review: The Mommy Myth

‘Did you see the news?’

‘I saw it in a magazine ....’

‘This week on Myths and Lies about Motherhood ...’

The media comes in for a fair amount of beat-up about everything these days. And not without cause, as the Levenson Inquiry, for example, is daily demonstrating. But the dodgy aspects of the media are not just about phone-tapping and hacking, shoddy journalistic ethics and corporate greed. Regardless of how sophisticated our critique of it may be, or how cynical our reading is, mass media - in the form of news media, TV shows, advertising, movies, magazines - plays a critical role in what we think about, even if, we tell ourselves, it doesn’t tell us how to think about it. It sets the agenda, and both politicians and the public take note.

Psychologist Susan J Douglas and philosopher Meredith W Michaels - respectively, a mother-of-one and a mother-of-five - wrote the The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined Women (2004) in order to analyse and critique the role of the mass media in ‘promulgating and exaggerating’ myths about motherhood. In the US, Douglas and Michaels argue that the mass media’s representations of motherhood ‘have laid down a thick, sedimented layer of guilt, fear, and anxiety as well as in increasingly powerful urge to talk back’. (p 13) Since the 1970s, and reaching a peak in the mid-to-late 1980s and 1990s, media constructions of motherhood have raised the bar ‘year by year, of the standards of good mothering while singling out and condemning those we are supposed to see as dreadful mothers.’ (p13)

While rigourously and systematically tracing the evolution of media constructions of motherhood since 1970, Douglas and Michaels also remind us what second-wave feminists actually had to say about motherhood (as opposed to right-wing distortions of it) and the ways which public policies on childcare, welfare and community funding have been eroded to the point of non-existence since the introduction of Reaganomics (detailed in a chapter pithily titled ‘Dumb Men, Stupid Choices’). Coupled with dwindling political will and a strengthening backlash against feminism (we’re all post-feminists now, right?), the growth of the ‘new momism’ has served to:

contain and, where possible, eradicate, all of the societal changes brought on by feminism. It is backlash in its most refined, pernicious form because it insinuates itself into women’s psyches just where we have been rendered most vulnerable: in our love for our kids. The new momism, then is deeply and powerfully political. The new momism is the result of the combustible intermixing of right-wing attacks on feminism and women, the media’s increasingly fine-tuned and incessant target marketing of mothers and children, the collapse of government institutions - public schools, child welfare programs - that served families in the past ... and mothers’ own very real desires to do the best job possible raising their kids in a culture that praises mothers in rhetoric and reviles them in public policy (pp 23-4)

The mountain of evidence to support their argument is compelling. From little news focus on motherhood in the 1970s to the ascension of the celebrity mother and demonisation of the crack-addicted welfare mother in the 1980s, Douglas and Michaels piece together an overwhelmingly stifling media onslaught of images of perfect, intensive mothering working in tandem with cautionary tales of ‘mothers-gone-bad’ who were poor and nearly always black and living in the inner-city (in contrast to statistics which actually showed that most poor mothers were white and lived in hard-to-reach rural areas). It is easy to marvel from the lofty heights of 2012 at how cynical, self-serving, and mean-spirited the removal of government funding for welfare and childcare programmes was (Nixon, for example, first in a long line of presidents to veto a government-funded childcare programme, used his discretionary veto power to torpedo this bill so he could count on support in some wavering corners when he sought re-election). Easy, that is, until we read contemporary news-stories about politicians telling single mothers to get back to work, and tinkering with funding for early-childhood education. Conservative, patriarchal ideas disseminated by politicians and the media have come to seem natural, like common sense.

While Douglas and Michaels show how the dominant media image of mothering has become one of intensive, upper-middle-class, corporately-defined individualism, they also show that representations of rebellious mothers have similarly gained attention. For every soft-focus magazine exclusive with Christie Brinkley or Marie Osmond, there is a Roseanne, or a Peg Bundy, or a Brett Butler, to mouth off at the new momism. Douglas and Michaels position themselves more squarely on the side of the Roseannes of the world, but also stress that she is a construction too: the binary opposite of the angelic mother who delights in every nano-second she spends with her children. Their mode of address throughout the book gives away their preference: they wisecrack, open chapters with cynical depictions of family life (think Married with Children rather than The Waltons), and undercut their more serious scholarship with sarcastic asides. Ordinarily, I’m all for this kind of thing, but, having just stated Shari L. Thurer’s book The Myths of Motherhood - if books about motherhood are not truth-telling, they’re myth-busting! - in which she deploys the same mode of address it’s hard not to read it as a self-deprecating defence mechanism i.e. you can’t criticise me more anymore than I am already criticising myself.

Historian and critical theorist Michel Foucault described power as not simply repressive, but also creative. Exploring the way in which sexuality, specifically homosexuality, was established as an identity rather than an act in nineteenth-century discourses of power, he argued that what began as an identification and a term of abuse, could be reclaimed as a subject position from which to speak (i.e. ‘we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!’) Similarly, repressive (and regressive) constructions of the new mother, create a corollary, the rebellious mother, the one who talks back and reclaims the right to determine what motherhood should be, both for herself and other mothers. Viewed in this way, Douglas and Michaels project is unashamedly political: it is not meant to be a dispassionate, ‘balanced’ and ‘objective’ account of the media in the last four decades. Rather, it is a call to arms: don’t let them define and pigeon-hole you! don’t let them put all the responsibility for growing healthy, well-rounded children on you (remember, it takes a village to raise a child)! and, most importantly, don’t watch Meg Ryan movies! Actually, I just slipped that last one in there.

It all sounds a bit ‘70s, doesn’t it?

Which is no bad thing, as Douglas and Michaels remind us. Most women inspired into activism by second-wave feminism were mothers. Mothers who demanded better treatment for themselves and their children, better childcare options, better support from the government for their families, better relationships with their partners, better pay and better career opportunities. And, here’s the other big secret that they say the media won’t tell you about feminism ‘exposing patriarchy was, while certainly dangerous, also - let’s face it - a blast!’ (p 38)

And, as novelist Linda Grant has recently reminded us, there are still a thousand reasons why this important work needs to continue.

stay-at-home mothers versus working mothers?

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.