The hand that rocks the cradle

NOT enough has changed in the 43 years since Betty Friedan wrote “The Feminine Mystique,” one of the first and loudest wake-up calls for working women. While the discussion Friedan started continues to rage, motherhood has become its own odd form of social disease. From the spiritual angst of the very wealthy to the anxious over-parenting of the upper middle class to the impossible financial crunch on poor families in this country, it is the new battleground, marked by an apparent wall between working and nonworking mothers, a trumped-up mud-wrestling match that has distracted us from more important issues since at least the 1980s, when writer Jan Russell coined the term “mommy wars.” If several new books are any indication, these mommy wars continue to divide us, with some mothers falling back on good old feminism while others take up arms in the backlash brigade. Still others focus on motherless mothers and the psychological tripwires that add more angst for women who lost their role models before they had children of their own.

The theme here is that the system isn’t working. The mothers are mad. There are 68 million women in the U.S. labor force. Seventy percent of American mothers with children younger than 18 work for pay in some capacity, more than half outside the home. They must. In the 1950s, writes Beth Brykman in her new book “The Wall Between Women: The Conflict Between Stay-at-Home and Employed Mothers,” “a mortgage consumed about 14% of the average thirty-year-old’s income, but, in 2001, approximately half of the income of medium and low income homeowners was going toward housing.” Meanwhile, Paige Hobey notes in “The Working Gal’s Guide to Babyville,” baby expenses average $6,300 in the first year, not including child care. The Family Leave Act of 1993 allows mothers 12 weeks of unpaid leave -- and that only in companies with more than 50 employees. Typical full-time baby-sitter costs range from $1,440 to $3,060 a month. Day-care center full-time costs range from $300 to $1,350 a month. For the middle and lower classes, at least, motherhood is unaffordable.

No wonder there’s a wall. But it’s not only between women. It’s between rich and poor.

It’s between defenders of a corporate culture that has gone past the point of usefulness to families and the people -- primarily women -- on the front lines defending those families. “To most women choice is all about bad options and difficult decisions,” wrote Ann Crittenden in her 2001 book, “The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World Is Still the Least Valued,” “your children or your profession; taking on domestic chores or marital strife; a good night’s sleep or time with your child; food on the table or your baby’s safety; your right arm or your left.”

In “Mommy Wars,” an anthology edited by Leslie Morgan Steiner that collects 27 essays by stay-at-home, part-time and full-time female writers including Jane Smiley, Veronica Chambers and Susan Cheever, mothers describe working their way around what Cheever calls “half a revolution,” in which “[w]omen have earned the right to work as hard as men do, but men did not take over half the work at home.” Although many (but not all) of the contributors here describe the beautiful epiphany of having a baby and the fierce determination to protect their children, most are unhappy with whatever choice they make. The working women describe out-of-control lives, bad relationships and missed opportunities; the stay-at-home moms (in this collection a slightly happier lot) describe the same isolation, boredom and financial dependence that Betty Friedan wrote about four decades ago. On the whole, however, they are troubled more by their low status in the world than by the actual routines and responsibilities of motherhood. All are about to drop from exhaustion.

For another category of writer-mothers, exhaustion is a trap of feminism. “The success of the women’s movement depended on imposing a certain narrative -- of boredom, of oppression, of despairing uselessness -- on an entire generation of women,” writes Caitlin Flanagan in “To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife,” which distills material originally published in the Atlantic Monthly and the New Yorker. Feminism, according to Flanagan, led to bad sexual relations, chaotic households, abandoned children and the mistaken belief that jobs could cure depression. She remembers the 1970s as a period of “half-liberated, half-imprisoned” women who were “angry all the time.” The difference between the “old libbers” and the traditional housewives was that the latter had a commitment to the family. The choice, as Crittenden has so well documented, may be a chimera, but it’s a lot better than not having one. Blaming other women (unless they are policymakers, politicians or bosses in decision-making positions) is not going to change anything.

