The Mommy Wars

Reason, July, 2000 by Cathy Young

Why feminists and conservatives just don't get modern motherhood.

If there is a "Mommy War" going on between mothers who go to work and mothers who stay home, Debra Cermele Ross isn't sure on which side she belongs. Ross, 30, is founder and president of Axton Enterprises, a company that provides technology consulting services to mail-order businesses. She became a first-time mother last September. She is her family's primary breadwinner, yet she doesn't think of herself as "working outside the home." Ross' office is attached to her house in Rochester, New York. For part of the day, a nanny comes in to care for her daughter Madison and for Alex, the 18-month-old son of her business partner Carole Ann Price; but except for occasional day trips on business, Ross is never far away.

"I'm amazed that it is still usually presented as this dichotomy--working-outside-the-home mothers vs. stay-at-home mothers," says Ross. Yet in the public debate, the dichotomy lives on, and so does polarization along familiar political lines.

About a year ago, when the journal Developmental Psychology published a study concluding that children do not suffer when their mothers work, virtually everyone followed the usual "Mommy Wars" script. Liberal newspapers like The Washington Post and The Boston Globe put the story on their front pages, under such headlines as "Mothers' Employment Works for Children" and "Study Supports Working Moms." Then, conservatives rushed in to attack the good news. Some argued that the study's validity was compromised by a skewed sample with a disproportionate number of young, low-income single mothers. But the conservative reaction went beyond a methodological critique.

Psychologist Diane Fisher, a board member of the right-of-center Independent Women's Forum, suggested that the positive headlines were dangerous and could have a "life-changing impact" on young children, presumably by encouraging their mothers to stampede to the office. Syndicated columnist Tony Snow accused the press of "dissing at-home moms" while giving selfish yuppie parents carte blanche to "stash their kids in day-care centers ...the way one might board a poodle."

In mainstream liberal opinion, support for full-time mothering is usually equated with naive nostalgia, while working mothers are often portrayed as victims of sexism, culturally imposed guilt, and benighted public policies. Most champions of working women--from the National Organization for Women to Hillary Rodham Clinton to columnist Ellen Goodman--share the assumption that for women to balance careers and motherhood, "society" (read: "government") will have to help out. In a way, their approach hasn't evolved much since Simone de Beauvoir curtly stated in The Second Sex (1948) that in a "properly organized society...children would be largely taken in charge by the community," freeing women from domestic bondage.

The views expressed at a recent New York conference on work and family life, held by the Cornell University Institute on Women and Work, were typical of this liberal feminist consensus. Women's movement matriarch Betty Friedan spoke in favor of "compulsory preschool" for 2-year-olds and deplored the lack of an organized political push for national daycare. (She even suggested that feminists should have demanded an executive order creating such a program from Clinton, in exchange for their loyalty during the presidential sex scandals.) Virtually everyone on the panel shared Friedan's impatience with most Americans' stubborn insistence on treating work-family issues as "personal issues," along with her conviction that women's struggle for equality would not be complete until these misguided attitudes changed.

If feminists go back and forth between depicting working mothers as heroines and as victims, conservatives go back and forth between depicting them as victims forced into the labor force by feminist bullying and high taxes, and as villains who put their personal fulfillment above their children's well-being. In a 1995 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Arizona assistant attorney general Andrew Peyton Thomas castigated career-minded parents who put their children in daycare. Thomas called them "more respectable, less violent versions of Susan Smith," the North Carolina woman who drowned her two sons in a lake because they were interfering with her post-divorce love life.

Perhaps out of deference to contemporary reality, many conservatives hesitate to declare categorically that mothers should not work. Instead, they say that a career should be a matter of free choice, that full-time mothering should be respected and supported through tax cuts, or maybe taxpayer subsidies. But the right's defense of the choice to stay home often morphs into an indictment of mothers who don't make that choice.

Conservative pundit Danielle Crittenden, author of the 1999 book What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us, sometimes protests that she does not condemn working mothers but sympathizes with their plight. At other times, however, she takes nasty swipes at women she judges to be in default of their maternal duties, such as Massachusetts Lt. Gov. Jane Swift, who ran for office while expecting her first baby. In 1998, Crittenden subjected the pro--working mother book, A Mother's Place, by journalist Susan Chira, to a startingly ad feminam thrashing in National Review. Her critique boiled down to the charge that Chira was a bad mother who devoted too much time to work: "As I closed this book, I thought of all the months Miss Chira took to write it--months of shutting her door and steeling herself against her children's yearning to be with her." This took some chutzpah, considering that Crittenden, like Chira a mother of two young children, had herself just completed a book.