I read speed read
The Mommy Myth by Susan J. Douglas and Meredith W. Michaels over the weekend. I have to say, it really gave me a better understanding of where I think many posters online are coming from when they get so defensive about daycare, their wanting to work, their feeling pressured and guilted and generally disgruntled about life for moms in America. Reading the book certainly underscores my own sense of not being like other people, though, because I don't really feel the way they do. I wonder, too, how many real-life women actually living in the world feel this way because I haven't met any in person. Maybe these are just not things that the people I know talk about? Maybe they're afraid to talk daycare and social change with me because they see that I stay at home right now and think I think a certain way and I'd judge them? I mean, a good number of women must feel this way, based on comments I read online. It's really hard to know, but, let's give it to the authors and assume they do.
Douglas and Michaels in the introduction say their main point is: "Media imagery that seems to natural, that seems to embody some common sense, while some blaming mothers, or all mothers, for children and a nation gone wrong needs to have its veneer of supposed truth ripped away." I can see this, I myself have applied the "so many kids have been sent to day care since the 80s, that's why X is like X..." and I know, of course, there's more to it. I certainly don't want to align myself with those figures that
The Mommy Myth authors are up against, either—the Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson, Nixon, Schlafly, moral majority tribe (now would be expanding to Palin,
et al, and wait, they even complain about Bill Clinton not doing anything about their child care, Dukakis, neither!) At the same time, I don't buy what the authors are ultimately selling—which appears to be big government funded daycare for everyone.
They say about how lots of mothers aren't buying into the retro momism (as they call it) although "it works to make them feel very guilty and stressed." The authors go on to say "they want and need their own paychecks, they want and need adult interaction during the day, they want and need their own independence, and they believe—and rightly so—that women who work outside the home can be and are very good mothers to their kids. Other mothers don't want or need these things for the time being, or ever, and really would rather stay home. The question is why one reactionary, normative ideology, so out of sync with millions of women's lives seems to be getting the upper hand."
And I ask,
what upper hand? Over 50% of children under 5 are now in day care, so, where's the upper hand of the other side? Women are doing it. They're doing what they want (or, those who may not want to are forced to do what they don't want because of the unbalanced economy). The thing is, they want
someone else to pay for it. They sort of seem like they want to help poor, working women get quality care, but to me, they come of more sounding like they want
their own daycare to be cheaper and better (really? any grown up knows the vast majority of the time you can't have both) and they think it's the government's job to make it so. They write "...the problem with the new momism is that is insists that there is one and only one way the children of America will get what they need: if mom provides it. If dad 'pitches in,' well, that's just an extra bonus. The government? Forget it." It is on this matter that I am so torn. (And since when is financially supporting one's family, as many dads do, considered merely "pitching in"?)
I want to be a good progressive, I want to help people who need help and I am not one of those greedy "don't raise my taxes for social programs" kind of people. But, I really,
really don't think that little babies should be cared for in large, institutional settings and by people other than their mamas (or, a distant but acceptable second, a dad or grandma or truly loving relative). I know some circumstances make it necessary for this to happen, but ideally, that baby needs to be cradled and near that mama's breast for the vast majority of its day and night when it is under a year old—less and less as it grows, naturally. (But, I have to observe, here we are looking at women who actually gave page space, and credence—if not complete buy in —to the concept of artificial wombs.) I just don't think setting up some kind of government care that makes it normal for babies to be warehoused like this is in the best interest of humanity. Just so women can work and feel independent? There are others ways. Fix the economy. Educate women about the reality of life with a baby, birth control and the work-life balance they are going to need to make sure they can create for themselves. Don't just throw money at setting up day care centers. Pay for a year of maternity leave. Subsidize another 6 months (for the first two children only, please!). Make it the cultural norm that women workers take time off and don't give them shit for it.
I guess this would necessarily create the situation commonly now referred to as "mommy tracking." The authors, and many women, are critical of what I think is a decent idea, and what businesswoman Felice Schwartz proposed in the late 80s. "Companies should allow 'career-and-family' women to drop out of the fast track while their children are young so they could spend more time with their children. they could return to the fast track later." What, I ask, is wrong with that? Seems like a perfect solution? (Schwartz got skewered and changed her position.)
