This is sort of a review of Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety. It's long. You may wish to scroll down and read the last two paragraphs.
Judith Warner responded to the vast differences between motherhood in France and in the United States in writing this book. French society and government provides innumerable amounts of support to families, including paid maternity leave, excellent day care, and consultants of every type for mother, or father, to turn to when at their last resort. Yet, they never reach a last resort because they are so completely buffered, quite in a pro-family bubble.
Warner returned stateside to Washington, DC and noticed several trends in motherhood. First, that mothers exhausted themselves by trying to be perfect and trying to raise the perfect child. And next, Warner noticed the divisiveness between mothers who work and mothers who stay at home, especially how working mothers are vilified by American media.
This was a different experience for Warner, a completely different culture of motherhood. Its pressures were immense. From breastfeeding for at least a year to enduring natural childbirth to attachment parenting, Warner found all these practices that we idealize in the US to be "cruelly insensitive to mothers' needs as adult women." Those few choices, if you will, prescribe a narrow path for American mothers to travel during their child's lifetime.
Our culture's emphasis on competition and performance get in the way of motherhood. Warner found that the pressure to succeed at breastfeeding or an intervention-free labor and delivery was oppressive and detrimental to the self-esteem of mothers. So basically she charts the reality of motherhood in America and found it lacking, found it on par with an indecent dogs' life.
To take this pulse of mothers in America Warner interviewed almost 150 heterosexual* women, but narrowed her scope to middle and upper class mothers because either she didn't have a ready pool of working-class mothers to interview, or perhaps she was inadequately prepared to communicate with working class mothers and emphasize with their particular plight. So yeah, I was disappointed about that, but gladdened that Warner at least admitted the scope of her study. Another point she made is that culturally, American's take their queues from the upper and middle classes; what they do trickles down to the rest of us and we decide to emulate their values and morals.
One thing Warner discovered is that the more that women strove for perfection in their roles, the more they suffered. She doesn't go into suffering so much, but basically she means suffering sleepless nights, permanent exhaustion, debilitating anxiety, and neutering their sexuality. But mothers who somehow step outside of this motherhood trap, who do not make their child/children the center of their lives evince greater peace of mind and sanity. In not pushing themselves or their children to be perfect, to be "winners," they were winning at a better quality of life.
Warner recommends parenting with reason and balance, which tend to fly out the window when faced with wanting the best for your child. She suggests following your intuition as a mother to fulfilling the needs of your child rather than relying upon experts for solutions to childrearing problems you face. Further, she advocates keeping as much fun in motherhood as possible. When mothers are convinced that "every decision we make, every detail we control, is incredibly important," over-invest themselves in their mothering roles.
An issue that resonated with me was when she described how mothers and families must provide it all for their children. Equipping our homes with playhouses, art studios, and myriad sources of fun and stimulation each day stretches budgets. But we feel as though we must do it all. It's that rugged American individualism that we've absorbed throughout our lives. We must do it all and be it all in and of ourselves.
Mothers must do it all more so today than ever given the government's unwillingness to help families. It's a combination of American self-reliance and our dissatisfaction with effecting change politically. Mothers are convinced government fails us. Americans are apathetic and don't believe it's possible to change policies or create new ones to aid families in need via the current political system. Thus, mothers, and families, circle the wagons and try to create a perfect, protective world and solve problems as they occur, within our unit. We must become "everything to our children that society refuses to be."
Warner places this problem of super motherhood, or the Motherhood Mystique, as she dubbed it, well within an historical context and likens today's over-invested, over-extended mothers to the same ones that Betty Friedan described in her classic The Feminine Mystique. Friedan's subjects were that post-war generation whose sphere was limited to home and hearth. They coped by medicating themselves with alcohol and Valium. Today's mothers cope with Prozac, or by medicating their children with Ritalin.
Further, Warner describes the way in which childrearing has evolved over time due to new research in the social sciences and early childhood development. Since environment has a greater affect on children than genetics, mothers must be devoted early educators and simulators of their offspring.
Warner breaks it down to this: "Children were not just born bright and successful, they taught; they could be made that way." Naturally, this created a lot more pressure and work on mothers to set their children up for brightness. Because no mother wants their child to be a loser, they "create the conditions that would allow their [child's] inner potential to be maximized." Charged with this responsibility, is it any wonder that mothers allow their children's lives to overtake their own?
But why has this generation of mothers, loosely defined by Warner earlier as Generation X, succumbed in such great numbers to the cult of perfect motherhood? Janet Jackson said it best:
Control, now I've got a lot
Control, now I'm all grown up
I'm in control, I'm in control
Warner cites the 1980s, when many Gen X mothers came of age, as a stew pot of trends about obsession and control: health food, dieting, and exercise. She says that feminism was affected by that decade too, that instead of being about a "redefinition of womanhood or reorganization of family life and society," that it became about issues of performance and control. 80s feminists were about controlling their bodies. Somehow, instead of being empowered by feminism, Gen X turned inward and used the tools of self-control, personal achievement, and self-perfection against ourselves. "Rather than becoming rebels or pioneers like our baby boomer predecessors, we became a generation of control freaks."
