Ding, ding, ding!
‘In the red corner, we have the stay-at-home mum: she’s chosen to look after her kids full-time and forego the ratrace for now!’ (doesn’t she know it’s boring to keep house and look after kids all day, and she’ll lose out in the job market when she does go back to work?)
‘In the blue corner, we have the working mum: she’s chosen to go back to work and pay for the best childcare she can afford!’ (doesn’t she know she’s abandoning her child for the sake of filthy money?)
It’s a knock-out fight: stay-at home mums versus working mums. Who will win?
Okay, okay, perhaps I exaggerate. But I have noticed a creeping and contradictory binarism that drives the ideology of the perfect mother. Whether you’re a stay-at-home or working mum, you’re bound to fall short of being the perfect mother: all women are set up for failure.
Inflamed by lurid media stories of the kind I have detailed in a previous post, the supposed binary opposition between mothers who stay home to look after their children and mothers who work to support their children is the engine of what US feminist critics Susan J. Douglas and Meredith W. Michaels call ‘the mommy wars.’ In their 2004 book The Mommy Myth: the Idealization of Motherhood and How it Has Undermined Women, Douglas and Michaels comment:
The ethos of intensive mothering has lower status in our culture (‘stay-at-home mothers are boring’), but occupies a higher moral ground (‘working mothers are neglectful’) ....The ‘mommy wars’ put mothers into two, mutually exclusive categories - working mother versus stay-at-home mother - and never the twain shall meet. It goes without saying that they allegedly hate each other’s guts. In real life, millions of mothers move between these two categories, have been one or the other at different times, creating a mosaic of work and child-rearing practices that bears no resemblance to the supposed iron-clad roles suggested by the ‘mommy wars’. Not only does the media catfight pit mother against mother, but it suggests that all women be reduced to their one role - mother - or get cut out of the picture entirely. (p 12)
I was moved to blog about the tension between the two for two reasons. One, in the mother’s group that I attend I have picked up a faint but definite tension between the mothers who stay at home and the ones who work. It kind of depresses me that even a group that is supposed to be about supporting mothers - all mothers - is clinging to pre-determined positions and, however covertly, judging those who don’t fit them. Two, having been a stay-at-home mother for the last 16 months, I am about to become a working mother for three days a week. In that sense, I will not be quite either mother figure: neither fully staying at home, nor fully re-entering the work-force.
Leaving aside the three big ice-bergs of partners’ roles, the value placed on part-time workers (of which women, primarily mothers, make up the majority) and the large and growing voluntary sector that augments gaps in state-funded social welfare in which stay-at-home mothers play an active role, is it possible that I am going to have my cake and eat it too? Or, more likely, am I going to feel caught between a rock and a hard place, thinking that I’m failing at both roles? As you can see, even my unexamined thinking about this is binary: will I fail or succeed? And why is success or failure - to my critical mind, an inappropriate and unhelpful way of thinking about parenting - based on whether I am in paid employment or not?
Douglas and Michaels suggest that the reason for this is that the messages of the media, politicians, academics, advertisers, marketers, and the person in the street work to create cultural norms about motherhood. Arguing that, in many ways, the gains achieved by second-wave feminists are being eroded, they suggest that we have entered the era of the ‘new momism’. They describe the new momism as ‘the insistence that no women is truly complete or fulfilled unless she has kids, that women remain the best primary caretakers of children, and that, to be a remotely decent mother, a woman has to devote her entire physical, psychological, emotional and intellectual being, 24/7, to her children.’ (p 4)
But the new momism is more than just a return to the 1950s. Considered to be more progressive, it is apparently based on women’s choices. Women can choose to work, or they can choose to stay at home. So far, so good: women are positioned as active and autonomous agents in their own lives. But what are the consequences of their supposedly freely chosen choices? Douglas and Michaels argue that under the prevailing ideology the only correct ‘choice’ for all women is to ‘choose’ to have kids and to ‘choose’ to stay at home - only if middle class, mind - and devote their lives to them. Based on this analysis, Douglas and Michaels conclude that the new momism is therefore ‘deeply contradictory: it both draws from and repudiates feminism’. (p 5)
Meanwhile, back in the mothers’ group, a stay-at-home mother mourned the fact that people didn’t value what she did: ‘No-one thinks it’s important.’ Another insisted that she got plenty of stimulation from her children, and that if she went back to work then she’d get time for herself. A working mother, perhaps feeling cut to the quick by these comments, said that ‘she felt bad for going to work and leaving her kids.’ Another said she had returned to full-time work when her baby was very young, and was now looking forward to cutting back her hours to spend time with him. For mothers of a certain class, it seems, choosing to participate in paid employment located outside the home is a defining and dividing line.
I listened to all of them express how they felt, and I felt sad. I recognised some of the defensiveness in play - ‘my choice is really the right one ... isn’t it?’ - and I recognised the unspoken feelings of guilt, inadequacy and uncertainty driving them. I recognised them, because I feel that way too. I felt sad about it because I wanted very much for us all to cut each other some slack and to cut out the covert competitiveness. I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again - if only to keep convincing myself - THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS A PERFECT MOTHER.
Perhaps, in a salute to all mothers and in recognition of the value of whatever role they perform, it’s time to resurrect that cherished slogan of second-wave feminism: ‘every mother is a working mother’.
And consign the ‘mommy wars’ to the dustbin of history instead.
