Razing The Village

How exactly did women get sold on this all-consuming motherhood plan anyway?

One of our core writers here at Iron Ladies, slmgoldberg wrote about expecting to pull back a bit from writing when her second son is born in the next few weeks. She figures it is temporary, but necessary. I have four children aged 10–14 (yes, there’s a set of twins in there) and so have seen a little more of the waxing and waning of work at home motherhood. I replied with an update of an older post of mine to tell her that her instincts were excellent. Motherhood does have phases.

A parenthetical question caught reader attention: “How exactly did women get sold on this all-consuming motherhood thing anyway?” It was a rhetorical question. I do know.

Razing the Village

Back in the early ’60s when the feminist Second Wave was new, leading feminists denounced domesticity in an effort to jolt women out of homes. Betty Friedan infamously started writing The Feminine Mystique after surveying her Smith College class at their 15th reunion, and when the sense of boredom she noted among well-educated, suburban elite housewives resonated, the movement ran with that. Second Wave leaders assumed that the post-war technology advances that turned housework into a less than full-time job wouldn’t prove motivating enough for women to try professional life in the numbers feminists thought were necessary. That some women were working was glossed over, and housewifery got slandered with horrible things, like slavery.

(This would be not the last time feminists demeaned real suffering by equating the plight of educated white women to atrocities, nor the last time they took such a condescending view of their own.)

The rhetoric worked, however. Plus, the Second Wave caught an economic wave, similar to the shift from agrarian to urban labor in the Industrial Revolution. Innovation freed women from the burdens of full-time domestic labor around the same time the federal education loans became generally available. Women surged back to school and into professional life much faster than anyone expected.

Largely unremarkable at the time, these original Second Wave feminists had their mothers, aunts, older children, and older housewives not caught up in the movement to serve as their village to care for their young children.

But things change.

When the power woman of the 80’s started a family, she had no such network. A child in the 60’s, teen or co-ed in the 70’s, she had been raised in the feminist Second Wave and had absorbed all of its teachings. Well, except for the one about motherhood. That one was stubborn. Turns out most women — not all but most — wanted to be mothers and liked being mothers.

So that 80’s power woman had gotten her education and established her career before settling down. In this pursuit, she had likely moved away from home and had waited to have children. If those children came along, parents and in-laws were older, less able to assist in baby care — if they were even interested. Many of these potential grandmothers were also the women who had gone on domestic strike and weren’t really into the idea of grandmothering. They had “done their time” and did not care to go back to domestic life even so their daughters could achieve professionally. (Incidentally, that problem seemed to worsen as time went by. For Gen X, I’d estimate that a little more than half of our mothers who are able are also willing. Millennials do not seem so fortunate.)

Teenagers and college co-eds were merely younger versions of 80’s power woman — full daughters of the Second Wave. They were not likely to try and earn money by babysitting or nannying. They had professional resumes to build, and child care was so very unprofessional.

So the 80’s Power Woman would have to do everything herself or find help. What about husbands? She couldn’t rely on her husband! The whole Second Wave attitude was that women could do anything men could do in high heels and backwards. Men were bicycles to women’s fish-ness. If a woman got help from a man, then it didn’t count. Never be dependent on a man! That was clear as a bell advice from the era, and it quickly morphed into “never rely on a man for anything — not money, not an open door, nothing.” Women didn’t need men for anything really but sperm. You could want them, but don’t be a fool and depend on them.

So that’s mostly why parenthood became all about mom. (I’m leaving out a divorce and family law amplifier that I will publish later.) But the all-consuming part, that was still to come.

The Mommy Wars Begin

Just repeating an old mistake of men — every woman is an island — would have been problem enough, but things got worse. Many factors contributed to the idea that women could “have it all,” but the popularity of the idea is easy to mark from the publishing of a book by that title. In 1982, Helen Gurley Brown the editor of Cosmopolitan wrote a book, Having It All, which assured women that they could, well, do it all.

Some women, and by now the bloom was off of the Second Wave, scoffed at this advice. Other women went all in.

Thus, a great social experiment was born. Was it better to be a working mom or an at-home mom? Neither side, however, had any guiding standards of success. The old standards for housewives were gone and the new standards for professional women were untried. It was only 1982, after all. The only thing it seems most women agreed on was that house and husband were not priorities. The women of the ’80s and ’90s would judge the success of their ‘to work or not to work’ choice by their kids. If the kids were all right in the end, then the professional plan would become the new standard. If the kids melted down, then the traditional plan would carry the day.

It sounds simple enough, but waiting two and a half decades to figure out which mothers had raised the happiest and most productive citizens would take far too long. These mothers needed shorter, visible measures. Highly edcuated moms — who were the ones driving this whole new trend — could totally do this, turn motherhood into a job with measurable metrics, that is. Into vogue came lessons of every kind, sight reading flashcards for toddlers, language programs, etc.

Stay-at-home-moms ran these things themselves. The work outside the home moms, again the elite white collar type, found nannies of sufficient credentials to do the job. SAHMs countered the outsourcing to credentialed nannies with a Martha Stewart offensive of complicated crafting and cooking and started touting all the things that only the actual mother could do, like breastfeeding. Work outside the home mothers who became exhausted trying to do it all, or who simply missed rearing their own children, latched on to the “things only a mother can do”/natural motherhood theories as justification for opting out. They had to give their peers and parents a reason they were “throwing their education away.” It had to be them. Only a mother can…

It only took a few rounds of this competition spiral, dubbed the Mommy Wars by a moms’ magazine in the early 80’s, before new mothers began to see their success as women completely tied up in how much they were doing for their children. If you were at-home it was because children require full time attention and management from their mother. If you were at-work, then you squeezed every educational/college resume builiding perk out of non-mother care that you could and devoted your non-work life to your kids.

The children, shockingly, did not learn much about doing for themselves. Oh, they learned Mandarin and violin and had resumes for kindergarten admissions races, but they didn’t learn how to do things on their own. So they do need mom to manage their every move well into their teens and twenties.

Motherhood is now the hardest full-time job we women will ever have. We made sure of it.