The Mommy Myth

The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined Women

Susan Douglas, Meredith Michaels

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9780743267014
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi di genere

Susan Douglas first took on the media's misrepresentation of women in her funny, scathing social commentary Where the Girls Are. Now, she and Meredith Michaels, have turned a sardonic (but never jaundiced) eye toward the cult of the new momism: a trend in American culture that is causing women to feel that only through the perfection of motherhood can true contentment be found. This vision of motherhood is highly romanticized and yet its standards for success remain forever out of reach, no matter how hard women may try to "have it all."
The Mommy Myth takes a provocative tour through the past thirty years of media images about mothers: the superficial achievements of the celebrity mom, the news media's sensational coverage of dangerous day care, the staging of the "mommy wars" between working mothers and stay-at-home moms, and the onslaught of values-based marketing that raises mothering standards to impossible levels, just to name a few. In concert with this messaging, the authors contend, is a conservative backwater of talking heads propagating the myth of the modern mom.
This nimble assessment of how motherhood has been shaped by out-of-date mores is not about whether women should have children or not, or about whether once they have kids mothers should work or stay at home. It is about how no matter what they do or how hard they try, women will never achieve the promised nirvana of idealized mothering. Douglas and Michaels skillfully map the distance traveled from the days when The Feminine Mystique demanded more for women than the unpaid labor of keeping house and raising children, to today's not-so-subtle pressure to reverse this thirty-year trend. A must-read for every woman.

Notes

Introduction: The New Momism

^1.People, September 21, 1998.

^2.Good Housekeeping, January 1995.

^3.People, July 8, 1996.

^4. Kristin van Ogtrop, “Attila the Honey I’m Home,” The Bitch in the House (New York: William Morrow, 2002), p. 169.

^5. “Motherhood Today—A Tougher Job, Less Ably Done,” The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, March 1997.

^6. Philip Wylie, Generation of Vipers (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1942). See also Ruth Feldstein’s excellent discussion of momism in Motherhood in Black and White: Race and Sex in American Liberalism, 1930–1965 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), especially chapter 2.

^7. Hays’s book is must reading for all mothers, and we are indebted to her analysis of intensive mothering, from which this discussion draws. Sharon Hays, The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 4.

^8. For an account of the decline in leisure time see Juliet B. Schorr, The Overworked American (New York: Basic Books, 1992).

^9. Patricia Heaton, Motherhood & Hollywood (New York: Villard Books, 2002), pp. 48–49.

^10. See Katha Pollitt’s terrific piece “Killer Moms, Working Nannies” in The Nation, November 24, 1997, p. 9.

^11. Hays, pp. 4–9.

^12. Based on an On-line Computer Library Center, Inc., search under the word motherhood, from 1970–2000.

^13. Susan Faludi, in her instant classic Backlash, made this point, too, but the book focused on the various and multiple forms of backlash, and we will be focusing only on the use of motherhood here.

^14. Robert Lekachman, Visions and Nightmares: America After Reagan (New York: Collier Books, 1988), pp. 118–121.

^15. For a superb analysis of the role of mother-blaming in American politics, see Ruth Feldstein, Motherhood in Black and White, especially pp. 7–9.

^16. V. Spike Peterson, “Gendered Nationalism: Reproducing ‘Us’ versus ‘Them,’ ” in Lois Ann Lorentzen and Jennifer Turpin, eds., The Women and War Reader (New York: New York University Press, 1998).

^17. This contradiction is central to Hays’s argument.

^18. Hays, p. 9.

^19. Ibid.

^20. Ibid., p. 9, p. 18.

^21. Most notable are Ann Crittenden, The Price of Motherhood (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001); Diane Eyer, Motherguilt (New York: Times Books, 1996); Susan Chira, A Mother’s Place: Choosing Work and Family Without Guilt or Shame (New York: Perennial, 1999); Susan Maushart, The Mask of Motherhood (New York: The New Press, 1999).

^22. As reported in “Wondering If Children Are Necessary,” Time, March 5, 1979, p. 42.

^23. Ken Auletta, Three Blind Mice: How the Networks Lost Their Way (New York: Vintage, 1992), pp. 457–60.

^24. Jonathan Alter, “Who’s Taking the Kids?” Newsweek, July 29, 2002 on-line edition; see also in the same issue Andrew Murr, “When Kids Go Missing,” p. 38.

^25. Alter.

^26.Redbook, April 1988; Redbook, June 1988.

^27. This information based on a content analysis of the January, March, May, July, September, and November 1970 issues of Ladies’ Home Journal and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Colophon
• Also by Susan J. Douglas
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction The New Momism
•   One Revolt Against the MRS
•   Two Mouthing Off to Dr. Spock
• Three Threats from Without: Satanism, Abduction, and Other Media Panics
•   Four Attack of the Celebrity Moms
•   Five Threats from Within: Maternal Delinquents
•   Six The War Against Welfare Mothers
• Seven The “Mommy Wars”
• Eight Dumb Men, Stupid Choices—or Why We Have No Childcare
• Nine Moms “” Us
•   Ten Dr. Laura’s Neighborhood: Baby Wearing, Nanny Cams, and the Triumph of the New Momism
• Epilogue Exorcising the New Momism
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• About The Author
• Photos