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Jamestown, Colo., is a small mountain town several miles up through Lefthand Canyon out of Boulder, in the Rocky Mountains. The canyon roads are steep, winding, and narrow, and peopled by brightly clad cyclists struggling up the hill and flying down faster than the cars. The road through Jamestown is dusty in the summer with brightly colored oil barrels strategically placed in the middle of the single road through town. Slashed across their sides: “SLOW DOWN! Watch out for our feral children!”
Wild child or hothouse child? What is the best choice? Women bear the brunt of this deciding, whether they are working outside of the home, or stay-at-home caregivers, or both. Women know they will be blamed if they get it wrong.
Society has exacted a tall order on women who choose to have children. Patriarchal norms ask (White) women who choose both to work and have children, if they are really a “stay-at-home” mother who must work, or a “working” mother who prefers work over their children. The underlying attitude can be read as: “Are you someone who prioritizes paid work over caregiving, or are you someone who prioritizes caregiving over work?” You may be seen as a bad mother if you prioritize work over the welfare of your child. If you prioritize your child over your work, then you are not a reliable, dedicated worker. The working mother can’t win.
Woman’s central question is what kind of mother should I be? Mothers struggle with this question all their lives; when their child has difficulties, society’s question is what did you do wrong with your child? Mothers internalize the standard of the “good mother” and are aware of each minor transgression that depicts them as the “bad mother.” It is hard to escape the impossible perfectionistic standard of the good mother. But perhaps it has come time to push back on the moral imbalance.
Internalized sexism
As women move out of the home into the workplace, the societal pressures to maintain the status quo bear down on women, trying to keep them in their place.
Social pressures employ subtle “technologies of the self,” so that women – as any oppressed group – learn to internalize these technologies, and monitor themselves.1 This is now widely accepted as internalized sexism, whereby women feel that they are not good enough, do not have the right qualifications, and are “less” than the dominant group (men). This phenomenon is also recognized when racial and ethnic biases are assimilated unconsciously, as internalized racism. Should we also have internalized “momism”?
Women are caught between trying to claim their individualism as well as feeling the responsibility to be the self-denying mother. Everyone has an opinion about the place of women. Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly considered “women’s lib” to be un-American, citing women in the military and the establishment of federal day care centers as actions of a communist state. A similar ideology helped form the antifeminist organization Concerned Women for America, which self-reports that it is the largest American public policy women’s organization. Formed in opposition to the National Organization for Women, CWA is focused on maintaining the traditional family, as understood by (White) evangelical Christians.
An example similar to CWA is the Council of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. It was established to help evangelical Christian churches defend themselves against an accommodation of secular feminism and also against evangelical feminism (which pushes for more equality in the church). It promotes complementarianism – the idea that masculinity and femininity are ordained by God and that men and women are created to complement each other.
At the other extreme, the most radical of feminists believe in the need to create a women-only society where women would be free from the patriarchy. Less angry but decidedly weirder are the feminists called “FEMEN” who once staged a protest at the Vatican where topless women feigned intercourse with crucifixes, chanting slogans against the pope and religion.
Most women tread a path between extremes, a path which is difficult and lonely. Without a firm ideology, this path is strewn with doubts and pitfalls. Some career-oriented women who have delayed motherhood, knowing that they will soon be biologically past their peak and possibly also without a partner, wonder if they should become single mothers using sperm donation. For many women, the workplace does not offer much help with maternity leave or childcare. Even when maternity leave is available, there is a still a lack of understanding about what is needed.
“Think of it as caregiver bias. If you just extend maternity leave, what is implied is that you’re still expecting me to be the primary source of care for my child, when in fact my partner wants to share the load and will need support to do so as well,” said Pamela Culpepper, an expert in corporate diversity and inclusion.2
Intensive mothering
When the glamor of the workplace wears off and/or when the misogyny and the harassment become too much, women who have the financial stability may decide to return to the role of the stay-at-home mother. Perhaps, in the home, she can feel fulfilled. Yet, young American urban and suburban mothers now parent under a new name – “intensive mothering.”
