The mommy mystique

What about the role of race in all this? While the book primarily focuses on white middle- and upper-middle-class mothers, you mention that the "new momism" is something of an exclusive white club and that women of color have been portrayed as the anti-new-mom.

At the same time that the celebrity mom was going through the roof in the media, so was the welfare mother. There were awful attacks on welfare mothers from the right. Welfare mothers were supposedly responsible for everything wrong in America: [drugs, crime, loss of productivity.] And of course most of the welfare mothers that we saw in the media were African-American women. The stories were sensational, they were newsworthy, so they got focused on. And everybody thought, Oh my god, welfare is comprised entirely of African-American women who come from three generations of welfare families and who refuse to work and are neglectful of their children. The number of welfare mothers who came from several generations of welfare mothers, in real life? That's a tiny fraction of welfare mothers.

It's such an awful stereotype. I think one of the worst things that emerged from the '80s was the stereotype of the African-American mother as a bad mother. Because of course we didn't see middle-class African-American women, of which there are some, by the way, who love their children and are fabulous mothers. Look, we're all in this together. If there are poor women whose children aren't getting enough to eat, they're going to crappy schools, they're learning a way of violence very young, that's not just a heartbreak for them, it's bad for us as a society, and it's morally wrong.

To highlight the contrast, you give a great example in the book of how Christie Brinkley is never described as having "three children by three different men," but if she were a black woman on welfare, she would be.

Right.

Can we really blame the media for our sense of maternal inadequacy and anxiety?

We can blame the media and marketing. Mothers and kids really got discovered in the '80s and '90s, when niche marketing took over. Kids started getting divided into ever and ever smaller niches and there's a load of products that you're supposed to buy for each developmental stage. And if you don't by them, your kid's left in the dust. If you fail to buy a Leap Pad or Einstein Junior or the correct teething ring, 20 years from now, your kid will be working at the Dunkin' Donuts and the other kids will be CEOs.

Politics have also played a big role. In the '80s and beyond, the far right really slammed working mothers and single mothers, really sought to guilt-trip them under the frame of "family values," which by the way had nothing to do with supporting everyday families. And of course they were central to blocking anything resembling federal support for decent day care; paid maternity leave, which sounds scandalous in this country, but you know every other civilized country has paid maternity leave, some for up to a year; decent public schools; after-school programs; healthcare for everybody, including for little kids so parents don't have to worry about that. So mothers, rightly, looked around and they saw institutions collapsing all around them. And of course, what's a mother going to say? "I've got to pick up the slack." Mothers have been revered in rhetoric, but reviled in public policy.

You mention the vilification of the working mother by the far right. Do you see politicians on the left addressing the plight of these mothers at all?

I don't hear any of the Democratic candidates [for president] talking about women's issues. We had the so-called soccer mom in '96, whose vote people wanted to get. But they are not talking to us -- and they should be. I really think mothers are realizing that politically we have not been seen as citizens. We've only been seen as consumers, not as a constituency. And that's got to change.

Have you ever been to Denmark?

No.

Oh, god. It'd break your heart. They have made a choice as a culture that's very different than the choices we've made as a society. Their choice has been work is work and family is family -- and family matters. So everybody leaves work between 4 and 5 o'clock. Everybody. Dads, moms. They go home and spend time with their families. You have a child, a baby nurse comes to your house once a week for, like, six weeks. So if you're not sure what you're doing, she helps you. Is their tax rate about 50 percent? Yeah. Would Americans put up with that? Probably not. But we can do a lot better than we're doing now. And once you see a culture in which there's really a commitment to family that makes it possible for fathers and mothers to work, it's a revelation.

It sounds great.

Well, you know, Japan, France, Norway, Sweden, they all have day-care centers for little kids, and they regard it not as a special interest for working mothers: They regard it as an investment in the future of the country because it's an investment in kids. If a kid goes into day care or nursery school when he or she is 2 or 3, by the time they get to kindergarten, they know their colors, they often know the alphabet, they've learned how to share with other kids, they've painted -- all these cool things that are so enriching developmentally. Why don't we think that that's important? We should.

How did mothers get so disenfranchised?

I think they've been too busy dealing with their lives to notice or to take action. But there's an incipient mothers movement going on in this country. You can feel it. You can hear it. Women are joining organizations like the Motherhood Project, the Motherhood Movement and MOTHERS (Mothers Ought to Have Equal Rights). There are Web sites going up: the Welfare Warriors, the Children's Defense Fund, Ann Crittenden's Web site. Mothers are saying, "I've had it." And this is true of stay-at-home mothers as well as working mothers.

Next Page: Is it really Sarah Jessica Parker's and Catherine Zeta-Jones' fault that mothers feel so stressed out?

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