anifestoes blast their way into the popular consciousness on two kinds of fuel: recognition (we see ourselves in them) and rage (we can no longer tolerate the injustice they describe). Judith Warner’s ”Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety” brims with both. She clearly means for her denunciation of American-style mothering to do for overstressed 21st-century upper-middle-class American women what Betty Friedan’s ”Feminine Mystique” did for underemployed 20th-century ones. ”Perfect Madness” is not half as good as ”The Feminine Mystique” — not as painfully accurate or cleverly argued — but, like Friedan, Warner channels a big, explosive feeling, which she identifies as frustration at ”the mommy mystique” or, more resonantly, ”this mess.” Since I and other mothers I know expend a great deal of energy trying to quash the suspicion that our once carefully groomed resumes now look as shabby and unpromising as our toy-strewn homes and lumpy midsections, I read most of Warner’s long and somewhat repetitive book in a single sitting, and so, I think, will fellow travelers on the mommy track. The mess, c’est moi; the injustice is that it doesn’t matter how committed I am to my work or how efficient I become. As soon as I began bearing children I hit, not a glass ceiling, but a brick wall. It is no longer cool to say stuff like this, not even in female company. After God knows how many thousands of books, articles and talk shows on the rapid-aging process human resources professionals politely call ”the work-life balance,” we have had about as much as we can stomach on the subject. We are not zesty, pie-eyed, would-be superwomen. We acknowledge life’s limitations and the needs of our children and adjust our ambitions accordingly. On the other hand, just because we have issue fatigue, that doesn’t mean we don’t have an issue. Judith Warner, a biographer of Hillary Clinton and Newt Gingrich and the co-author of a book with Howard Dean, interviewed 150 mostly well-off women, about half of them in and around Washington, and wrote up her observations in a breathy women’s-mag style that would seem to disqualify her somewhat for the job of filtering out the chatter and identifying the threat to our emotional and economic security. (She confined her interviews largely to upper-middle-class women because, she says, images of upper-middle-class motherhood tend to crowd out all other kinds in magazines and on television and therefore exert an outsize pressure on discussions of the subject — a claim with merit, but still a remarkably circular way of going about things.) Then again, as the defense secretary recently said, you go to war with the army you have.
And so, to war. Warner has two points to make. The first is that, in affluent America, mothering has gone from an art to a cult, with devotees driving themselves to ever more baroque extremes to appease the goddess of perfect motherhood. Warner, who has two children, made this discovery upon her return from a stay in Paris, where, she says, mothers who benefit from state-subsidized support systems — child care, preschools, medical services — never dream of surrendering jobs or social lives to stay home 24/7 with their kids. In the absence of such calming assistance, however, American moms are turning themselves into physically and financially depleted drones.
The truth of this last observation is perceptible on even a short visit to any faintly tony suburb, though it’s doubtful that only mothers have lost their sense of proportion. Parents no longer set up metal swing sets in corners of their backyards; they hire professionals to erect sprawling wooden castles that consume half the lawn. Parents line up at 5 a.m. to get slots in just the right neighborhood preschool and bring their children to specialists upon noticing the slightest delay in speech or motor coordination. Desperate to maximize their children’s levels of attachment and developmental capacity, they turn marital beds into family beds, flash ”Baby Einstein” cards at their 3-month-olds, enroll toddlers in nonstop improving activities, and give up quiet evenings at home to plan Girl Scout cookie drives — ”Girl Scout cookie meetings? At 8 o’clock at night?” exclaims Warner. (That last surely is a mother-only activity.) The ex-professional stay-at-home mothers who, like haughty high priests, identify each new form of self-sacrifice set the pace for the still working ones, some of whom leave their jobs to keep up.
Warner tends toward hyperbole, but she strikes me as right about the basic phenomenon. In a society that measures status in consumer goods and hard-to-come-by symbols of achievement — grades, awards, brand-name colleges — the scramble for advantage is bound to propel American upper-middle-class parents into exponentially goofier displays of one-upsmanship. Try giving your 3-year-old an old-fashioned cake-and-balloon birthday party at home, with neither facilitator nor gift bags, and you’ll see that Warner’s onto something, and that it’s harder to opt out than you’d think. Allison Pearson was a lot funnier about the anthropology of parental rivalry in her novel, ”I Don’t Know How She Does It,” and incidentally revealed that elites use their children to jockey for status in other developed nations, not just in the United States. (Pearson’s hyperjudgmental mothers lived in London.) But then, fiction is always better on the details than sociology.
