The mommy mystique

In the book you talk about the "Mommy Wars" the media has created between "stay-at-home moms," which you point out is a friendly term, and "working mothers," more formal and distant.

Right. I think it's a big red herring. Of course there are tensions and differences between stay-at-home mothers and working mothers. But the media has suggested that they have become mutually exclusive categories. You know, stay-at-home mothers have often been working mothers in the past. Working mothers have sometimes been stay-at-home mothers. We move back and forth between these categories. And in my limited experience, stay-at-home mothers and working mothers bail each other out all the time. We carpool together, we watch each other's kids. There's been a real divide and conquer in the media. We're supposed to be involved in this big catfight instead of saying, "What happened here?"

Are we mothers at all culpable here? Is it really Sarah Jessica Parker's and Catherine Zeta-Jones' fault that we're feeling so stressed out?

Look, images in the media don't come from Mars. It's not like somebody manufactures them out of some alien material. They come from what's in our culture. And people who work in the media are not all evil. Mass media is filled with all kinds of people, many of whom mean well -- a lot of women work in the media too.

But there have been a series of very heavy-duty commercial pressures on television shows, on magazines, that have to do with selling products, that have to do with making women feel inadequate. After all, if you don't feel inadequate, why are you going to buy the next product. It's very important for selling things.

And if you talk to women who work in magazines, for example, or women who produce TV shows, they'll tell you how they feel besieged by this stuff, too, but they have to put out certain kinds of stories, certain kinds of idealized images. Then these scare stories come out and they gain traction. And so what happens to the regular mother is that she sees in the media a construction of what seems like the norm. "Oh, if it's in the media, everybody must believe it. If Kathy Lee Gifford can have this very high-powered job and still read the Bible to Cody and look beautiful all the time, then those are expectations that I guess everybody has of me."

Should we really be basing our self-images on TV talk-show hosts and sitcom characters?

Well, it's not what we should do, but it's what does happen. The mass media is a kind of giant Home Depot of identities that colonizes our most basic hopes and dreams and fears about who we are as people, and as mothers.

But I think that we need to look to each other more to validate who we are. We need to use our common sense and just say, "This feels right to me. End of story. No, I'm not baking you 40 blueberry muffins at 10 o'clock at night so you can bring them in for snacks tomorrow. We'll go to the store tomorrow to buy something."

Are we presented with any realistic examples of motherhood in the media?

When "Roseanne" came on, the mothers of America said, "Thank you!" That show flew to the top of the ratings because it took the schmaltz out of motherhood. And I think "The Osbournes" took the schmaltz out of family values. And "Married With Children" was another one. A lot of people hated that show, but it was a huge hit. Why? Peg Bundy was the absolute anti-mom. She wouldn't do anything. It was funny, because it was a relief.

The book is funny, but it's also angry. Are you angry? Should we be?

Yeah, we should be angry. We're not supposed to be angry. We're supposed to be all sweetness and light and understanding. Well, where did that come from? You know, if mothers had never gotten angry in this country, there would never have been social change, including, I might note, widows' benefits in the 1930s. We wouldn't have child labor laws if mothers hadn't gotten mad. Birth control would be illegal if mothers hadn't gotten mad. So yeah, it's time for mothers to get mad. I don't know why mothers are not all opening their windows and saying, "I'm not gonna take it anymore."

We have been completely let down by our government, and many of us have been really let down by our places of employment. There are still so many companies with no day care, no flextime, incredibly punishing hours. It's so hard to work 60 hours a week and be a mother. I mean, it's hard enough to work 40 hours a week and have a child. So I think mothers have every, every right to be angry. There are plenty of other interest groups much smaller than mothers who, because they got angry, got what they wanted.

So what's the solution?

The most important first step is to rip the veneer off the Mommy Myth. It's important for mothers to get together and talk back to and make fun of these ridiculous ideals in the media, and the book tries to lay out some examples of how to do this.

What happened with the women's movement in the 1970s is that, once women began to see through the "Feminine Mystique," which was a crucial first step, they then got political. They did start agitating for child-care centers and equal pay and we made a lot of progress as a result of that.

I think it's time for mothers to get more political, and that is not as time-consuming as you might think. If every mother who has access to a computer spent five minutes, sat down and wrote an e-mail to her presidential candidate of choice, her congressional and senatorial candidates of choice, and said, "Excuse me, what are you going to start doing for mothers and children?" And if millions of mothers did that and kept doing that, I think the political agenda might change. Mothers' voices have to be heard. But what the women's movement taught us is that first you have to see things differently. First you have to see what's keeping you down, and once you do that, then you can move ahead politically. I think that's already starting to happen for mothers. Why shouldn't we have the same things that European women have? We deserve it!

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