Flanagan opens “To Hell With All That” with a chapter about her mother’s death, evoking both the objects in her mother’s home that meant so much to her and the efficiency and caring that the older woman brought to household management. It’s a deft and beautiful beginning, and includes lovely reflections on the author’s predecessors: Erma Bombeck, Jean Kerr and Peg Bracken. But when Flanagan shifts focus to hiring a nanny, her writing becomes so whiny, self-indulgent and frankly bizarre that it capsizes the book entirely. There is almost nothing to be learned from her love-hate relationship with her nanny Paloma (“I was becoming quite the Latinophile!” she writes), as Flanagan bestows gifts and shares secrets and cups of tea and even Social Security set-asides, only to be shocked when Paloma wants to join a citywide strike of Central American workers in Los Angeles. It gets worse: “De-cluttering a household,” she writes in an egregiously arrogant passage, “is a task that appeals strongly to today’s professional-class woman.... Scrubbing the toilet bowl is a bit of nastiness that can be fobbed off on anyone poor and luckless enough to qualify for no better employment. But only the woman of the house can determine which finger paintings ought to be saved for posterity, which expensive possessions ought to be jettisoned in the name of sleekness and efficiency.”

Hope Edelman’s “Motherless Mothers: How Mother Loss Shapes the Parents We Become” is a heartfelt and practical work for a specific audience, although the triggers she attributes to loss, like the tendency to be overprotective, over-controlling or intolerant -- as well as an unwillingness to discipline children -- could well apply to many mothers who are simply stressed or overworked. The book, which includes some interesting studies on role models and childhood trauma, is long on suggestions for mothers and short on the effects that different mothering strategies have on children. How do children respond to anxious over-parenting? What happens when, in compensating for gaps and sadness in our childhoods, we suffocate the children we love? Books like “Motherless Mothers” are especially useful in helping readers understand why there are so many different ways of parenting -- far too many to impose our views or judge other mothers from either side of the parenting wall.

“Motherless Mothers” may best be read in tandem with another new book, “Every Mother Is a Daughter: The Neverending Quest for Success, Inner Peace, and a Really Clean Kitchen” by Perri Klass and her mother, Sheila Solomon Klass. In many ways, this is my favorite of all the new inquiries into motherhood, featuring as it does the interlocking recollections of the authors, who take turns remembering their childhoods (Sheila’s in extreme poverty and Perri’s in suburban, middle-class comfort), while trading perspectives on their mother-daughter relationship, including Sheila’s role as grandmother to Perri’s three kids. Both are remarkably open, no-nonsense women who have taken opportunities and made do with few complaints. So this, we can’t help thinking, is what it could be like! This is how it ought to be! These are the kinds of conversations I wish I could have (or could have had) with my own mother! Together, the Klasses create a kind of gold standard for a famously fractious relationship. Theirs is a book that gives us a vision of the future and raises, rather than lowers, our respect for the job of mothering.

It was not until 2004 that the Second U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that “simply assuming that women with children would take their jobs less seriously than non-mothers was, in itself, discrimination,” a ruling that, according to Brykman’s “The Wall Between Women,” will “make it easier for employed mothers to bring forth discrimination suits in the future.” And yet, in the absence of concrete laws, far too many of the arrangements made by working mothers are still left to the kindness of strangers or bosses who may change their minds or be replaced by someone with different ideas about work and family. “The Wall,” the most comprehensive of this year’s books on the state of motherhood, places a great deal of emphasis -- perhaps too much -- on changing women’s own attitudes, “redefining success and abolishing guilt,” as opposed to direct political change. But in this era of general despair over domestic issues, we need a coherent and forceful voice.

