Motherhood at the moment is a gut-wrenching debate. SAHM. The acronym for Stay-at-Home-Moms. The idea is hot and raging and under the knife term of The Mommy Wars. Philosopher Linda Hirshman ignited the simmering coals with an article and televised debate last fall in which she criticized the trend of highly educated mothers opting out of the workforce. "You make me vomit, too?" is Hirshman's newest response to moms who wrote online that her take on the SAHM choices made them want to vomit. Her article yesterday in the Washington Post is a response to the wrath she says she unleashed. Everybody Hates Linda, an article by Judith Stadtman Tucker, talked about the issue in terms of the language and how the current terms (such as *choice*) might not accurately reflect the problematic issues of identity.
The issue keeps hurling into the mainstream news. Like irritating summertime gnats, the conflicts just won't leave women alone. The ideas continue to simmer uncomfortably. I understand. I feel the pain of all sides and it is a societal festering wound that should become less personalized, more open to debate and less polarizing (but more on better terms on Wednesday). I've completely upended my plan for posts this week to write about this.
My frames of reference: female familial lines of strong smart women. One great-grandmother passed the Oklahoma State Bar with the highest grade in the state and although she was a card-carrying member of the state association of lawyers, she never practiced for economic gain. The other great-grandmother was a degreed nurse from Johns Hopkins and she, too, didn't participate in the workforce. One of my grandmothers ran a family business from her home and had full-time employees to support her domestic and economic roles. My other grandmother wanted to be a doctor and I have the her letters and those of her parents debating if she could ever balance the role of doctor with being a mother and she wanted both but felt both options were not open to her. She ended up being a teacher and happily having a flexible way to participate in the workforce. My mother's only regret and her mother's only "failure" was that my mother, like many women of her generation, married a semester short of getting her degree. My mother was happiest in her part-time workforce roles that gave her an identity and a way to contribute and participate in the larger world beyond the strictures of home.
My generation began to seek professional careers AND motherhood. Before electrical pumps were widely available, I continued to breastfeed using a miserable hand pump after returning to work six weeks after the birth of my first child. I started a business in a city that still had few illegal immigrants available for domestic support. The women I had as role models were closeted lesbians, divorced working mothers, women who never married and women who married but never had children. I did not have close contact with a single woman who juggled all of the options. When I started a business, it made the front page of the business paper and emphasized my role as a daughter and the business of my father rather than the enterprise I had shouldered. That is where society was.
We -- my female peers and I -- began to do things so differently from the options of our mothers and we experienced the ramifications of birth control options, no fault divorce, career choices and the trickle and then flood of cheap labor to support work/life options. Meanwhile, the changing face of America and its shift of workforce from labor to service continued. The homogenous lifestyles of my mother's generation became a crazy quilt and we can just now -- JUST NOW -- begin to filter what all of this means for us as women and for our daughters and comprehend what choices, options, consequences and relevance this means in the 21st century.
My daughters, unlike me, know that they can opt to juggle and have it all, but they have a better sense of the costs and tolls of their choices than my generation had. Maybe. And that is a big Maybe with a capital M. It is Maybe Motherhood, Maybe SAHM, Maybe Balanced, Maybe Not. Because maybe we still don't know and our inner life is velcroed to society's structures with a dissonance that we are just now talking about.
One of my daughters knows herself well enough to know she will want to work, as her maternal grandmothers and paternal aunts have, for fulfillment and perhaps necessity. My other daughter -- GASP -- seriously talks about getting an MRS. degree. She is picking up the retro movement with her choices of identity that I see with the younger mothers and I just can't comprehend this and am totally at a loss as to how to mother her -- personally, politically and societally through this mother minefield. She wants to stay home and have children. Is this a reality-based choice today? How do I mother her for preparation in the modern world?
Jeffrey Zaslow wrote on 5/4 in a Wall Street Journal article, A New Generation Gap: Differences Emerge Among Women in the Workplace, that Gen X (born between '65 - 80) bosses are not the same as the Gen Y workers (born after '80) and that now, with four generations of women in the workforce (Boomers b. 46 - 64 and World War II women), there is a huge gap and an existing difficulty of women relating to each other across the generations. The older women had no female role models to guide them in the workforce and the younger women are not being mentored as they need to be, Zaslo wrote.
My mother warned me before marriage that the lives of Corporate Wives were fraught with terror traps. It scared me then and I've experienced the highwire act myself of trying to balance three children along the lonely little paths of trying to build a community of support and a fulfilling life beyond mothering as we've moved from city-to-city. It does take a village to raise children and this I know: the me, me, me generation is the big Scarecrow and the Lion combined. We've been missing the brains and heart of the issues in terms of a cross-generational coming to terms with the huge shift from rural-to-urban and traditional-to-modern.
