It
had all of the makings of a train wreck: stay-at-home mothers,
working mothers, an angry audience and television cameras. So it
came as no surprise, then, when everything exploded into flames
only a few minutes after the conductor, Dr. Phil of TV talk show
fame, pulled out of the yard. Minutes into the show, otherwise composed
mothers dissolved into screaming match, egged on by an audience
that actually “meowed” at them.
It was a low moment,
even for The Mommy Wars.
Ironically, the Dr. Phil
show Mom vs. Mom (the actual title) may have done some
good for the so-called “Mommy Wars,” those battles between
women over whether to work or stay at home while raising children.
Days after the show aired, two of its guests—women usually
considered to be on opposing sides of the Mommy Wars—released
a joint statement to the press calling on mothers to put aside their
differences and join together to improve the status of families
and the lives of children. Likewise, Mothers & More, a national
organization for women who have altered their careers to care for
their children, issued a public “Apple Pie in the Face Award”
to Dr. Phil; the group also made mothering stereotypes the focus
of its 2004 Mothers Day Campaign.
The Mommy Wars, and the
media’s infatuation with them, infuriate people like Joanne
Brundage, founder of Mothers & More, who see them as a diversion
tactic that redirects mothers’ attention from the real issue
at hand: the lack of support and respect for caregiving in this
country.
“If we’re
going to have a war, it should be on how society ignores caregiving
roles and the people who fill them,” says Brundage. “We
are all suffering [from] a larger societal disease but all we focus
on is the symptoms.”
How
We Got Here
The Mommy Wars are nothing
new. In fact, they’ve been around, in one form or another,
since the Victorian Age. The 1854 publication of the book The
Angel in the House fired the first public shot. Written by
Coventry Patmore, the book extolled the virtues of his wife, Emily,
and portrayed her as the quintessential wife and mother—one
who sacrificed herself for her husband and family. Initially successful
among the middle class, the book’s ideals received royal reinforcement
from Queen Victoria’s marriage to Prince Albert, which in
turn caused the message to spread throughout society.
One hundred and fifty
years later, some scholars believe those ideals are at the heart
of the Mommy Wars. Dr. Catherine Wallace, author of Selling
Ourselves Short: Why We Struggle To Earn A Living And Have A Life,
argues that firmly entrenched ideals of the “perfect”
mother, when combined with America’s ideal-worker, consumerist
society, put mothers in a no-win situation.
“The workplace
was [originally] understood to be amoral competition, something
like warfare….that was why women were supposed to stay out
of it,” says Wallace, a former college professor and mother
of three. “All morality was then invested in the figure who
never went to work, which was the mother, who was then the ‘angel
in the house’: she was the guardian of all that was pure and
noble and morally centered and spiritually enlightened and gracious
and kind and pure.”
What mother can live
up to that?
Modern mothers, however,
are encouraged to try through a plethora of mixed messages. Television
commercials, for instance, on one hand glamorize motherhood (think
of the ad for that new minivan that says “moms have changed”
while showing numerous impeccably dressed women but no children)
but also tell moms they shouldn’t rest until they’ve
found the perfect dish soap/laundry detergent/quick-fix-meal to
keep their families healthy and happy. And those are the benign
messages. Others are more insidious: the constant clash of scientists
to determine whether daycare is harmful or beneficial for children;
the American Academy of Pediatrics’ recommendation that babies
be exclusively breastfed for six months while working mothers are
entitled to only four months of unpaid maternity leave under the
Family and Medical Leave Act; or a 1998 U.S. House and Senate joint
resolution that stated Congress “should acknowledge the importance
of at-home parents” yet offered nothing to assist those parents.
“We have these
two inconsistent ideals: the ‘ideal worker’ norm that
mandates working full time for 40 years, and also the ‘ideal
mother’ norm that mandates children need time with their parents
and that the mother should provide that,” says Joan Williams,
a professor of law and the author of Unbending Gender: Why Family
and Work Conflict and What to do About it. “It is virtually
impossible for women to live up to both of these ideals.”
Although women understand
this intellectually, many feel guilty emotionally. Clinical Psychologist
Dr. Daphne de Marneffe, author of Maternal Desire: On Children,
Love, and the Inner Life, says women often cope with guilty
feelings of not doing enough—for their children, themselves,
or their families—by building a rigid identity for themselves.
“I think partly
why the mommy wars are so vociferous is that being a mother—
and the kind of mother we are— is a core identity and is incredibly
important to us,” says de Marneffe, a mother of three. “In
order to cope with the things we give up, we try to shore ourselves
up.”
That manifests itself
in the Mommy Wars: mothers judging other mothers. And it is a vicious
cycle.
“The smug sense
of superiority that comes from denigrating another mother’s
values can be very seductive,” says Judith Stadtman Tucker
of The Mothers Movement Online, a national organization for mothers
to discuss social change. “Over and over again, that’s
exactly where mothers get hung up.” |