It’s no wonder, then, that “Maybe Baby,” an anthology of pieces by 28 writers culled from the 2003 Salon series “To Breed or Not to Breed,” seems refreshingly gruff. It takes, writes Lionel Shriver in “The Baby Stops Here,” a total fertility rate of 2.1 to replace a generation. The TFR in Germany is down to 1.3; in Italy and Spain, 1.2; cumulatively in the wealthy developed world, 1.5; and in the United States a dangerously close 2.0. I mean, if no one appreciates what mothers do, why bother? One possible reason emerges in Joe Loya’s essay “Redemption,” which occupies a territory as far from that of Caitlin Flanagan as it is possible to get without falling off the planet. “When I was twenty-seven years old, I told my cellmate, Lalo, that I was never going to have kids,” Loya writes in this remarkable piece. “I was at Lompoc Federal Penitentiary, a maximum-security prison in California, beginning a seven-year sentence for bank robbery. We were locked in our cell at night, a cell the size of a parking space. Lalo was on the top bunk, talking about how much he loved his young boys, telling me I should have kids, too.”

So why the paralysis? Why the bickering instead of real change? “One could say that motherhood is now the single greatest obstacle left in the path to economic equality for women,” writes Crittenden, whose work continues to stand as a prism through which motherhood can be examined as a function of political will.

Such a point of view is shared by many other writers, including Judith Warner, whose “Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety” has just come out in paperback. “You cannot,” Warner writes, “really challenge the American culture of rugged individualism. Because beyond the pretty words we have about ‘caring’ or ‘community’ (words that tend to get the government off the hook), we lack the most basic notions now of what a different kind of culture might look or feel like.” As a contrast, Warner paints a picture of her own experience as a new mother living in France. It’s not just the low cost of day care ($150 a month, full time), the four months of paid maternity leave that all companies must grant pregnant women, “the right to stop working for up to three years and have jobs held for them” or even the cash grants of $105 a month after second children are born. Rather, Warner argues, “that was just the beginning. There was more: a culture.... A set of deeply held attitudes toward motherhood -- toward adult womanhood -- that had the effect of allowing me to have two children, work in an office, work out in a gym, and go out to dinner at night and away for a short vacation with my husband without ever hearing, without ever thinking, the word ‘guilt.’ ” When she returned to the United States, on the other hand, Warner met mothers “stressed near the breaking point,” blaming themselves and each other for their problems.

In the ebb and flow of publishing, these and other books, all released within a short period, indicate a groundswell, an issue about to break. Because of this, the authors here who offer a vision of a future in which motherhood is not only valued but financially viable are the most useful. Books about how hard it is to find good help are not useful at all. The mothers are mad. And we all know what that means. *

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Mothers in arms

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The following books are discussed in this review:

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The Wall Between Women: The Conflict

Between Stay-at-Home

and Employed Mothers

by Beth Brykman

(Prometheus Books:

192 pp., $18 paper)

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The Working Gal’s Guide to Babyville:

Your Must-Have Manual

for Life With Baby

by Paige Hobey with

Allison Nied, M.D.

(Da Capo: 412 pp.,

$15.95 paper)

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Mommy Wars: Stay-at-

Home and Career Moms

Face Off on Their Choices,

Their Lives, Their Families edited by Leslie Morgan

Steiner (Random House:

336 pp., $24.95)

*

To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing

Our Inner Housewife

by Caitlin Flanagan

(Little Brown: 244 pp., $22.95)

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Motherless Mothers:

How Mother Loss Shapes

the Parents We Become

by Hope Edelman

(HarperCollins: 410 pp., $25.95)

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Every Mother Is a Daughter: The Neverending Quest for Success, Inner Peace, and a Really Clean Kitchen (Recipes and Knitting Patterns Included) by Perri Klass and Sheila Solomon Klass (Ballantine Books: 290 pp., $23.95)

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Maybe Baby: 28 Writers Tell the Truth About Skepticism, Infertility, Baby Lust, Childlessness, Ambivalence, and How They Made the Biggest Decision of Their Lives edited by Lori Leibovich, with a foreword by Anne Lamott (HarperCollins: 288 pp., $24.95)

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Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety by Judith Warner, with a new foreword by the author (Riverhead Books: 332 pp., $15 paper)