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The Motherhood Debate
Child magazine
Back in the 1980s, I remember confidently discussing with friends how we had more options than our mothers did. We could choose whether to have careers, husbands, children or some combination thereof. Years later, most of us are married to men we love, raising children we adore, yet every mother I know—whether working part-time, full-time, or at home full-time—is conflicted about the choices she’s made. Why does being a mother today feel so difficult?
Thankfully, a new generation of women writers is beginning to reckon with the emotionally charged territory that defines modern motherhood. Nonfiction works like The Price of Motherhood, an exploration of the economic costs of motherhood, and The Bitch in the House, a compilation of essays about work, motherhood, and marriage, have skyrocketed to the bestseller lists. And with the success of the novel, I Don’t Know How She Does It, about a working mother who can’t get everything done despite her endless-to-do lists, a new “Mommy Lit” genre was born.
Two new books, with distinctly different views, broaden the discourse of motherhood: Maternal Desire: On Children, Love and the Inner Life by Daphne De Marneffe, Ph.D. advocates for at-home mothers, while The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It’s Undermining Women by Susan J. Douglas, Ph.D., and Meredith Michaels, Ph.D.. champions working mothers. While both can be irritatingly one-sided, together they provide fresh insights into the conflicts gnawing at mothers today.
Drawing on her own and patients’ experiences as well as the work of other psychoanalysts and feminist scholars, Dr. de Marneffe, a California-based psychologist, makes a convincing case (despite clunky writing)that maternal desire has become the new taboo. As a result of the feminist movement, there has been a general recognition of a woman’s desire and need to work, but relatively little has been said about a woman’s yearning to mother her children, says Dr. de Marneffe. Even conservatives who praise at-home moms tend to see these women as fulfilling their duty to their children or husbands or God—not satisfying their own maternal urges. Yet, the author argues that most women do have a deep desire to mother, not simply because it’s “good” for their family but because they derive a true sense of meaning from caring for their kids.
Dr. de Marneffe began writing her book shortly after giving birth to her third child and giving up her practice to become an at-home mom. Ever since becoming a mother, she writes, “I felt an invisible tether drawing me home.” Yet, “my wish to care for my child was something I felt both reticent to admit and called to defend.” Listening to other working mothers rationalize their long days at the office as helping them feel better able to deal with their demanding babies at home, she came to a conclusion: “Women, including herself, were repressing her maternal desire. Whether maternal desire is biologically determined doesn’t matter: “Maternal desire is not, for any woman, all there is,” she writes. “But for many of us, it is an important part of who we are.”
A startling simple observation, but in what is the strongest section of the book, De Marneffe shows that maternal desire is largely left unacknowledged, leaving women feeling conflicted. Day care debates, she points out, tend to focus only on the fact that women “need” to work and whether childcare “hurts” kids. And so one working woman the author knows obsesses over whether her 10-month-old daughter is happy with her childcare provier, even though the woman has no cause for concern. It’s only through therapy that the woman realizes she simply aches to be with her child.
Perhaps Dr. de Marneffe’s most powerful insight is that the so-called mommy wars are actually a projection of an internal battle raging inside mothers, between the desire “to become absorbed in mothering” and the wish to “continue reaping the rewards of professional commitments,” passionately take sides in this debate, or become competitive with each other, they’re simply trying to erase their own underlying anxieties, she contends.
Dr. de Marneffe says her goal is therapeutic, to help women give equal voice to their maternal instincts so they can create the life they want. But what about men’s desire to parent? And what about those mothers who have high-powered jobs and genuinely like being at the office? Are we to believe they’re denying their maternal desire? She mostly dismisses such questions.
Although she endorses 50-50 parenting near the end of the book, it doesn’t seem heartfelt, especially after reading her constant pot shots at dual income professionals. (“It seems that the children with the most stuff are often the ones whose parents are around the least,” she sniffs.) Determined to legitimize maternal desire, the author romanticizes it and denigrates anyone who chooses another path.
It is such thinking that rankles the authors of The Mommy Myth. Dr. Douglas, a communications professor at the University of Michigan and mother of a daughter, and Dr. Michaels, a philosophy professor at Smith College and the mother of five, rant, scathingly and humorously, against all the ways the mass media idealize motherhood to the detriment of women. In particular, the authors blame the rise of what they call the “new momism”—“the insistence that no woman is truly fulfilled unless she has kids,” 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.”