I know the "cities on the hill," those places known as Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and other European countries in varying flavors, have childcare programs that are government funded, but, they also have generally different cultures there than here. It's unfortunate because I appreciate and align more with these aspects European cultures, described in a
Salon interview with Douglas, where she observes, "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." That said, what's wrong with "mommy tracking" everybody, then—men and women—at different points in their lives? Part of my problem with the hard driving feminists (and others) who would have children in daycare from six weeks on is that they raise the bar and crack the whip and drive the rat race to an even more unsustainable pace. How about everybody (men and women) just take it down a notch and be
human? I think it's a good idea. But, apparently it is not enough for the women who "want it all."
So, what is "it all"? The authors repeatedly go back to the call for government funded (but locally ran, that part is certainly more palatable) day care centers. Repeatedly. All the content about media messaging, pressure on moms to be perfect, parenting styles, psychological and medical advice messing with people, I can agree with most of what they say, other than that I have not felt affected by it because I guess I am a bit of a social outlier (?) I even like alot of the early feminist lore and the action behind the lore about women fighting for equal pay, women progressing beyond days where they couldn't hold their own credit cards, have their names on a mortgage deed, things like that that we take for granted today. Those are all very important and reading the book renewed my respect for alot of what feminists did back then. But, what of all the
weirdness? Again, the artificial womb comes to mind. The underlying current of wanting and desperately needing to escape from one's own children because they're so vexing and tyrannical. (OK, we all need a break from kid stuff sometimes, but not enough to take it into social institution territory—have a cup of tea or a glass of wine and throw them outside for an hour or put them in front of a DVD if you have to. There, you're renewed!)
So, with the repeated call for large-scale, institutional day care, they reference World War II era day care centers created by the government in cooperation with the defense industry to encourage women to go to work as they were much needed during war time. This bit of history is fascinating to me and I definitely want to know more. There are several, kind of random, patchwork links to be found in a cursory web search that shed a little light on the centers:
a site that is critical in general of daycare,
a personal history-buff/scholar site, the
Kaiser Permanente site, the
Oregon Historical Society site.
The Mommy Myth authors talk about how great the centers were, how they were high quality, not bad for the children, but good (?). Apparently these, still, only took children who were at least 18 months old. The authors wrote of how there were laundries, infirmaries if the children were sick, staffed with skilled nurses, oh, and there were hot ready-made dinners to take home at the end of the day. All this while mom spent the day
working in a factory (to support a war). Yay! Where do I sign up?
Seriously, though, it's a boon, perhaps, for people who really need the money, for those whose husbands were at war, and I don't mean to slam honest factory work. But, the authors are proclaiming these shipyard centers to be the cat's meow and it just doesn't resonate with me. If a kid is sick, other than the care of a doctor if it's serious, what they need is some down time, in the comfort of their own home, with the person who cares more about them than anyone else in the world. The workplace needs to understand this, understand the hands on value of mom to her children, not say, hey, we've got you covered, you come on to work the line, nurse Jones over here will take great care of your sick child. I mean, I appreciate the gesture, but...And the idea of an institutionally-prepared dinner at the end of the day. Again, thanks, but no thanks. I'd rather make my own homecooked meal. We all know what kind of meals governments and institutions pull together. They're just not very good.
What's more, what makes them think that people want to have their lives reduced to dropping their kids off in the morning, working all day, picking up a box of dinner, going home, sleeping and doing it all over again. It all seems to be to be very much in service of work and treating humans as cogs in the wheels of production. It's OK if a company wants to do that for employees because maybe it's good for their business and any thinking person should have the expectation that businesses view their employees somewhat as human capital. For the government to view their people as human capital, though, is something else. I'm not comfortable with the whole worker-commerce model being the be all and end all of everything. That women in their capacity as mothers (and of course their children) create a chink in this worker-commerce model is cool, for one thing, and important to society, lest we all just become worker drones at various rungs on the ladder to nowhere.
Another example of daycare provided to women workers is that of the WearGuard company. Their daycare sounds all well and good and fine, but, that's a private company providing a benefit to its employees. That doesn't really bolster the case for government-funded daycare. (I would add that the shipyard daycares, too, were funded largely by the companies and only subsidized by the government, and the whole war connection as impetus there is obvious.)
My final analysis of
The Mommy Myth is that while it was, in many ways, a thought-provoking and enjoyable read (I like the authors' wry, sort of sarcastic humor, even when I don't agree with how they're using it), the dogged focus on government-funded daycare and general lack of respect (and refusal to face what is just the plain reality of the biology) of motherhood is not something I'm on board with.
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