| While Warner gives
a condensed overview of cultural and structural factors which contribute
to the contemporary motherhood “mess,” her primary focus
is on how the present generation of mothers has internalized certain
patterns of thinking and behavior that leave them more susceptible
to the unreasonable demands of “intensive” motherhood.(1)
“If you have been brought up, all your life, being told you
have wonderful choices,” Warner reflects, “you tend, when
things go wrong, to assume you made the wrong choices— not to
see that the ‘choices’ given you were wrong in the first
place.” Warner argues that this disconnect sends young women
into a kind of existential tail-spin that plays out in a unusually
self-destructive way once they become mothers. Yet— in a very
un-Friedan like manner— Warner declines almost every opportunity
to probe the possibility that the “choices” mothers have
are ideologically defined, structurally reinforced and generally serve
the interests of individuals and institutions that benefit from the
social subordination of women.
The issue of class looms large over Warner’s research methods
and analysis, although she defends her attempt to generalize
the experience of the very privileged women she interviewed to
mothers at large. “It is very hard to write about the middle
class in America without excessively focusing on the upper middle
class,” she insists. She notes that “every other book
on ‘American’ motherhood I have read” suffers
from the same bias. (But since Sharon Hays’ Flat
Broke With Children, Jodi Heymann’s The Widening
Gap and Rickie
Solinger’s work are listed in Warner’s bibliography,
one has to wonder. Either she was under the impression these texts
concentrate on the lives of upper middle-class mothers, or she did
not read them very carefully.) Warner argues that the upper middle
class “is our reference point for what the American good life
is supposed to look like and contain.” Therefore, she suggests,
“the ways of the upper middle class affect everyone—
including, to their detriment, the working class and the poor.”
This is undeniably true, but probably not in the way Warner wants
to spin it. As Hays shows so brilliantly in her analysis of welfare
reform legislation in Flat Broke With Children, dominant
cultural values in America— and by default, the ideological
dictates of motherhood and broadly accepted parenting norms—
have everything to do with class and the distribution of
wealth and care, but they affect mothers quite differently
depending on where they are situated in the class hierarchy. (And
then again, it’s probably safe to assume that a fair number
of middle- and upper-middle class mothers have never been blindsided
by paralytic indecision when dealing with such “mindless trivia”
as whether to order the regular or deluxe version of the Hello Kitty
birthday pack. I, for one, have never experienced anything quite
like that, even though I’m well acquainted with maternal anxiety and fit squarely into the demographic
Warner claims to speak for.)(2)
Yet in her concluding chapter, Warner reverses herself on the significance
of class when she states that “The focus on the motherhood
dilemmas of the very successful which runs through so very much
of the thinking and writing on and media coverage of motherhood
in our time, poses the problems relating to motherhood and family
life in America in terms that are not only irrelevant to most women
but also harmful to their interests.” (Italics in
original)
The major problem is
that the experiences of these wealthy women have come, despite
their irrelevancy to the vast, vast majority of the population,
to define the terms through which we understand motherhood in
our time.
They determine the
vocabulary with which we discuss motherhood— using words
like “choice” and “options” and “priorities”
and “balance.” As though they had universal validity.
As though they had any meaning at all in the majority of women’s
lives. And they have inspired the story— the master
narrative, if you will— that we tell now about women’s
progress and the problems of motherhood.
Um,
OK— I agree. (Mary Ann Mason offered a similar critique in
her 1988 book, The Equality Trap.)
But I’m confused.
2.
Warner is not the first to proclaim that unobtainable
standards of self-effacing, over-the-top mothering are detrimental
to mothers and others. In The
Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined
Women (2004) co-authors Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels
cover much of the same ground, and one has to wonder if Warner’s
effort to position herself as the go-to gal on motherhood issues
has something to do with the fact that she fails to cite The
Mommy Myth (and several other highly relevant works) in Perfect
Madness. But while Douglas and Michaels document the influence
of media messages on the rise of “the new momism” and map the relationship between the renewed acceptance of traditional
sex roles and the changing political climate of the 1980s and 1990s, Warner proposes the destructive perfectionism that’s
killing off mothers’ social consciousness is the product of
internalized patterns of self-defeating behavior. When confronted
with the unhappy reality of workplaces and romantic partnerships
in which equality of opportunity and respect remain in short supply,
the generation of young women who were raised to believe they could
do and be anything hunkered down. Instead of fighting
the power, Warner asserts, they settled for fine-tuning their pathological
eating habits, obsessing about body image, and— when they
became mothers— micromanaging the lives of their children.
