political context, and suggest that— like
other prevalent stereotypes of mothers— the “Wars”
serve to divert public attention from the wants and needs of real
mothers who have too much work, too little time and not enough support.
But there’s no denying that mother-on-mother judgment exists
and is widespread— it almost seems to be woven into the cultural
fabric of our society— and it tends to cause bad feelings
all around. Do you think there is a lens, other than the monolithic
“Mommy Wars,” through which we might view this kind
of harmful behavior and defuse some of its power?
Miriam
Peskowitz: We mothers are supposed to be in control of our family life and
ourselves. In my family, I’m “Mom the fixer.”
When the pastel blue bow comes off the doll, I superglue it back
together. I keep food in our fridge. I watch that homework gets
done, make the doctor’s appointments, make sure new sneakers
are bought when the old ones are outgrown. It’s my role to
make our life as a family as seamless as possible. Many mothers
are in the same boat. When we move from being “the one who’s
in control” to situations in the workplace, where we can’t
fix things, we can’t make things work right for us, or in
our society more generally, where men are still the ones who create
law and policy, who control the flow of money, and who don’t
sacrifice as much when they become parents, it gets very confusing.
Why can’t Mom the fixer convince her employer to give her
health and retirement benefits? Why can’t Mom the fixer convince
the state government to provide paid parent leave?
I think the gap between
growing up and feeling like we’re in charge of our lives,
and the reality of becoming a mother right now in our society can
be debilitating, and depressing. It makes us feel ashamed, and it
makes us frustrated and angry, and these emotions are hard to give
voice to. So we take it out on other mothers, mothers we think are
doing it wrong. Mommy Wars judgments really say “You working
mom/stay at home mom, you think you have it made, you think you’re
doing the right thing, but you’re not and you’re wrong.”
That’s their message. You’re wrong and I’m right.
They pretend that the answers rest in the individual decisions we
make. We’re mad, and it’s hard to know who or what to
be mad at, so we take it out on other women, because we know they’re
as vulnerable as we are.
I know personally how
hard it is to “get” how the structural issues for motherhood
affect us. When my daughter was two, I had a part time job that
paid decently well, and also gave me health and retirement benefits.
I felt like I was on top of the world. I loved thinking of myself
as the mom who could make it all work out, the mom who could win.
For part of that year I thought less and less about other mothers,
and less and less about the big picture. Until, that is, my schedule
was changed mid year, and I found myself scrambling for a different
mixture of preschool hours and babysitting, up against the gap between
morning out programs on the one hand, and daycares that only provide
fulltime care on the other. I was still aghast that the structures
for hiring primary caretakers and caring for their young children
while they worked really, truly weren’t set up to help me.
I started really feeling the loss of privilege and status that accompanies
being a mom.
You
ask about other lenses to explain what’s going on. What’s
happening is that many women can’t believe things are as bad
they are. But it’s hard to be mad at “our society”
for these things. The motherhood problem is a hard one to gain traction
on, there are so many moving parts to it. And the magazine model
of motherhood constantly tells us that if we made the right choices
and followed the right coaching tips and domestic advice we would
be okay. There’s always another woman or mother held up to
tell us how someone else has figured out the answer. As Americans,
too, we imbibe competition— that’s our national culture,
so in a way it makes sense that mothers, too, are competitive with
each other; it would be weirder if we weren’t. When we’re
in that gap between thinking we should be in control, realizing
that we’re not, and we’re feeling anger, but we experience
it as shame that we can’t compete, that we can’t win—
the easy way out is to vent on other women, on those around us who
don’t have much power in the world. I understand this.
MMO: You conclude that the contemporary motherhood problem— which
you discovered is actually a “parent” problem—
is really a labor problem. Why? Isn’t it also a gender problem?
Miriam
Peskowitz: I am so tired of seeing the media treat motherhood as a female style
issue that I really emphasize in The Truth Behind the ‘Mommy
Wars’ that motherhood is work, and that mothers are experiencing
a labor issue. I don’t want this point to get lost. When a
mom working fulltime still faces a 15 percent lower wage than other
women, that’s a labor issue. When a mom or dad wanting part
time work has to give up salary and benefits, that’s a labor
issue. When a mother or father at home can’t count their work
as such on the United States census, or when a mother on welfare
can’t count parenting her own children as “work,”
those are labor issues. In all cases, the labor of mothers is being
devalued, whether she’s being paid for it or not.
Second, what I found
is that fathers who want to be primary caretakers have similar experiences—
they’re not really counted, and they too have trouble finding
decent part-time work. The book includes several stories of stay-at-home
dads, of fathers who have chosen to work less-than-full time so
they can be more hands-on with their kids. I found their stories
fascinating, and important. One of the first at-home parents I met—
before I was even pregnant, was Tom, who had left several high-level
jobs to be with his older kids and support his wife’s work.
When fathers are part of families, they’re crucial. That’s
why I call it both a motherhood problem, and a parent problem. It’s
coming down more harshly on mothers because so many of us tend to
be the primary parent, yes. But we need to include the experiences
of fathers who parent; they’re very isolated, need friends,
and have important insights. (I’m very critical of books like Perfect
Madness that write off this generation of fathers and say
they don’t want to parent; they haven’t done their research.)