Conducting in-depth interviews of 38 women of diverse backgrounds in the United States, Sharon Hays found women describing their 2- to 4-year-old children as innocent and priceless, and believing that they – the mothers – should be primarily responsible for rearing their children, using “child-rearing methods that are child centered, expert guided, emotionally absorbing, labor intensive, and financially expensive.”3 Ms. Hays clarified four beliefs that were common to all the women in the study: mothers are more suitable caregivers than fathers; mothering should be child centered; parenting consists of a set of skills that need to be learned; and parenting is labor-intensive but an emotionally fulfilling activity.
Hays wondered if this type of mothering developed as the last defense against “the impoverishment of social ties, communal obligations and unremunerated commitments.”3 She suggested that women succumbing to social pressures to return to the home is yet another example of how society is set up to benefit men, capitalism, political leaders, and those who try to maintain a “traditional” form of family life.3 Ms. Hays concluded that the practice of intensive mothering is a class-based practice of privileged white women, entangled with capitalism in that the buying of “essential” baby products is equated with good mothering. She found this ideology to be oppressive of all women, regardless of their social class, ethnic background, household composition, and financial situation. Ms. Hays noted that many women experience guilt for not matching up to these ideals.
In “Dead End Feminism,” Elisabeth Badinter asks if the upheaval in the role of women has caused so much uncertainty that it is easier for women to regress to a time when they were in the home and knew themselves as mothers. They ask if this has been reinforced by the movement to embrace all things natural, eschewing the falseness of chemicals and other things that threaten Mother Earth.4
There is no escaping the power of the mother: she will continue to symbolize all that is good and bad as the embodiment of the Mother Archetype. All of this is the background against which you will see the new mother in the family. She will not articulate her dilemma, that is your role as the family psychiatrist.
Dr. Heru is professor of psychiatry at the University of Colorado at Denver, Aurora. She is editor of “Working With Families in Medical Settings: A Multidisciplinary Guide for Psychiatrists and Other Health Professionals” (New York: Routledge, 2013). She has no conflicts of interest to disclose. Contact Dr. Heru at alison.heru@ucdenver.edu.
References
1. Martin LH et al (eds.). Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. University of Massachusetts Press: Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2022.
2. How Pamela Culpepper Is Changing The Narrative Of Women In The Workplace. Huffpost. 2020 Mar 6. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/pamela-culpepper-diversity-inclusion-empowerment_n_5e56b6ffc5b62e9dc7dbc307.
3. Hays S. Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. Yale University Press: New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996.
4. Badinter E. (translated by Borossa J). Dead End Feminism. Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 2006.
Jamestown, Colo., is a small mountain town several miles up through Lefthand Canyon out of Boulder, in the Rocky Mountains. The canyon roads are steep, winding, and narrow, and peopled by brightly clad cyclists struggling up the hill and flying down faster than the cars. The road through Jamestown is dusty in the summer with brightly colored oil barrels strategically placed in the middle of the single road through town. Slashed across their sides: “SLOW DOWN! Watch out for our feral children!”
Wild child or hothouse child? What is the best choice? Women bear the brunt of this deciding, whether they are working outside of the home, or stay-at-home caregivers, or both. Women know they will be blamed if they get it wrong.
Society has exacted a tall order on women who choose to have children. Patriarchal norms ask (White) women who choose both to work and have children, if they are really a “stay-at-home” mother who must work, or a “working” mother who prefers work over their children. The underlying attitude can be read as: “Are you someone who prioritizes paid work over caregiving, or are you someone who prioritizes caregiving over work?” You may be seen as a bad mother if you prioritize work over the welfare of your child. If you prioritize your child over your work, then you are not a reliable, dedicated worker. The working mother can’t win.
Woman’s central question is what kind of mother should I be? Mothers struggle with this question all their lives; when their child has difficulties, society’s question is what did you do wrong with your child? Mothers internalize the standard of the “good mother” and are aware of each minor transgression that depicts them as the “bad mother.” It is hard to escape the impossible perfectionistic standard of the good mother. But perhaps it has come time to push back on the moral imbalance.