“Rather than becoming rebels of pioneers like our baby boomer
predecessors,” Warner laments, “we became a generation
of control freaks.”
And as Warner hastens to add, control does not equal power. “And
control through what means? The only ones available to us then in
the political landscape of the deeply reactionary Reagan and Bush
years: self-control, personal achievement, self-perfection. This
felt like empowerment, but it wasn’t— not in the long-term.”
Warner says this “obsessive looking inward”
hides “a kind of despair… Our outlook is something very
much akin to what cognitive behavioralists call ‘learned helplessness’—
the kind of instinctive giving-up in the face of difficulty that
people do when they come to think they have no real power.”
(For a more sophisticated discussion of the inner lives of women,
perfectionism and forms of power, see Women
& Shame by Brené Brown, PhD, and Toward
A New Psychology of Women by Jean Baker Miller.)
This is one of Warner’s more interesting theories, and while
it’s dicey to compare excessive mothering to an eating disorder—
or to minimize the magnitude of psychic pain that causes women to
compulsively starve themselves— the question
of what happens to women when sexist attitudes and institutions
thwart their sense of agency is one worth exploring in greater depth.
It’s possible that some women do take to mothering with a
vengeance— after all, motherhood is the only locus in which
our society reflexively grants women a smattering of social power,
social power that hinges on the myth that children are perfectible
and mothers have the ultimate control over children’s optimal
development. Whether or not one accepts the proposition that motherhood
is “the most important job in the world,” for the sake
of argument it’s important acknowledge that this tired sentiment
is born out of cultural ideals and human longings that lend such
maxims the sheen of sacred truth. And as Rhona Mahoney points out
in her 1995 book, Kidding Ourselves: Breadwinning, Babies and
Bargaining Power, a woman’s autonomy is significantly
compromised when she has dependent children, and mothers tend to
fall back on sacred truths and familiar gender roles when the pursuit
of equality blows up in our face.
Warner’s transition from pop psychology to public
policy solutions is problematic, notes Daphne de Marneffe, clinical
psychologist and author of Maternal
Desire: On Children, Love and the Inner Life. “There
is no suggestion that there is an actual person in the center of
this, someone who has to evaluate social messages, get clear on
her values, tune out trivia, and work for a better world through
the sometimes boring and unsensational attempt at coalition building,
political action, etc. We go directly from a (particularly tortured)
personality type to a large scale political solution, with no account
for the mediating self.”
De Marneffe feels that Perfect Madness “is a symptom
of the very condition it purports to be trying to cure. If you write
a book with the explicitly narrow focus on (upper-middle class)
mothers’ obsession with externals and appearances and competition,
you can’t very well turn around and ask in good conscience
‘Does anyone have an inner life?’ The way you’ve
picked your topic and constructed your argument guarantees that
you’ve left out the very terms that could question and subvert
and discredit the reality you’re describing.” “But I think the deeper issue is that Warner refuses to engage
seriously the issue of women’s own desire,” De Marneffe
says, “including their own lived sense of complex subjectivity
and their own responsibility to their better selves. In Perfect
Madness, desire is aligned, in a totally clichéd way,
with all the things that women want ‘for themselves,’
that is, apart from motherhood— jobs, achievement, time, looking
nice, dates with husbands— and never examined as an integral
part of their experience of motherhood. Feminism’s ideal was
to free women to be the author of their own lives, and to know and
act on their desires. Warner’s argument expunges the desiring
voice of women by not analyzing more deeply what is going on to
make women suppress their awareness of it.” |
