Advertisement

Brave New World

Share
<i> Karen Stabiner is the author of "To Dance With the Devil: The New War on Breast Cancer."</i>

What I liked most about my mother’s part-time job was Wednesdays at the Top Hat. She was a bookkeeper for a medical magazine and, for some reason, its fiscal health required her presence once a week at noon.

She hated not being home for lunch. A good mother was home for lunch. The other kids went home to Chef Boyardee spaghetti and “Lunchtime Little Theater” on TV, dished up by a hovering mom in a shirtwaist. My sister and I walked three extra blocks to sit by ourselves at the counter at the Top Hat, where a tall bottle-blond in a pale blue polyester uniform served us each a hamburger, French fries and a Coke, conveniently billed to my folks on a monthly basis.

But I want to take this opportunity, long after the fact, to tell my mom not to feel guilty. We did not feel all those things that the children of working mothers are supposed to feel--abandoned, less cared for, oh God, less loved. Truth is, all my friends envied me. And as I sauntered away from that counter, conspicuously ignoring the cash register, I felt like I owned the joint. For all my myriad neuroses, none of them stemmed from Wednesdays at the Top Hat.

Advertisement

That was before the women’s movement made work a politically correct aspiration, in fact, a prerequisite for any woman who wanted to prove her merit in modern society. Now that there are more women in the workplace and my daughter is the rule, not the exception as I was, a mother’s guilt has become the focus of endless anguished musings and analyses. Should mothers work? Dare we confess to ambitions beyond hearth and home? Will our children think we neglected them--or is there a way to redefine all of this so that they will think that we expanded the universe for them? That we held the door open, just a bit, to give them an earlier glimpse than of what might await them.

One of the most arresting aspects of “A Mother’s Place” by New York Times deputy foreign editor Susan Chira is her willingness to confess that she likes work; her frank comments about the joys of the workplace stand in stark contrast to the rationales--fiscal, emotional, professional--that too many women on both sides of the debate still use to disguise their pleasure at what they do.

The self-righteous self-sacrifice that usually clouds the issue, whether the political correctness of the working mom or the mythic devotion of her stay-at-home counterpart, is cleared away. Chira has elevated the debate from the standard back-and-forth about priorities, to address the same questions that men ask: Is my work satisfying? Am I a better, more interesting, more engaging person because of it?

She adamantly believes she has the right to address these questions, dismissing all the naysayers who suggest that she is shirking her maternal responsibilities. “A Mother’s Place” is an ambitious book, clearly intended to retire the field and enable working women to get on with it. Its sweeping approach sometimes leaves the reader breathless. In the chapter “Courting the Soccer Mom, Hounding the Other Mom,” Chira surveys everyone who has a point of view on woman’s proper role, from feminists who celebrate the differences between women and men to researchers who debunk the distinctions. She worries about the effect of the right-wing doctrine of manifest gender destiny, which suggests that an entire sex was born to parenthood uber alles, and writes: “This obsession with biology as destiny has produced a public discourse that sentimentalizes motherhood and narrows women’s acceptable choices. Contemporary echoes abound of the Victorian cult of domesticity.”

The only odd thing about her energized analysis of working motherhood is that she has to work to defend the choices she has made. I recall the documentary film “Rosie the Riveter” about mothers who had responded to the call when World War II robbed industry of its workers--only to be sent home despite their expressed pleasure in work, once the men came back to claim their rightful place in society.

More than half a century later, we’re still wondering whether moms ought to work--and buying books on the subject, since mothers are a subset particularly prone to self-doubt. Perhaps the focus is wrong: The real question, as Chira points out, is not whether working motherhood works--economics demand it--but how to make it work better for everyone in the family. We live in a culture that extols youth but does remarkably little for its children; until that changes, working mothers, experts at the overlapped life, will be hard-pressed to find time to read this important analysis.

Advertisement

Newscaster Cokie Roberts takes a much more personal, anecdotal approach in “We Are Our Mothers’ Daughters,” a set of recollections about her own life and the lives of remarkable women she has encountered during her long career as a journalist. She has a disarming style: Her first essay, about her late sister Barbara, reads like an emotional Mack truck driven by a lady wearing kid gloves, the perfect combination of powerful feelings and a modulated style.

The sections on Roberts’ family are the strongest in the book; any working mother will wince at the story of how Roberts missed her daughter’s first big dance (“ ‘What was she wearing?’ I asked. ‘Something blue and shiny of yours,’ ” her son replied). When she reminisces about heading over to the Harvard Library to do research and bumping into her husband-to-be, Steve Roberts, she reflects the experience of a whole generation of women, carried along by the women’s movement, who juggled traditional notions about love and marriage with newer, more ambitious ideas about the future.

But finally, the reader wishes for more. These are little tastes of a larger story, and while there are elegant, touching passages, there is not enough here. As the daughter of Congressman Hale Boggs and his wife, who took his place when he died in a plane crash, and as a political journalist, Roberts has seen so much. But her life is not adequately reflected in her writing. Restraint is an admirable quality, and discipline to be desired in a writer, but restraint carried too far begins to look like etiquette. Roberts has lived a privileged life, and all that good luck seems to get in the way of a livelier voice.