Internalized sexism
As women move out of the home into the workplace, the societal pressures to maintain the status quo bear down on women, trying to keep them in their place.
Social pressures employ subtle “technologies of the self,” so that women – as any oppressed group – learn to internalize these technologies, and monitor themselves.1 This is now widely accepted as internalized sexism, whereby women feel that they are not good enough, do not have the right qualifications, and are “less” than the dominant group (men). This phenomenon is also recognized when racial and ethnic biases are assimilated unconsciously, as internalized racism. Should we also have internalized “momism”?
Women are caught between trying to claim their individualism as well as feeling the responsibility to be the self-denying mother. Everyone has an opinion about the place of women. Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly considered “women’s lib” to be un-American, citing women in the military and the establishment of federal day care centers as actions of a communist state. A similar ideology helped form the antifeminist organization Concerned Women for America, which self-reports that it is the largest American public policy women’s organization. Formed in opposition to the National Organization for Women, CWA is focused on maintaining the traditional family, as understood by (White) evangelical Christians.
An example similar to CWA is the Council of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. It was established to help evangelical Christian churches defend themselves against an accommodation of secular feminism and also against evangelical feminism (which pushes for more equality in the church). It promotes complementarianism – the idea that masculinity and femininity are ordained by God and that men and women are created to complement each other.
At the other extreme, the most radical of feminists believe in the need to create a women-only society where women would be free from the patriarchy. Less angry but decidedly weirder are the feminists called “FEMEN” who once staged a protest at the Vatican where topless women feigned intercourse with crucifixes, chanting slogans against the pope and religion.
Most women tread a path between extremes, a path which is difficult and lonely. Without a firm ideology, this path is strewn with doubts and pitfalls. Some career-oriented women who have delayed motherhood, knowing that they will soon be biologically past their peak and possibly also without a partner, wonder if they should become single mothers using sperm donation. For many women, the workplace does not offer much help with maternity leave or childcare. Even when maternity leave is available, there is a still a lack of understanding about what is needed.
“Think of it as caregiver bias. If you just extend maternity leave, what is implied is that you’re still expecting me to be the primary source of care for my child, when in fact my partner wants to share the load and will need support to do so as well,” said Pamela Culpepper, an expert in corporate diversity and inclusion.2
Intensive mothering
When the glamor of the workplace wears off and/or when the misogyny and the harassment become too much, women who have the financial stability may decide to return to the role of the stay-at-home mother. Perhaps, in the home, she can feel fulfilled. Yet, young American urban and suburban mothers now parent under a new name – “intensive mothering.”
Conducting in-depth interviews of 38 women of diverse backgrounds in the United States, Sharon Hays found women describing their 2- to 4-year-old children as innocent and priceless, and believing that they – the mothers – should be primarily responsible for rearing their children, using “child-rearing methods that are child centered, expert guided, emotionally absorbing, labor intensive, and financially expensive.”3 Ms. Hays clarified four beliefs that were common to all the women in the study: mothers are more suitable caregivers than fathers; mothering should be child centered; parenting consists of a set of skills that need to be learned; and parenting is labor-intensive but an emotionally fulfilling activity.
Hays wondered if this type of mothering developed as the last defense against “the impoverishment of social ties, communal obligations and unremunerated commitments.”3 She suggested that women succumbing to social pressures to return to the home is yet another example of how society is set up to benefit men, capitalism, political leaders, and those who try to maintain a “traditional” form of family life.3 Ms. Hays concluded that the practice of intensive mothering is a class-based practice of privileged white women, entangled with capitalism in that the buying of “essential” baby products is equated with good mothering. She found this ideology to be oppressive of all women, regardless of their social class, ethnic background, household composition, and financial situation. Ms. Hays noted that many women experience guilt for not matching up to these ideals.
