The Feminine Mystique” jump-started the women’s movement more than 40 years ago with its exposé on the discontent among American women over the tyranny of domesticity.
These days, many Gen-X and Gen-Y mothers are experiencing that same discontent.
“You become so absorbed in ‘attachment parenting,’ you put so much effort into it that you’re lucky to get a shower,” says Anne-Marie Nichols of Firestone, 40, who writes the newsletter for the national organization MOTHERS (Mothers Ought to Have Equal Rights.)
A former marketing copywriter, she’s now full-time mom to two toddlers, and president of the board of directors of a charter school. She believes that her generation, unlike the one that came of age in the 1960s and ’70s, has failed to create social change for women through political action.
“After a certain point you think, ‘Who cares how people voted?’ Your husband is yelling at you, there’s no clean underwear, you didn’t get to the store, and there are piles of laundry all over.”
But in the past few years, a handful of organizations have begun to forge what’s called “The 21st Century Mothers Movement.”
Forget getting husbands to do more housework. They want sweeping social change,
a pro-mother political agenda that would eliminate policies and practices that unfairly affect women as caregivers.
They advocate for affordable day care, tax breaks for corporations that allow mothers to work part time, and laws that provide health-care benefits.
“Motherhood remains the crucial unfinished business of the women’s movement,” says Susan Douglas, author of “The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined Women.”
But there’s significant disagreement over the need for changing the system to help mothers.
“We emphasize the importance of motherhood,” says Janice Crouse, senior fellow of the think tank Concerned Women of America in Washington, D.C., which works to bring biblical principles into public policy.
She agrees that motherhood is extremely stressful, with a litany of demands ranging from high-pressured kids’ activities to impossible standards of perfection.
“But it seems to me that, once again, they are looking for a governmental solution – for someone else to solve their problems,” says Crouse.
As a mother of grown children, she says, “There were days that I wondered if I would survive. I very definitely identify with what they call ‘mommy madness.’ But there’s a sense of unrealistic expectations.
“We can’t as women speak out both sides of our mouth. On one hand, ask to be taken seriously and considered rational, intellectual beings. And on the other hand, say ‘Oh my goodness, I can’t cope, this is too hard, someone’s got to help me.’
“I feel like saying, ‘You’re a grown woman. Take control of your schedule.’ If you can’t manage that, you can’t manage a company or a very demanding career.”
In her new book “Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety,” Judith Warner also criticizes the emerging mother’s movement. Her complaint is that it’s unfocused and ineffective.
But pioneers of the movement refuse to quit. They target what they consider inflexible workplace practices and outdated policies, which they believe increase the odds that mothers will experience financial insecurity and diminished well-being over a lifetime.
“A ‘perfect storm’ of unfavorable economic and social conditions harms all women who mother, but the consequences are most severe for low-income mothers, single-parent mothers and mothers of color,” said Judith Stadtman Tucker, at a recent conference on motherhood in Toronto.
To reach the tipping point will require an “open discourse about the new future of motherhood,” said Tucker, who is editor and founder of The Mothers Movement Online.
Evidence of this dialogue percolating in pop culture includes blogger moms, mama-zines, websites, e-newsletters, and a deluge of trendy “momoirs” – memoirs written by mothers.
This Mother’s Day, activist campaigns will range from the “Mamas Rising Up! Festival” in Brooklyn, N.Y., to blogger moms railing on the website of the national advocacy organization Mothers & More.
“Cultural politics is often a necessary prelude to political politics,” says Douglas. “We are in a consciousness-raising mode right now.”
In February, Newsweek ran a cover story on the myth of the perfect mother, based on Warner’s book. She described a “nationwide epidemic” of “craziness” in which 70 percent of American moms find motherhood “incredibly stressful.”
This brings to mind, she wrote, “Betty Friedan’s 1963 classic, ‘The Feminine Mystique.’ The diffuse dissatisfaction. The angst, hidden behind all the obsession with trivia, and the push to be perfect … And the tendency, every bit as pronounced among my peers as it had been for the women Friedan interviewed – to blame themselves for their problems.”
The story triggered more than 600 letters from grateful readers.
“This generation of women isn’t like (that of) the ’60s, which protested and tried to change things,” says Laura Nevitt, president of the Denver chapter of Mothers & More.
“I read that piece and thought, ‘This is so me!’ I look at myself, and focus on what I am not doing instead of trying to get other people to help me. I’m trying to be so self-sufficient.”
Modern mothers aren’t just isolated, Warner argued. They also are bred to rely on their own initiative, and to privatize their problems.
A few months earlier, an episode of “Desperate Housewives” targeted the problem. Lynette, the stay-at-home mother of four hellacious children, has a meltdown and runs away. After two friends track her down, she explains that she feels like a failed mother. They confide they feel the same way – but just don’t admit it.
In communities across America, “mothers were talking about that episode,” says Douglas. “It was like a shock wave, because it was one of the most honest moments on TV about motherhood. It hit a nerve, making fun of the myth of the perfect mother and the myth of domestic bliss – that you become a housewife and it’s just heaven.”
Joan Williams, author of “Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What to Do About It,” argues that domesticity is the root of the problem. This gender-based economic system arose about 1780, and still drives the U.S. workplace, which is comprised of two types of workers: the ideal, who works full time and has no time to raise children, and the family caregiver, who is marginalized, cut off from professional and social advancement.
“Once the focus shifts away from women’s choices to the gender system that sets the frame within which those choices occur, we can see that domesticity’s peculiar structuring of market work and family work hurts not only women but also men, children, politics and our emotional life,” she wrote.
Williams, an American University law professor, is director of the Program on WorkLife Law, which seeks to eliminate employment discrimination against caregivers.
She’s optimistic about motherhood and social action.
“Since the 1970s women have accomplished something stunning,” she says. “The U.S. is probably the best country in the world for women who are willing to live the biographies of a male. But it’s probably one of the worst countries in the world for mothers.
“So the next frontier is to change the family hostile atmosphere for men as well as women. That will jump-start the stalled revolution.”
Staff writer Colleen O’Connor can be reached at 303-820-1083 or at coconnor@denverpost.com.