A front-page USA Today article in May on the new trend of elders returning to the roost of their children nicely ties the ribbon around the subject of we in a move away from the me, me.
Eeeee gads. The issue needs our little chairs in a circle and not shouts from podiums. Praise be the new online media, such as blogs, that can spark conversations and keep it away from the binarially limiting discussions (which are great for controversy, publicity for profit and engineering continuing dissonance and dissenion). Maybe we can begin to move to a true healthy balance. Let the pendulum keep swinging towards a new regularity. When I was in 8th grade and began to see divorces leaving older women with no options, I didn't know how to define what I wanted other than not wanting *Stationwagon Momhood.* Since then, female identity beyond uniting each other in the fraternity of motherhood, has festered all over the game of Life.
You can't put a lid on a vomiting Vesuvius and you can't hide the motherhood issues under the burka of simple binary terms. It is sort of stinky right now.
5/20 Update: Leslie Steiner Morgan's WaPo Blog addressed the itsy grains of truth in Hirshman's positions yesterday and today her blog had 365 comments. It is a hot hot issue. Go read.
The thing is, no matter what anybody (Hershorn) says, women will do what they want to do. Which is only justice. I don't care how much this is in the news, it isn't news. Nobody's mind is going to be changed by it.
Posted by: Old Horsetail Snake | June 19, 2006 at 11:19 AM
Hi,
I like your site, so I have linked you over to mine. I hope you don't mind! You'll be part of the pregnancyweekly's mommies' blogs. If you would like me to take your blog off please let me know! :)
Posted by: Debby | June 19, 2006 at 04:42 PM
You make a couple of excellent points here (well, several, but there's two I love):
-- the concept of Maybe Motherhood -- why can't we have what we CHOOSE, despite what Hershorn would say?
-- "the issue needs our little chairs in a circle and not shouts from podiums." YES. We need to work it out together, moms together, not be lectured to by this author and so-called feminist or that person in the media.
Hershorn's op-ed piece in the Post really bothered me. Her language, her approach to the argument, just completely unpleasant. I expect she is bitter from having lambasted (or she would deny that she's bitter, but she sure comes across that way) but she could have handled herself in a better way and stuck to her beliefs rather than bringing in all the personal discussions. Sure, some of her dissenters did that, but that doesn't mean she should stoop to that behavior.
Ugh, now I'm riled up. ;-)
Posted by: Nancy | June 19, 2006 at 04:45 PM
Your blog would be much better if you got the author's name right. It's Hirshman, not Hershorn.
Posted by: Candace | June 20, 2006 at 11:18 AM
Excellent perusal of the subject. I've been pondering these issues lately as I have 18 mos til I finish my AA and then I'm on to "Law School" Hopefully, with six children (most of whom are under the age of nine) alternating my hips and time and energy and stamina. My husband is the artsy type and doesn't produce a truly reasonable income, therefore, femenist or no, I am justified (need I be?) in my quest. Otherwise, I would simply be a rebellious wife of a republican.
What has occurred to me is that even the name of my blog declares my masked identity- I refuse to be present as a person, and it is because I don't know (am a little afraid of?) who I am as a person, as a voice as a human- male or female. Funny how the hubs knows exactly who he is and calls himself by names that do not reflect even a hint of his paternity six times over.
I have much to mull.....
Posted by: six kids'mom | June 20, 2006 at 12:43 PM
One more thing. I wish I could email Linda herself to ask whether the women who marry "down" should expect the men to help if they are "less able" than the women. No sarcasm intended, just expereience. I've come to the conclusion that my man is simply unable to deal with some of the stuff I deal with. Yes, even when I'm taking ten hours of college credit, raising six children, and attempting to persue some semblance of my own life. The place I've come to is that I need to finish up my degree so I can get a good job and let him stay home (at which time the pooping and vomiting will be largely over.) I've also delegated my children's lives back to themselves, which means as soon as possible they do everything for themselves- bathe, feed, even cook and clean. Thus the blog, and thus the blog stalking.
Posted by: Jael | June 20, 2006 at 01:13 PM
Thanks, Candace, for catching my unprofessional typo. (Miss, miss, miss those traditional media editors!) I have corrected my post to reflect the proper spelling of Linda Hirshman's name.
I always appreciate the additional information and corrections provided...
Again, thanks.
Posted by: H.A. Page | June 20, 2006 at 07:21 PM