I’ve noticed that because men tend to feel anger as anger
(not like women, who tend to turn anger inward into shame), at-home
dads really notice the loss of prestige when they decide to parent,
and they are very vocal about it.
And to be clear, when
I say in the book that this is a labor problem, that’s not
to negate gender, it’s to make sure we think about all these
things together.
MMO:
While doing research for The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars you discovered that it’s nearly impossible to find accurate
information about how many mothers of young children actually work
full-time, year round in the U.S. Why is this information—
or, to be more precise, the lack of it— so critical?
Miriam
Peskowitz:
Yes, I remember the summer
I tried to track down this information. I would be sitting in my
sunny home office, drinking iced tea, and on the phone and email.
And as soon as one lead dead-ended, I’d just dial another.
I write about this goose chase in the book because I think we need
to realize how our government’s ways of recording what people
do doesn’t incorporate mothers’ work, and that’s
a very political issue. I admit that at first it seemed technical,
along the lines of “my editor wants numbers, and I need to
find them to make her happy…”
This attitude changed,
though, after I interviewed policy experts. The worlds of policy
and journalism depend on numbers and statistics. This is the type
of information they rely on, the information that they deem authoritative
and real. They don’t care much about anecdotes, and about
emotions, and about mothers talking truth about their lives. Further,
when policy people get their issues in front of lawmakers, it’s
even more crucial to have numbers to illustrate the problem. It’s
a whole different way of talking about social problems than most
of us are aware. In order to translate the frustrations of motherhood
and parenting so that politicians can consider issues, and journalists
report them, national figures are crucial, and it’s a huge
problem for mothers that they’re so hard to find.
We must keep remembering
that the goal here is to share information, and to foster change,
and that though we tend to think about change in household and personal
terms— how can my family do it better. I hope we can move
out of our living rooms, so to speak, and see our issues in broader
terms, and to see solutions in the workplace and in policy change.
And second, the numbers
remind us that the problem is bigger than we are. When I was struggling
with the vagaries of part time work, I had no idea that 37 percent
of mothers work part time and have the same problems. I was shocked
when I found out. I had no way to understand this personally, nor
enough perspective to explain these issues to my boss. I want mothers
to know that when motherhood is difficult, the problem isn’t
just them; it’s often linked with some thing larger, some
way in which mothers and parent aren’t yet getting the support
they need.
MMO: While many recent books on motherhood as a social issue— such
as Ann Crittenden’s The Price of Motherhood, Joan
Williams’ Unbending Gender and Judith Warner’s Perfect Madness— focus on the predicament of well-educated,
affluent mothers, you sought out parents from all walks of life—
including mothers on public assistance— for your interviews.
Why did you feel it was important to offer such a diverse perspective
on the motherhood problem? Are there any “one size fits all”
solutions that will support both middle-income and low-income parents?
Miriam
Peskowitz: One afternoon I was at the playground in the Atlanta neighborhood
we lived in when my daughter was little. I loved the playground,
adored the moms I knew there, and had a great time. It was the place
that kept my daughter happy, and me sane. It was where my mother
wisdom came from— toilet training, weaning, pediatricians,
you name it, I learned it at the playground. One afternoon I was
pushing the stroller home, and I noticed that one street away, down
a hill and behind some houses, was another, smaller playground.
This one, though, was in a housing project, one of the last in the
city; the next year, in fact, it was torn down to make way for luxury
homes. We were middle class, mostly but not entirely white. They
were poor, and mostly African American. It struck me that their
families and kids never came to our playground, we never went to
theirs, and that we knew nothing about the other.
I was also increasingly
aware of a new media trend that used the needs of lower-income women
to undermine the needs of professional women. Caitlin
Flanagan’s particularly mean-spirited Nanny Wars article
in the Atlantic Monthly was part of that trend. It was
Mommy Wars again, the class version. Professional women feel frustrated
by work-and-motherhood issues? Well, buck up, look how hard factory-working
women have it, and stop complaining. She played women against each
other. I feel strongly that the answers to mothers’ frustrations
can’t be zero-sum, that motherhood is motherhood, no matter
how much or little money you have. A few years later, as I researched
the book, it was just clear to me that I would try to write about
all of our lives as mothers, across class and community differences.
I started talking with women who had struggled with welfare, and
with finding their feet after.
That said, one of the
things I learned is that we each have our own needs as mothers.
I want job security, and fair wages and benefits for part time work.
My friend wants more balanced hours for fulltime work, the return
of the 40-hour week. Someone else wants high quality, subsidized
childcare, and dreams of childcare stipends for parents of young
children. Another wants social security and other tax benefits for
the unpaid labor of motherhood, another wants part time childcare.
And still another wants the childcare vouchers that welfare recipients
get to continue when you’re off welfare and back to work.
Someone else wants childcares with infirmaries, childcares that
serve dinner at 6 pm so the kids aren’t starving when you
pick them up. And someone else still wants a cultural shift that
makes it easier to move back to the workplace after time off to
parent, they want on-ramps, and soon. Another mom wants better schools,
and more realistically priced homes; she’s given up her job
to home school her kids because the only house they can afford is
in a neighborhood with terrible, unsafe schools. There’s no
one size fits all answer. But there are lots of solutions, that
must never be played off against each other. |