The process of motherhood teaches us that we have no control over our bodies, during labor and delivery, and our careers, after we're placed on the mommy track. And thus American mothers endeavor to control every aspect of their children's lives by being and doing for them to the extreme. This over-extension results in depression and anxiety, which then places an undue burden upon our children. "By making them the be-all-and-end-all of our lives, by breaking down the boundaries between ourselves and them so thoroughly, by giving them so much power within the family when they're very small, we risk overwhelming them psychologically and ill-preparing them, socially, for the world of other children and, eventually other adults."
And that was just Part One. Part Two is called The Motherhood Religion. Warner describes the sacrificial mother's evolution from the 1920s until today. Actually, Dr. Spock got it right in the 1960s, according to Warner, when he believed that parents should hold on to boundaries and establish rules of acceptable behavior and not be accepting of every ugly behavior your child produces.
Warner cites one of the biggest reasons why today's generation of mother's cling to the cult of perfect motherhood as the example their own mother's set. In the 1970s and 1980s most middle class women worked, or aspired to work outside the home. Those children missed the involvement of their mothers in bringing cupcakes to the classroom and going on field trips to the zoo with their classes. They want to do better for their children, because somehow, they felt shirked. They want to create an idealized childhood they never experienced for their children. Surely it's a generational division. Yet in the 1970s, "the majority opinion was that the key to maternal self-fulfillment was work outside the home." Warner credits today's trends in mothering as a form of "remothering" ourselves. "It's about compensating for the various forms of lack or want or need or loneliness that we remember from childhood."
Conversely, Warner deals with working mothers, who are described as selfish and their children as forsaken. That was the 1980s and 1990s. Warner talks about the economy changing and women being unable to break the glass ceiling, and eventually opting out of the rat race to be at home with their children all day, every day.
Part Three is Ourselves as Mothers in which Warner delves into the extent to which today's mothers micromanage their family's lives. It all stems from a generational meltdown in which many Gen X mothers struggled with anorexia nervosa as a means to control their lives. Control, Warner writes, became a way of dealing with life. She says it morphed into "a whole slew of maladies—various syndromes involving aches and pains and vapors and intolerances, which had in common the net effect of allowing those suffering from them to exercise a rather remarkable degree of control over their environment and those around them." Syndromes include: Chemical sensitivity, food allergies, and fibromyalgia.
Nearly at the end Warner focuses on wonderful husbands and what an oxymoron that turns out to be since in the next breath husbands are denigrated by their spouse. Then she mentions how policy change would be a boon to families, as far as making government policies and programs more supportive of their needs. Certainly she advocates a return to community and caring for one another and families helping each other out.
Whew. That was long. Dragged out longer than what I expected. I expected Perfect Madness to focus on what mothers were doing right and wrong, and didn't so much expect much analysis regarding how current trends evolved due to social, political, and economical forces. This book is great for introducing readers to the topic of motherhood and how it was, and is, idealized through the ages.
My impending motherhood has stirred my interest in reading about mothers, mothering, and childrearing in the USA. I'm seeking a "state of the art" briefing, so to speak. But it's not brief. My first immersion in reading about the politics of motherhood a few months ago with Opting In: Having a Child Without Losing Yourself (an excellent book in it's own right and something I want to review here as well, only I wasn't too scrupulous about making notes in its pages though it inspired me to do so) reminded me of what I liked and disliked with all the social change/feminism/socialism books I devoured as a Women's Studies minor. Writers incense their readers by exposing societal inequalities within their books, but then have little to offer in their conclusions for what one person can do make a difference. Here and there in Perfect Madness, Warner advocates policy change, but doesn't reveal any five step plan. In the end, her advice capitulates back to the model of self-reliance that she says creates societal ills: She suggests mothers take a breather, free themselves from the chained minds and spirits and just be.
*I swear I read in this book that studies show that lesbian mothers' (because there are more to be studied since lesbians) approach to division of household labor and parenting is more equitable than that of heterosexual couples possibly because they are both female and can compromise easier than men. But, perhaps it was in Parenting, Inc. that I read this, because I cannot find anything about partners, lesbians, homosexuals, etc. in its index. I didn't make this up. At some point it really struck me that besides leaving out working class mothers, this book completely acts as though lesbian mothers don't exist and that makes me wonder if lesbian mothers feel the same pressure to be perfect mothers.
And why, if Warner is so careful to focus on upper and middle class trends and exclude working class mothers, did she not also mention in that same "exclusions" paragraph that she didn't speak to lesbian mothers? Additionally, I simply cannot recall her specifying whether she spoke to mothers who are any color other than white. DC is not homogeneous. While I agreed with Warner's thesis that this trend affects upper and middle class women, now I wonder about "other" trends in mothering that she didn't uncover because she focused so narrowly on one demographic, and here, she's convinced me that this is a nationwide trend. Doubts. I have my doubts.
