A dear friend told me (in the comments section here) that one reason she and her husband had delayed having children was that other couples they knew who were dedicated to equality in their marriages seemed to throw their convictions out the window as soon as they had a baby. Well, yeah. It's a problem. It was less of a problem when I worked full time and Mike was home taking care of Frances, but that situation was difficult in other ways. I struggled with envy and sadness, and felt compelled to do everything when I came home. It wore me out. But then I got my turn staying at home, and guess what? That wore me out too.
It is a conundrum. When I was offered a great 32 hour/week job shortly before Gabriel's 2nd birthday, I said no. Even though I had applied for it, even though I was going nuts missing work, something told me I would be nuttier still if I worked four full days a week. I imagined that life, rushing and dropping off and scrambling to get dinner ready. I thought of all the spontaneous beautiful things that require stretches of quiet, open time together that would never happen and knew with sadness that I could not take that job.
When I watched thirtysomething, I wondered if a single thing had changed for mothers since the eighties. Hope was my mother's age when the show first aired; funny, because she's my age now. In the pilot episode, Hope's new role as mother is alienating her from her friends, colleagues, and spouse. Everyone gets less of her now, and they're sort of annoyed about it. She also misses work and friends and easy intimacy with her husband. Plus being home puts her right in the resentful homemaker shoes I am loathe to slip on - and yet have, do, and will. She is sacrificing a lot, and she knows it. Yet she can't bring herself to go back to work.
Without the distancing power of shoulder pads and bad perms, thirtysomething would be too excruciating close. It left me feeling vaguely glum: this mother problem just might be unsolvable. The onward and upward course of feminism suggests that we are supposed to be marching with our ERA signs towards an ever more equal future, but I don't know that much has really changed since 1987. Better birth control pills, maybe? Less sexual harrassment in the work place, perhaps. But have we made any progress towards creating conditions that support more equitable, sustainable roles for men and women in families?
You could say the problem is just that some ambitious, educated women want to be with their kids - unlike men - and so they have to deal with the consequences of that. Except in Madmen, privileged Betty Draper has no desire to take care of her kids. Neither do any of her friends seem interested in spending time with their children. It's not a part of their culture. Educated women of means weren't expected to want to get down on the rug or make crafts at the kitchen table. (This also suggests that a culture that reinforces a male lack of interest in caring for children has perhaps more to do with the dearth of stay-at-home dads than some essential masculine temperament).
Did you ever read Crossing to Safety
? As in so many other stories from that era, the women don't work, but they keep busy fulfilling social and community obligations, leaving their young children behind while they do. They remain essentially aligned with their husbands, and the children belong to another world ruled by ruddy-cheeked working class girls and maiden aunts. The vision of marriage, family, and community life in that book was powerfully attractive. Alas, we have no family compound in Vermont, nor the resources to hire a "girl." But the bizarre truth is I am too attached to spending time with Frances and Gabriel to make it work anyway.So Betty Draper was not interested in parenting. Neither were her parents, who hired help to do the work of caring for their children. Betty and Don's daughter Sally (whom you can easily imagine building bombs in some basement for the Weather Underground in a few years) is the first one who is going to at least consider whether or not she wants to take care of her own kids.
Isn't it interesting to think the second-wavers were the first to feel these conflicting desires? (I'm just talking about an elite, educated bit of the population, I know - forgive me for the purposes of this thought experiment). We think of our feminist mothers as making the desire for meaningful work outside the home possible. Did they make the desire for intimacy and time with our children possible too? Did the feminism of the sixties and seventies result in an awareness of ourselves as subjects - agents in the world - with all kinds of desires? And was the kind of involved parenting that baby boomers trailblazed (and for this author, modeled) a reaction to second wave feminism, or a natural continuation of it?
Enough of me. Readers, weigh in!
3 comments:
There was a fabulous article in the Oct Harper's by Susan Faludi called "Feminism's Ritual Matricide." She said that until the 1920s, feminism was deeply maternal-- it was about mothers making social change to protect and enrich their daughters. (temperance, the vote) They believed that once women got the vote, they'd change the world. Instead, they went out dancing and scoffed at their dour Temperance mothers. In the 20s, being liberated became about daughters rebelling against the Victorian moral constraints of their mothers, and ever after, each generation of feminists has hamstrung itself by spending energy trashing the previous generation of mothers. The lack of progress you refer to might be related to this dynamic. ?
Betty Draper aside, I don't think any generation of mothers loved being with their children more or less than any other. But the notion of a "good mother" has certainly changed a lot over time. How much of our choices is motivated by authentic desire, and how much by the need to be perceived as a good mother by whatever party, external or internal?
Interesting, because my thoughts were leading me to see 2nd wave and 3rd wave mothers as being more continuous with each other than previous generations. I don't think third wavers trash their boomer mamas in quite the same way as the Faludi scenario describes. Like yesterday, I heard Terry Gross interviewing Lena Dunham. Terry asked about a scene in which she crawls into bed with her mother for comfort, and in asking Terry commented that doing that was something that was simply unimaginable to her. I had just crawled into bed with Frances that morning (per her request), and I wouldn't hesitate to get into my mom's bed either. But maybe that kind of relationship wasn't part of the "good mother" culture of previous generations...?
I agree, I don't think mothers in one time love being with their children any more or less than mothers in any other. But what I was trying to get at was feeling the desire to do the work of caring for their own kids - and having that be an actual choice.
Post a Comment