Studying media coverage, the authors argue that new momism took root in the 1980s, just when mothers were entering the workforce in record numbers. Suddenly, there was an avalanche of sensational news reports about dangers to children—day care sex abuse cases, child abductions, studies about how Johnny can’t read (or watches too much TV). Never mind that much of the sex abuse charges were fabricated by unlicensed “therapists,” or that actual number of children abducted by strangers was a fraction of the wildly inflated statistics that were reported by the news media.
As a result, mothers today are urged to act as their children’s psychologist, doctor, tutor and police officer, lest their children be psychologically damaged, become dismal failures, or worse. Web sites, magazines and TV news inundate mothers with advice and warnings, whether it’s to never let go of your child’s hand, even for a second (to prevent kidnapping), or to buy “educational” videos for your 9-month-old (so he won’t fall hopelessly behind his peers). “The paranoia about your children’s health and safety, the fear that you aren’t tending to their developmental needs, the nervousness that you aren’t doing enough arts and crafts or baking enough cakes in the shape of Hogwarts, the worry that they don’t have the right toys or a nursery that is color-coordinated with their personalities, and the concern that you simply aren’t spending enough time with your kids and demonstrating in countless ways each and everyday that you really, really love them—all of these have now inflated to near-bursting, Michelin Man proportions,” the authors write.
As they point out, even the language we use to describe women who stay at home with their kids has changed. No longer are they called housewives; they’re full time mothers or stay-at-home mothers, suggesting that taking care of their children’s development (as opposed to the laundry or dinner) is the only thing they do—or should be doing—all day long.
What makes new momism especially insidious, Drs. Douglas and Michaels say, ist that it has the veneer of feminism, using the women’s movement catchwords like “choice” to attack working mothers. The authors find this most evident in the celebrity mom profile, that new journalistic genre in which glamorous, famous working women burnish their images as noble moms, betraying not even a hint of angst or ambivalence about motherhood. “Everyday feels like Christmas morning” since having children, actress Kirstie Alley told one interviewer. These articles celebrate these mothers for making the right “choice” and putting their “family first,” suggesting that anyone who does otherwise is wrong-headed or selfish. In a People magazine cover story, for instance, Celine Dion, who took 2 years off, and ex-soap opera star Emma Samms, who quit acting entirely, were said to be “just as happy staying home as [they were] working...happier, even.” “There was no agonizing,” Samms declared. “If I was going to have children, I was going to raise them myself.”
It doesn’t take a media insider to figure out that many of these stories are bogus. Only months after I read that Mary Matalin had quit her powerful White House job because she wanted a quiet life with her kids, I turned on the TV and saw she had a new (more visible, probably higher paying) job—as the star of a new HBO TV series, K Street. But while power moms get celebratory, front page treatment when they “drop out,” their return to work usually goes unmentioned.
While Dr. de Marneffe wants women to look inward to recognize their maternal desire, Drs. Douglas and Michaels want women to look outward and speak up. Not only against the mass media, but the conservative Republican leaders and talking heads like Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Laura, who, the authors believe, helped create the new momism agenda. As a journalist who covers work-family issues and the mother of two children, I hope they succeed, too.
But like Dr. de Marneffe, Drs. Douglas and Michaels disregard inconvenient facts that don’t fit into their thesis. They suggest, for instance, that the reason why so many couples have fallen into traditional roles at homes is because of resistant dads; the authors ignore the research showing that many young fathers today would like to co-parent—but their wives resist. According to the authors, the Mommy Wars don’t exist; but were invented by the media. Why then does the tension between working and at-home mothers feel so real? By focusing only on social forces, the authors portray women as just passive victims—of the media, Republicans and the men in their lives. Isn’t there a reason, though, why women feel vulnerable to certain social forces?
Both Maternal Desire and The Mommy Myth have blind spots, but read together, you get a deeper understanding of why both at-home and working mothers say they feel unsupported by the culture—and both are right. Reading these books brings to light the schizophrenic culture we live in, one that romanticizes at-home motherhood and maligns mothers who work, yet also recognizes women’s urge to work, while denigrating the desire to mother. Although it may take a few more books to figure out how these realities connect, for those of us wrestling with the choices we’ve made, these two books are a good start.
Child magazine, March 2004
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