There’s more than just detail, however, to back up the theory that parents put in more time than they used to. According to the Families and Work Institute’s most recent five-year study of the national work force, children receive on average one hour more of parental attention on work days than they did 25 years ago. Translated out of the levelling language of statistical averages, that means many, many hours of helping with homework, cheering at basketball games and schlepping to music classes. (Interestingly, the study says that it’s men who are putting in the extra hour, while working women spend the same amount of time as before: 3.4 hours per workday. Men now average 2.7 hours.) Insofar as Warner implies that these new standards of parenting are driving women from the work force, she may be exaggerating. She is right to observe, however, that something is taking them out of action. A 2002 Census Bureau report shows that from 1998 to 2000 the percentage of women in the work force with small children declined from 59 to 55 percent, reversing a general upward trend; 13 percent more children were being raised at home by full-time mothers in 2002 than in 1994.
These changes may seem relatively small, but small changes can have cascading effects. Mothers experience them at the most personal level. Take the woman who decides to scale back when her baby is born. Her smaller paycheck makes her husband feel that he must bring in a bigger one, or at least make sure not to slip into a lower income bracket. That means longer hours and less time at home. Before long, the wife cuts back her hours even more to cope with the increased housework, shopping and cooking she has to do, and to care for the baby, who, as he gets older, needs more love and educational enrichment, not less. Soon she is wondering whether to keep her expensive part-time baby sitter (who is probably looking around for a full-time position) and whether her career, now barely recognizable as such, is worth what it costs to maintain it. ”Was I really a good enough writer to justify the sacrifice?” Warner wondered when she found herself in that situation. ”Or should I, at long last, just hang it up?”
I hate to think what America would be like should even the small number of women who could afford it decide just to hang it up. One imagines the halls of law firms, businesses, universities and newsrooms slowly thinning out of all but the youngest women, who, over time, would tend to be confined to jobs that don’t lead anywhere, since no boss would want to see his investment in a fast-track employee rewarded by her leaving to have a baby. At the moment, more women than men get master’s degrees and as many women as men get professional degrees, but that, too, could change, if a diminished idea of what women are capable of starts deflecting them from even beginning serious careers. (That a dearth of women in a particular field leads directly to doubt about their suitability for that field was made amply clear by the controversy last month over whether women lack the genetic capacity to succeed as professors of math and science. Maybe they do and maybe they don’t, but you don’t need genetics to explain why women might fail to rise to the top of a profession that requires an 80-hour workweek.)
This leads to Warner’s second point, which is more openly political than her first. Our neurotic quest to perfect the mechanics of mothering, she says, can be interpreted as an effort to do on an individual level what we’ve stopped trying to do on a society-wide one. In her view, it is the lack of family-friendly policies common in Europe that backs American mothers into the corner described above — policies that would promote ”flexible, affordable, locally available, high-quality” day care; mandate quality controls for that day care; require or enable businesses to give paid parental leave; make health insurance available for part-time workers; and so on.
Unfortunately, Warner doesn’t say how we might organize to get such policies passed in a rightward-drifting, Europe-hating America. She is content merely to criticize social conservatives, on the one hand, and old-school feminists, on the other, for making such legislation unthinkable. (Some feminists fear that a focus on motherhood and the needs of children will distract from the goal of workplace equality, though I think Warner overstates their influence.) Nor does she grapple with research that suggests a downside to European-style family legislation. One typical study, for example, argues that cushy state supports for Swedish mothers have weakened the bonds of marriage in that society and undermined the family. Such arguments (in my opinion) often lack context — any signs of dissolving family ties, such as rising levels of divorce, that you can point to in Europe tend to be worse in the United States — but Warner ought to have dealt with them.