In “Dead End Feminism,” Elisabeth Badinter asks if the upheaval in the role of women has caused so much uncertainty that it is easier for women to regress to a time when they were in the home and knew themselves as mothers. They ask if this has been reinforced by the movement to embrace all things natural, eschewing the falseness of chemicals and other things that threaten Mother Earth.4
There is no escaping the power of the mother: she will continue to symbolize all that is good and bad as the embodiment of the Mother Archetype. All of this is the background against which you will see the new mother in the family. She will not articulate her dilemma, that is your role as the family psychiatrist.
Dr. Heru is professor of psychiatry at the University of Colorado at Denver, Aurora. She is editor of “Working With Families in Medical Settings: A Multidisciplinary Guide for Psychiatrists and Other Health Professionals” (New York: Routledge, 2013). She has no conflicts of interest to disclose. Contact Dr. Heru at alison.heru@ucdenver.edu.
References
1. Martin LH et al (eds.). Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. University of Massachusetts Press: Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2022.
2. How Pamela Culpepper Is Changing The Narrative Of Women In The Workplace. Huffpost. 2020 Mar 6. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/pamela-culpepper-diversity-inclusion-empowerment_n_5e56b6ffc5b62e9dc7dbc307.
3. Hays S. Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. Yale University Press: New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996.
4. Badinter E. (translated by Borossa J). Dead End Feminism. Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 2006.
Jamestown, Colo., is a small mountain town several miles up through Lefthand Canyon out of Boulder, in the Rocky Mountains. The canyon roads are steep, winding, and narrow, and peopled by brightly clad cyclists struggling up the hill and flying down faster than the cars. The road through Jamestown is dusty in the summer with brightly colored oil barrels strategically placed in the middle of the single road through town. Slashed across their sides: “SLOW DOWN! Watch out for our feral children!”
Wild child or hothouse child? What is the best choice? Women bear the brunt of this deciding, whether they are working outside of the home, or stay-at-home caregivers, or both. Women know they will be blamed if they get it wrong.
Society has exacted a tall order on women who choose to have children. Patriarchal norms ask (White) women who choose both to work and have children, if they are really a “stay-at-home” mother who must work, or a “working” mother who prefers work over their children. The underlying attitude can be read as: “Are you someone who prioritizes paid work over caregiving, or are you someone who prioritizes caregiving over work?” You may be seen as a bad mother if you prioritize work over the welfare of your child. If you prioritize your child over your work, then you are not a reliable, dedicated worker. The working mother can’t win.
Woman’s central question is what kind of mother should I be? Mothers struggle with this question all their lives; when their child has difficulties, society’s question is what did you do wrong with your child? Mothers internalize the standard of the “good mother” and are aware of each minor transgression that depicts them as the “bad mother.” It is hard to escape the impossible perfectionistic standard of the good mother. But perhaps it has come time to push back on the moral imbalance.
Internalized sexism
As women move out of the home into the workplace, the societal pressures to maintain the status quo bear down on women, trying to keep them in their place.
Social pressures employ subtle “technologies of the self,” so that women – as any oppressed group – learn to internalize these technologies, and monitor themselves.1 This is now widely accepted as internalized sexism, whereby women feel that they are not good enough, do not have the right qualifications, and are “less” than the dominant group (men). This phenomenon is also recognized when racial and ethnic biases are assimilated unconsciously, as internalized racism. Should we also have internalized “momism”?
Women are caught between trying to claim their individualism as well as feeling the responsibility to be the self-denying mother. Everyone has an opinion about the place of women. Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly considered “women’s lib” to be un-American, citing women in the military and the establishment of federal day care centers as actions of a communist state. A similar ideology helped form the antifeminist organization Concerned Women for America, which self-reports that it is the largest American public policy women’s organization. Formed in opposition to the National Organization for Women, CWA is focused on maintaining the traditional family, as understood by (White) evangelical Christians.
An example similar to CWA is the Council of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. It was established to help evangelical Christian churches defend themselves against an accommodation of secular feminism and also against evangelical feminism (which pushes for more equality in the church). It promotes complementarianism – the idea that masculinity and femininity are ordained by God and that men and women are created to complement each other.
