Moms: Bring Home the Bacon? Fry it Up in the Pan?

Some 30 years ago - as women were entering the workforce in huge mass numbers, dressed for success with high hopes of big careers - a famous ad ran for Enjoli perfume: 

The mother pranced around boasting that she could "bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan and never let her husband forget he was a man."

This mythical woman had it all—career, children, marriage, dust-free windows, multiple orgasms.

Since then, the have-it-all myth has imploded. 

1984 - The first mention of the term "glass ceiling" was in an article in Adweek, an influential advertising publication.

1989 - An article in the Harvard Business Review introduced the concept of "the  mommy track" which put the idea of two career paths for women: one to the boardroom for a slay-the-dragon career for women who made their career their primary focus, and another slowtrack with lower pay for those who chose career and a family.

1990s: The Mommy Wars

2005: The Mommy Wars Redux

2006: Betty Friedan dies and the conversation is up for grabs again.  Her book, The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, called stay-at-home motherhood a life in a "comfortable concentration camp." 
The book was listed as #3 in a list of the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th centuries by a panel of 15 conservative scholars and public policy leaders, right under 1848's Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels and Mein Kampf by Adolph Hitler.   (Ideas from her book are under reviews at Amazon.com if you click the title above and want to refresh the issues that were up for debate then).

Wow.  No easy answer here, gals.  And we didn't even throw in no-fault divorce or bring up the fact that most divorces are initiated by women.  WTF is going on?  (that means What The Fuss).   Work and guilt or work and stress or stay-at-home for no accolades. 

Why can't motherhood and the lives of women read like a big, long, wonderful book with many different and interesting chapters along the way?  One that you can start, stop, put away, revisit, continue or begin again.  That is a lot less linear than how we've been thinking about how to do it.  Society might really benefit.

Here's an interesting article for more on this from Canada's Globe and Mail.  Myra Strober, an economist at Stanford, questions the classic enonomic models and says, "...we have to ask, as an economy, as a society, what are our values and priorities."

Who is talking about this?  Acton Institute's Power blog picks up in Dueling Mommies the resurfaced issue MotherPie addressed here in the Mommy Wars and points to more hash-outs happening since then with this article in Townhall.com on The Duel in the Mommy Wars by Jennifer Roback Morse who makes these points:

I plead guilty to Hirshman’s charges. I am an expensively educated woman who has joined the "opt out revolution." I have a doctorate in economics. I did a post-doc at the University of Chicago. My first teaching job was at Yale. I had tenure at George Mason University. I loved my job. But I left my tenured position to follow my husband to the West Coast where I had no immediate job prospects (Gasp! It doesn’t get any more retro than that). I did it, because I learned from experience that the kinds of claims Hirshman makes are simply untrue.

Here's what others have to say:  Diane Kubel writes that the issue is "being the best me." Clancy Ratliff, a Ph.D. candidate, writes in her blog CultureCat about this from the issue of the possibility of new norms reducing the number of the mommy wars and uses an example of breastfeeding and norms.  The Barely Attentive Mother gives a good wrap-up of links on the issue of work/life balance.

What say you?

Comments

[Casey]

No myth, you need to check out the latest post.. you go girl! www.guidetoahappymarriage.blogspot.com