5.
But if mothers really are the thinking, self-determined creatures
that populate this different story of American motherhood, why are
we so stuck? As Warner comments on reading The Feminine Mystique,
“Bizarrely, it is almost impossible to read the depictions
of motherhood in Friedan’s time without a shock of recognition.”
I had exactly the same reaction, although I did not find it so bizarre.
In her review of Perfect
Madness for Slate,
Ann Hulbert, author of Raising America: Experts, Parents and
a Century of Advice About Children (2003), remarks:
If there is a ‘myth’
of motherhood these days, it is that mothers’ experience
has been relentlessly, and romantically, mythologized. In print,
at least, the opposite is the truth. Over the course of almost
half a century now, women writers have been busy crafting a withering
corrective to official versions of motherhood.
The proliferation
of individual voices and personal dilemmas has been warmly welcomed,
both by female readers eager for vivid portraits/polemics about
overstressed parents in the dual-career era and by a media ever
more obsessed with motherhood issues. Yet if you believe the authors’
own accounts, the accumulation of mothers’ “brutally
honest” stories has done little to erode the power of those
coercive myths of perfect motherhood— much less to shake
up public policy, which resolutely ignores mothers’ work.
… It’s enough to make you wonder whether the maternal
memoir-cum-manifesto might be complicit in the privatizing, sentimentalizing,
anxiety-inducing “momism” that Warner, like many of
the genre’s practitioners, aims to eradicate to make way
for an ethos of more collective support for mothers.
Andi Buchanan, author
of Mother Shock: Loving
Every (Other) Minute Of It, feels Hulbert’s critique
is short sighted. As she wrote in a recent entry on her Mother
Shock blog:
The more we tell each
other our personal experiences, the more we tell our stories,
the more we realize that what we grapple with as mothers and fathers
trying to balance meaningful work and our young children is not
primarily our own failure to have it all and do it all. The more
we talk about what we're doing, the more we realize that our problems
are not as individual as we might have thought, that what we're
up against is not something we can fight only by ourselves.
Has publishing “Mother
Shock” made a difference in the politics of motherhood?
On a large scale, the answer is obviously no. But I can tell you
from the e-mails I get from readers every single day, the book
has made a difference to mothers who thought they might be alone,
who were sure no one was feeling what they were feeling, who assumed
they were to blame for finding it difficult to adjust.
Katy
Read, a freelance journalist who has written on motherhood
for Salon and Working Mother, sides with
Buchanan. “There aren’t as many motherhood books as
reviewers are always claiming,” she says. “Yes, a search
on Amazon brings up 1,000 titles, with 30 of those coming out this
year, but a search under ‘baseball’ brings up almost
7,000, including 200 from 2005. Women’s lives have gone through
far more dramatic changes recently than baseball has, and it would
be pretty weird if people weren’t writing a lot about how
it’s going.” And, she remarks, typically 90 percent
of motherhood titles are of the self-help or “girlfriend’s
guide” genre.
Read recalls the
books that were easiest to find when she was a new mother were not
all that helpful or reassuring, let alone empowering. “When
my first son was born— this was just 10 years ago!—
I didn’t have internet service, nor time and energy to get
to the library. I grabbed what few motherhood books I could scrounge...
and instantly concluded that I was a terrible, evil, irresponsible
mother. Everything I got my hands on was either sappy idealized
crap about how wonderful babies are, or self-help books that ordered
me to do things that I found a pain in the ass. A corrective book
back then might not have improved the quality of my daycare choices
but it probably would have made my first five or six years of caring
for my kids much less angst-ridden.”
She thinks that one
thing standing in the way of moving the discussion from books into
organized activism is that the topic of motherhood is still dismissed
as trivial. “I’ve encountered many books editors who
have been reluctant or unwilling to run reviews of serious important
books about motherhood— The Mommy Myth,
even Hulbert’s!— because they automatically assume they
are self-help or just generally unimportant. That’s my own
experience, but I think it’s symptomatic of a larger attitude
that sees motherhood-related issues in general as, well, a little
silly.”