At the other extreme, the most radical of feminists believe in the need to create a women-only society where women would be free from the patriarchy. Less angry but decidedly weirder are the feminists called “FEMEN” who once staged a protest at the Vatican where topless women feigned intercourse with crucifixes, chanting slogans against the pope and religion.
Most women tread a path between extremes, a path which is difficult and lonely. Without a firm ideology, this path is strewn with doubts and pitfalls. Some career-oriented women who have delayed motherhood, knowing that they will soon be biologically past their peak and possibly also without a partner, wonder if they should become single mothers using sperm donation. For many women, the workplace does not offer much help with maternity leave or childcare. Even when maternity leave is available, there is a still a lack of understanding about what is needed.
“Think of it as caregiver bias. If you just extend maternity leave, what is implied is that you’re still expecting me to be the primary source of care for my child, when in fact my partner wants to share the load and will need support to do so as well,” said Pamela Culpepper, an expert in corporate diversity and inclusion.2
Intensive mothering
When the glamor of the workplace wears off and/or when the misogyny and the harassment become too much, women who have the financial stability may decide to return to the role of the stay-at-home mother. Perhaps, in the home, she can feel fulfilled. Yet, young American urban and suburban mothers now parent under a new name – “intensive mothering.”
Conducting in-depth interviews of 38 women of diverse backgrounds in the United States, Sharon Hays found women describing their 2- to 4-year-old children as innocent and priceless, and believing that they – the mothers – should be primarily responsible for rearing their children, using “child-rearing methods that are child centered, expert guided, emotionally absorbing, labor intensive, and financially expensive.”3 Ms. Hays clarified four beliefs that were common to all the women in the study: mothers are more suitable caregivers than fathers; mothering should be child centered; parenting consists of a set of skills that need to be learned; and parenting is labor-intensive but an emotionally fulfilling activity.
Hays wondered if this type of mothering developed as the last defense against “the impoverishment of social ties, communal obligations and unremunerated commitments.”3 She suggested that women succumbing to social pressures to return to the home is yet another example of how society is set up to benefit men, capitalism, political leaders, and those who try to maintain a “traditional” form of family life.3 Ms. Hays concluded that the practice of intensive mothering is a class-based practice of privileged white women, entangled with capitalism in that the buying of “essential” baby products is equated with good mothering. She found this ideology to be oppressive of all women, regardless of their social class, ethnic background, household composition, and financial situation. Ms. Hays noted that many women experience guilt for not matching up to these ideals.
In “Dead End Feminism,” Elisabeth Badinter asks if the upheaval in the role of women has caused so much uncertainty that it is easier for women to regress to a time when they were in the home and knew themselves as mothers. They ask if this has been reinforced by the movement to embrace all things natural, eschewing the falseness of chemicals and other things that threaten Mother Earth.4
There is no escaping the power of the mother: she will continue to symbolize all that is good and bad as the embodiment of the Mother Archetype. All of this is the background against which you will see the new mother in the family. She will not articulate her dilemma, that is your role as the family psychiatrist.
Dr. Heru is professor of psychiatry at the University of Colorado at Denver, Aurora. She is editor of “Working With Families in Medical Settings: A Multidisciplinary Guide for Psychiatrists and Other Health Professionals” (New York: Routledge, 2013). She has no conflicts of interest to disclose. Contact Dr. Heru at alison.heru@ucdenver.edu.
References
1. Martin LH et al (eds.). Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. University of Massachusetts Press: Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2022.
2. How Pamela Culpepper Is Changing The Narrative Of Women In The Workplace. Huffpost. 2020 Mar 6. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/pamela-culpepper-diversity-inclusion-empowerment_n_5e56b6ffc5b62e9dc7dbc307.
3. Hays S. Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. Yale University Press: New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996.
4. Badinter E. (translated by Borossa J). Dead End Feminism. Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 2006.