In the end, she acknowledges that life isn’t perfect for French mothers, either. ”There is a price they pay for the wonderful (and expensive) benefits they enjoy: a pervasive and all-but-unchallenged kind of institutional sexism,” she writes. ”It can keep women of childbearing age from being hired. And can condemn others to being fired when they fully avail themselves of the ‘rights’ so readily accorded to them.” Warner signs off after conceding this point, as if to say, c’est la vie, but I think it goes to the heart of the problem. We can and should write more maternal supports into law, but until we change our bedrock assumptions about what the proper balance of work and life should be, women will always pay a price for interrupting their careers to have children. Non-upper-middle-class women who have no choice but to keep working will continue putting in the kinds of days that make them strangers to their children, while those with more options will either tear their hearts out at not exercising them or drop out of the work force and apply their skill at climbing career ladders to pushing their children up them.
There is reason to believe — to hope — their children will resist. The Families and Work Institute study cited above found that, compared with members of the baby boom generation, younger college-educated workers seem markedly less willing to sacrifice everything to advance in their careers. Many of the younger workers yearn to work fewer hours, and say they would turn down promotions if the new jobs required longer days and more work brought home — claims that may well prove untrue in practice, but nonetheless say a lot about the people making them. More young professionals rank their families as equal in importance to their jobs, or even greater. More young women than men hold these views, not surprisingly, but what is surprising is how many more young men interviewed in 2002 disagreed with the statement that it is ”much better for everyone involved if the man earns the money and the woman takes care of the home and children,” compared with young men interviewed 25 years earlier. You could dismiss this as just the young folk regurgitating the gender ideology they learned in school, except that more young fathers also ”walk the talk,” in the jargon of corporate America: they spend an average of one more hour a day with their children than baby boomers do.
Which brings us back to overparenting. Warner deplores its dangers both to us and to our children, who, she says, are likely to wind up as spoiled, callow, allergy-prone, risk-averse success machines with no inner lives. I rather doubt it. Social scientists and commentators have been warning of the ill effects of overparenting since parental advice books first began appearing in bookstores, but each new generation seems about as agreeable or disagreeable as the last. For all its excesses, overparenting is still preferable to its alternative, which was depicted with quiet sadness by the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild in her 1997 book, ”The Time Bind.” Hochschild studied a Fortune 500 company with exemplary work-life balance policies for both men and women and discovered that few mothers and almost no fathers took advantage of them. Some were afraid of losing their jobs; some couldn’t cope with the fear that they’d be diminished in their bosses’ eyes; some wanted overtime pay; but a majority eventually admitted that they liked life in the office and even on the plant floor better than life at home. Work was orderly and companionable. Home crackled with the anger and acting-out of children cycled through jury-rigged baby-sitting arrangements and yanked through their lives like tiny factory workers keeping pace with a speedup.
Hochschild interviewed only workers employed by the company, not those who had dropped out to stay home, so hers was a world perhaps overly drained of nurture. But the majority of women now work, and given the growing gap between the wealthy few and the less-wealthy many, that probably won’t change. With the rise of the service economy and companies that spread their production process across several continents, Americans are more likely to be working longer and during evenings and weekends, making child care even more complicated. What Hochschild forces us to consider is that we’re losing the ability to imagine a world in which we work less and at more reasonable hours, and therefore that we no longer bother to fight to bring that world into being. It is our own internalized workaholism that threatens to devour us and our children — that, and the increasingly untenable absence of a public infrastructure of care.
Overparenting has a lot in common with overwork. Both make economists happy, because they lead us to buy more stuff, whether that stuff is baby-wipe warmers or gourmet meals delivered after hours to our offices. Both are powered by fear of a loss of face. But the two also come into conflict, and therein may lie one route to salvation. It is mothers caught between overparenting and overwork who have the strongest incentive to push back against the forces that drive them. I wouldn’t go so far as to echo what one writer recently said in The New York Times Magazine, which is that mothers opting out of their careers herald a new revolution, because revolutions tend to end badly, and this one seems pretty inauspicious. But insofar as mothers with jobs and mothers without them could conceivably band together to form a very large interest group, we do represent a whopping opportunity for change. Whether we take that opportunity depends on whether we can pull ourselves out of our mess long enough to persuade those around us to clean up theirs.
Judith Shulevitz is working on a book about the Sabbath.
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ASHINGTON, Feb. 17 – Few officials in the Bush administration better understand the damage that can be wreaked by faulty or politicized intelligence than John Dimitri Negroponte.
human nature
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