Even so, Hulbert has
a point. Since 1970, there’s been a steady stream of books,
essays and short stories written by mothers who longed to expose
the mind-numbing, soul-killing grind of caring for small children
day-in and day-out, to challenge unrealistic representations of mothers
and mothering in popular culture, and to undermine the oppressive institution
of motherhood— or simply to leave a record of the complexity
of their experience.
Many of these books had
something else in common: they argued that fathers can and should
be tender, caring and competent parents, and that men’s equal
participation in child-rearing and housework would make motherhood
less burdensome and more enjoyable for women who mother. Some authors
even offered policy recommendations aimed at reducing structural
barriers to integrating paid work and caregiving, including universal,
affordable, high quality child care, flexible workplaces, part-time
parity, changing the hours of the school day to coincide with the
hours of the standard workday, generous paid leave for infant and
sick child care, and specialized training and educational programs
for mothers entering or re-entering the paid workforce after an
extended period of unpaid caregiving.
Most of these books are
now out of print and difficult, if not impossible, to find.(4)
Only a few early works— Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique,
Of Woman Born by Adrienne Rich and Jane Lazarre’s The Mother Knot— survive in reprint editions. But
that does not entirely explain why, in the last 35 years, every
new generation of mothers has felt compelled to start the motherhood
conversation over from scratch.
I think this is an important
question with a complicated answer— an answer that might tell
us something about why mothers aren’t spontaneously banding
together to better their lot. I think there’s also a simple,
straightforward answer: the reason the message of The Feminine
Mystique still resonates for today’s middle-class mothers
is that, despite the acceleration of women’s progress
in the last half-century, the underlying value system, gender
norms and social conditions that disproportionately disadvantage
women who mother haven’t really changed that much since Betty
Friedan’s day -- or since Susan B. Anthony’s day, for
that matter. Notwithstanding the nervy confidence of social commentators
who've declared feminism is passé, the pursuit of freedom,
equality and justice for women is still a work in progress.
But why, then, must
we scramble to reinvigorate the popular discourse on motherhood
as a social problem every decade or so? I don’t know for sure—
it’s not a subject that’s ever been formally studied,
although it really ought to be, and soon. But I’m willing
to offer some theories, with the caution that they are only that,
theories. Conjectures based on my own experience, and on listening
to hundreds of mothers share their experiences, their grievances,
and their visions for a fairer world.
From a purely feminist
standpoint, one might argue that dominant groups and institutions
have a stake in making sure this dialog evaporates. It would
create a major headache for the powers with be if droves of American
mothers suddenly realized that— at least motherhood-wise—
certain things are way better in France, Denmark, Sweden,
and even Canada. As Jana Malamud Smith notes in her April
2003 interview with the MMO, one of the reasons we lack a resilient
common language to describe motherhood as a social problem is because
it’s against the best interest of those who have a
bigger piece of the pie to let these ideas flourish:
It’s important
to understand that this language is missing for a politically
important reason. One way to undercut the power of any group is
to obscure the truth of their experience. We typically think about
that as a silencing of voices. You might say it’s against
the interests of the dominant culture to let groups who are marginalized
or oppressed own a vibrant language to describe their reality.
Instead, we construct descriptions and expectations of motherhood
based on ideologies and stereotypes that preserve the status quo.
I also believe part
of the need to constantly renew the investigation into the motherhood
problem has to do with the very nature of becoming a mother. A woman
may learn a lot about caring for babies and children in the course
of her pre-maternal life, but it’s almost impossible to know
what becoming a mother will actually feel like until you are one.