Marion Winik, on the other hand, is hell-bent in “The Lunch-Box Chronicles” to tell you every last thing you want to know about young working motherhood. Young, widowed working motherhood. Young, ex-drug user, married to a gay fellow with AIDS, widowed working motherhood. She has the literary equivalent of a very fast metabolism, which is both her gift and her downfall. Winik’s sense of humor can go from zero to 60 in about five seconds, a good thing, given the hand fate has dealt her. But unless she wants to burn out before she’s 45, she needs to learn to pause long enough to draw breath.

The speedy punch lines are understandable, considering her early life: Her husband’s death was the capper to a young adulthood spent in a card house of controlled substances. But the humor can sour in the blink of an eye--or, in Winik’s case, the flick of a wrist, as when she slapped her younger son, Vince, for throwing a tantrum about not getting to wear his favorite sneakers.

She struck her child. The incident leads to a prolonged rant on the duel between the good mommy and the bad mommy in all of us, but I’m uncomfortable with throwaway references to the “wild threats” she made to shut Vince up--including promises that she would either kill herself or abandon her boys at the side of the road.

Advertisement

We tend to define child abuse as a physical phenomenon, overt in its hideousness. But words can wound a small child, and parental threats are particularly scary. Delivering an ultimatum fast does not make it funny; honesty may be the best policy, but a little self-control never hurt the mix, either. If Winik is going to bring up this kind of stuff, she has a responsibility to take a longer look at it.

That requires a different pace. It’s more difficult, less frantic, less easily accessed. The chapter called “Books and the Night” gives us a different glimpse of Winik, anticipating that sweet, slow moment when the kids are in bed and a book beckons. It’s an abrupt change but a welcome one. She ought to trust herself and try it more often. And she ought to trust readers to follow her there, to remain interested if she downshifts from manic to meaningful once in a while. It worked for Robin Williams.

Besides, according to Sally Helgesen, author of “Everyday Revolutionaries,” working women like Chira, Roberts and Winik are central to a massive social shift away from the “organization man” and his homogenous 1950s environment made famous by author William Whyte. In a rather emphatic style, she announces a “major economic and technological upheaval” occurring at “the precise historical moment that one-half of the human race is also entering the public realm. . . .” In other words, the world is holding hands across the Internet; it is your mall, your library, your med center, your open door, just as women are stepping into the workplace and promising to enhance it.

But I have a little trouble with the image of half the population entering the public realm, as though women had all gathered outside the gates, discarded their shirtwaists and stormed over to the other side in full enlightenment regalia. Human progress is a process, and for every woman who finds fulfillment in a brave new world of work, home and family, there’s another somewhere who’s still making 75 cents to a guy’s dollar, or having to choose between advancement and the slower pace of the mommy track.

It would be nice to be able to buy Helgesen’s view of the world, in which women help to make the workaday world a more humanistic, flexible environment; certainly her outlook is far rosier and freer of conflict than is Chira’s. But it is difficult not to trip over the generalizations. She refers again and again to the “Starbucks society,” in which the accent is firmly upon individual choice. Today’s marketplace constantly requires people to make decisions: what kind of coffee to drink, what magazines to subscribe to, how to exercise, what kind of sports their children should play. People today want to shape every facet of their lives, and the commercial emphasis upon niche marketing enables them to do so.

A great sound bite and an attractive premise, since she believes women, free from linear male ideas about conformity and success, are leading the way out of Cheeverland and into a synergistic society where humanism and opportunity rule. Wait a minute, though. Much as I’d like to see women take the credit for sweeping social change, what is Starbucks, after all, if not McDonald’s’ hip grandson? Helgesen uses the fact that you can invent your own perfect coffee drink as a symbol of all that is right in our changing society. I don’t see it: How is ordering a nonfat decaf latte (known at my local outlet as a “why bother latte”) any different from ordering a cheeseburger, hold the onions, and using both mustard and catsup?

Advertisement

Sometimes there is such a thing as too much choice, which distracts from the real choices, making things look far prettier than they actually are. Some women live in Helgesen’s world and lucky they are for it: enthusiastic, energetic women who happen to have been given the chance to reinvent themselves and their workplace. But some others live in Chira’s stressed-out world or on the emotional edge, like Winik. And no working mother is home free until we all are.

Lest you think this is a tempest in a cappuccino cup, take my word: The question of how to be a woman in the world already resides inside some very young heads. I asked my 8-year-old if she sometimes yearned for a stay-at-home mom, and she looked at me with the kind of reverence that fades with puberty and said, “But Mom, I bet you could go a whole 24 hours and not run out of facts.” Some people might consider me a journalist, but to Sarah I run the best kind of import business: I bring home information from the outside world. That day she announced she wanted to be a writer just like me. But a week later she decided instead to ride horses when she grows up, and when I inquired about how she would pay her bills, she shrugged. “Maybe I’ll marry a man who has a job.”

Advertisement