Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety - Hardcover

Warner, Judith

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1573223042 ISBN 13: 9781573223041

Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover, 2005

Synopsis

An exploration of the world of modern motherhood describes the author's early parenting experiences in Paris and how they contrasted with anxiety-marked parenting expectations in the United States, drawing on mainstream media sources to identify what is shaping American cultural assumptions about parenting. By the author of Hilary Clinton: The Inside Story. 35,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Judith Warner writes about women's issues and politics for The New Republic and Elle magazine. She is the author of Hillary Clinton: The Inside Story and coauthor of books about Grace Mirabella and Newt Gingrich. A former special correspondent for Newsweek in Paris, Warner lives with her husband and their two small children.

Reviews

When Judith Warner returned to Washington after several years of living in France, she felt she was a pretty good mother to her two young daughters.

A few months back in the States cured her of that. Suddenly, she was caught up in the modern American mommy rat race and wondering why on Earth what had been so easy in France was so hard back at home.

Friends and acquaintances all seemed fellow sufferers, despite outward appearances. "They had comfortable homes, two or three children, smiling, productive husbands, and a society around them saying they'd made the best possible choices for their lives," she writes, "yet many of them seemed miserable." Like hers, their unhappiness was "a choking cocktail of guilt and anxiety and resentment and regret," a mixture that is "poisoning motherhood for American women today."

Taking a page from Betty Friedan, Warner calls this situation "the Mommy Mystique." (Many of the 150 women Warner interviewed for this book call it merely "this mess.") It's a "culture of total motherhood," she writes, that demands the suppression of mothers' ambitions -- unless those ambitions were directed toward getting Jackson into the best preschool in town or helping Maya score a better grade on her social studies test. Stay-at-home mothers are made to feel inadequate if they want too much time away from their kids. Working mothers are giving up on careers, either because the cost of child care proves prohibitive or because they can't tune out the guilt. Many end up living a souped-up version of a June Cleaver lifestyle, complete with breadwinner dad and PTA-obsessed mother, all the while reassuring themselves that this was their choice. Their toned-down expectations and low-level resentment manifest themselves in sexless marriages and increased rates of depression.

How did this happen?

Warner believes the causes are many. Our culture's expectation of mothers has always seesawed between warning them to back off from their children (lest they foster wimps) and exhorting them to regard raising children as their life's work. We're currently in the clutches of the latter ideology, she says, thanks in large part to the prevalence of "attachment parenting" philosophies that lead mothers to believe they must respond instantly to a baby's every need or else doom him to suffer "abandonment issues" for the rest of his life. We've also bought too much into the therapy culture, Warner says, by intensely parenting our children as a way of curing ourselves of our own childhood wounds.

But the biggest culprit in the total-immersion mothering trap, Warner says, isn't the media or our own neuroses. It's the rise of a winner-take-all society that inordinately rewards the wealthy while throwing scraps to the rest of us. Today's middle-class parents live anxious lives, worried about job security, the affordability of health care and housing in good school districts, the prospect of paying for their kids' college educations and their own retirement. With families under such financial stress and little help from the government, it's no wonder mothers are over-focused on their children's success. After all, in a winner-take-all society, there's no place for the average kid who will become the average grown-up.

In other words, the mania for privatization that drove the Reagan '80s and continues today has finally trickled down to motherhood. Now, all problems you may have balancing work and family are yours alone. (Unless, of course, you're a single mother on welfare, Warner points out. Then the government is happy to meddle in your life.) If you choose to work, it's up to you to find quality day care. If you choose to forgo the second income and stay home, it's up to you to find a way to afford preschool or a morning out for yourself.

We've come to believe that this way of life is "necessary and natural," Warner writes. But it wasn't always thus: "Things used to be different in America," she says. "There used to be structures in place that gave families a certain base level of comfort and security. Things like dependable public education. Affordable housing. Job security. Reliable retirement benefits." In addition: tax codes that provided healthy exemptions to couples with children, low-interest educational loans -- even government-run and -subsidized day care for children whose mothers worked during World War II.

The only way out, Warner says, is for mothers to rejoin the political scene and to call for a new "politics of quality of life" that would create institutions to help us care for our children so that we don't have to do it all on our own. It wouldn't be cheap; Warner estimates that mimicking the French plan for child care and paid leave would increase government spending by $85 billion per year. (Though not so costly when you consider that Bush's recent tax cuts are costing more than $200 billion per year, she points out.)

Modern motherhood is exacting costs, too. Ann Crittenden's The Price of Motherhood showed how mothers become poor in old age. With Perfect Madness, Warner convincingly shows the psychological damages. What more do we need to learn before things change?

Reviewed by Stephanie Wilkinson
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

In this polemic about contemporary motherhood, Warner argues that the gains of feminism are no match for the frenzied perfectionism of American parenting. In the absence of any meaningful health, child-care, or educational provisions, martyrdom appears to be the only feasible model for successful maternity—with destructive consequences for both mothers and children. Comparing this situation with her experiences of child-rearing in France, Warner finds American "hyper-parenting"—pre-school violin and Ritalin on demand—"just plain crazy." The trouble is a culture that, though it places enormous private value on children, neglects them in the arena of public policy. She is concerned less with sexual politics than with the more pervasive effects of the "winner takes all" mentality, and makes an urgent case for more socially integrated parenthood.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

With all the opportunities available to modern American women, why does Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique continue to resonate with so many of them? Writing from the perspective of her first few years of motherhood spent in France and her subsequent return to the U.S., Warner ponders the cultural factors driving the madness of pursuing perfect motherhood and the toll it is taking on American women. Drawing on books, articles, observations, and interviews with hundreds of women, Warner finds too many well-educated middle-class women succumbing to the guilt, anxiety, and hyper-competitiveness surrounding ideals of motherhood that are often self-imposed. Instead of focusing energy on changing the culture and laws that do not support women's career ambitions and parenting obligations, women have emphasized self-control, personal achievement, and self-perfection, dooming themselves to endless self-criticism. Warner explores the social, economic, and cultural developments that have led to this juncture and--given the unlikelihood of turning the U.S. into as family-friendly a nation as France--how women can reevaluate their priorities and gain balance in their personal lives. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1573223042
• ISBN 13: 9781573223041
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336