It may hit you at some point during pregnancy, immediately after
childbirth or adoption, or a few day or weeks (or months, years)
after bringing your baby home. I really hate to admit this, but
I was the callow sort of young woman who scowled every time a mother
with an infant sat behind me on an airplane, who shot withering
glances at mothers who, I assumed, would not or could not control
their screaming toddlers in the supermarket check-out lane, who
silently cursed mothers who blocked the bookstore aisle with their
bulky strollers, who on more than one occasion thought to herself: Why
the hell doesn’t someone wipe that kid’s nose?
On one memorable subway ride, I listened in absolute horror
as pre-teen girl berated her mortified mother over and over again:
"Mom, you're NOT paying attention
to my FEELINGS." What a consummate brat! I muttered
to myself. What did that mother do wrong? In short, I
was obnoxious.
Well, I’m a mother
now. And what I know is that no experience, no classroom instruction,
no book, no sisterly advice, no amount of therapy could ever have
completely prepared me for what it would be like. Like birth and
death, the passage into motherhood is, ultimately, something we
do on our own. That does not mean, however, it needs to be
lonely or unsupported. But in our culture, it usually is—
which is one reason mothers feel ashamed and incompetent when their
expectations of maternity turn sour. The lucky ones find a friend,
or a book, or a blog that will counteract the inward spiral.
But before I became a
mother, I would never have sought out literature about
motherhood, although I was an avid reader. (I did read some Doris
Lessing and Enormous Changes At The Last Minute and other
works by Grace Paley, which supplied rich maternal images that still reverberate in my imagination.) But maybe critical writing about motherhood doesn't really make sense until we are ready to
make sense of it.
The other thing I’ve
noticed is that a lot of the mothers I know who are inclined to
view motherhood as a political matter— or who are already
working for social change on behalf of mothers— went
through a some kind of experience, a critical disconnect, that
severed them from the puffy pink fantasy of ideal motherhood. Maybe
this mother came into motherhood with a feminist awareness that
provided a framework for evaluating the social context of her
post-partum stress and fatigue. Maybe she suffered from post-partum
depression. Maybe she gave birth to a baby with a serious health
condition or disability. Maybe, after planning for a natural birth,
she had a caesarean delivery. Maybe she defecated on her OB during
a vaginal delivery, or could not control her bladder for months afterward.
Maybe she had a miscarriage or stillbirth; maybe she had more than
one. Maybe she had a baby with 24/7 colic. Maybe she was unable
or did not want to breastfeed. Maybe her race or ethnicity makes
her more attuned to the presence of discrimination. Maybe she struggled
with infertility. Maybe she gave birth to two children with extremely
different temperaments. Maybe it was living with the stigma of being
an unmarried, teenage mother. Or maybe a formerly devoted husband
or boyfriend refused to “show up” after his baby was
born— maybe he left for good. Maybe it was being unexpectedly
overwhelmed with love for her new child, or the shock of discovering the depth of her ambivalence. Maybe
she’s a lesbian. Or maybe it was the trusted boss who refused
to negotiate a part-time schedule, or co-workers who rolled their
eyes whenever she left the office at 5:15 to avoid paying a
late pick-up fee at the day care center. Maybe it was relentless
pressure to perform as an always-on-call ideal worker. Maybe, once upon a time, she lived in France.
Several of these things
happened to me. The point is, something— some unanticipated
event or emotion or crisis or opportunity denied— seems to
occur in some mothers' lives that interrupts the illusion they
are in absolutle control of the outcomes of their mothering.
Since motherhood is (ostensibly) the one thing women are “made” for, these
disenchanted mothers may become sensitized to their outsider status.
They learn that instead of being omnipotent, they are vulnerable,
needy, fallible— everything a red-blooded American should not be— and shortly thereafter, they discover that
no one is actually available, or willing, to give them a hand. Something
allows these mothers to see through the myth of perfect motherhood --
the “mommy mystique” -- and realize it's all a load
of bullshit.
It seems possible that
thousands, maybe millions, of mothers may fall into this category.
I can’t verify this. But perhaps someday I’ll interview
a few hundred politically conscious mothers, and write a book about
how they got that way.
mmo : march 2005
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