That Mommy Wars Thing

It just won't go away, will it?

My copy of Leslie Morgan Steiner's Mommy Wars: Stay-at-Home and Career Moms Face Off on Their Choices, Their Lives, Their Families arrived last week and although I have not yet had a chance to dip underneath its spilled milk cover, I feel as though I have already formulated an opinion.

There has been a lot of angry buzz in the blogosphere about the book. Rebel Dad, a blogger I respect a lot, has declared a bit of a war of his own on Steiner's seemingly devisive book. And while I do agree that Miriam Peskowitz's excellent The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars should be receiving more publicity (and ought to be sold in tandem with Steiner's book on Amazon) as it is a very thoughtful and balanced look at the issue, I suspect that Steiner might be getting a bit of a raw deal.

I want to reserve commentary until I've read the book. But from the article and the one piece I have read (excerpted on Literary Mama here), I am not sure that this book is about moms "facing off" at all. I do think that is more about the inner struggle moms have when trying to figure out how to balance childrearing and an identity outside of motherhood. As for the title, yup, it's a bad one, but again, I'm not convinced that Steiner has not been saddled with the provocative title by her publisher.

So I was keen to hear about the Berkeley MotherTalk featuring Leslie Steiner that a number of Literary Mama contributors including Caroline Grant (who blogs about the evening here), Sophia Raday, Sybil Lockhart, and Heidi Raykiel attended. I asked Literary Mama Review Editor and MotherTalk host Rebecca Kaminsky how the session went:

RK: It was a lovely intimate group of about fifteen women, some writers including mommy blogger Mary Tsao (you can read her review of the evening here) and local poet and musician Sarah Kilts (of the band "Diablo's Dust), some Literary Mama readers, and even a (personally and professionally) interested reporter from the sf chronicle. Several of the guests were also members of the local writer's group "Motherlode".

I read the book before the evening and was very impressed -- the stories are deep and honest, and not about "facing off" in the way you might think (or the way the title might lead one to think). Each woman wrote a memoir-type piece about how they came to motherhood and how they define themselves as mothers. Most wrote about their own mothers and how their mothers had affected their choices. These are the kind of stories I love -- these women really sat down and thought deeply about their lives. I didn't agree with everyone, but I think that was the point. We all come to different choices and the rub is to not judge each other.

If there is one overall theme to the book I would say that it is about reframing the "mommy wars" as a war not between SAHMs and mothers who work outside the home, but as a war within each woman who wrestles with how society judges her and how she judges her own mothering. The book also did a great job of finding voices on the whole spectrum, from strict stay at home moms, to moms who work part time and define themselves as either "SAHM's who work part time" or "Working moms who are at home with their kids," to pantyhose wearing working moms.

One wouldn't have thought at first blush that Ms. Steiner, an east coast journalist and MBA would have fit into this slightly crunchy Berkeley crowd (she was in a smart business suit and most of us in jeans and sandals) -- but we all warmed up right away. She began by reading from her introduction to the book, "Our Inner Catfight". Her motherhood story was moving and very personal, her courage in sharing it gained respect from her audience right away. Soon we were all laughing and talking about our own lives and how they relate to the themes of the book. We covered many topics: the definitions of motherhood society forces upon us and how we deal with that in our everyday lives, how defining motherhood differs from defining fatherhood, whether her book title was detrimental to her topic, how the definitions of motherhood change along race and class lines (something the book touched on but could have done more -- definitely needs to be opened up into a wider discussion), and how our own childhood experiences often frame our motherhood choices. We all ended up bonding across the coastal divide and were sad to see the evening end.

Rebecca also shared with me her comments about the book's controversy, especially in the blogosphere:

RK: With respect to the seemingly devisive title, Steiner did say that the title was her publishers choice, not hers. But to dismiss her book because of that makes us guilty of fanning the war flames too. The actual stories (along with her intro) seem to dispel the myths of the mommy wars -- she seems to be trying to reframe the judgement mothers have for each other to be more about a war within when society that forces these roles upon us, but yeah, the "facing off" part of the title seems to be fanning the flames -- I had the hardest time with that part of the title.

Also folks have pointed out that she's helping perpetuate a mainstream framing of motherhood -- I can see that point, but won't any book that successful fall victim to "sound bite" theorizing. On the other hand, it is annoying that so many other of the more carefully theorized and deeper books in the new wave of motherhood literature don't get the same great publicity.

Hopefully the publicity generated by Steiner's book will demonstrate to publishers that women are interested in having this dialogue and it will open the gates for many more mother writers to weigh in on this issue. For more on Steiner, you might also want to check out Literary Mama Editor Helaine Olen's interview with Steiner on Salon.com.

Some more good news

Literary Mama Commentary Editor Dawn Friedman's moving essay, Open Adoption, Broken Heart, has been published on Salon.com.

Wondertime, a new magazine by the editors of FamilyFun, has bought exclusive serial rights to Creative Non-Fiction Editor Jennifer Margulis's book, Why Babies Do That. She will be kicking off a blog book tour in May in honor of Mother's Day and el dia de los ninos.

Literary Mama Managing Editor Andi Buchanan has an essay in the April issue of Child magazine, a Mother's Day feature on moms making community online and in real-life in Nick Jr. magazine, and is celebrating the release of her latest book, It's a Girl: Women Writers on Raising Daughters, featuring essays by Jacquelyn Mitchard, Katharine Weber, Joyce Maynard, Jennifer Lauck, and more.

You can listen to Andi and Miriam Peskowitz on NPR as they talk about "the truth behind the mommy wars" as part of their series of events at last weekend's Virginia Festival of the Book. And soon you'll be able to watch them in action, when CSPAN's BookTV airs their panel discussion with Barbara Ehrenreich, taped on March 24.

Readings, Appearances, and Other Events

Tuesday, 3.21, 1 p.m. (EST) LM creative nonfiction editor Jennifer Margulis chats online at pregnancy.org about her new book Why Babies Do That.

Thursday, 3.23, 7 p.m. LM managing editor Andi Buchanan will be speaking at a Mother Talk salon with Miriam Peskowitz, hosted by the publishers of Brain,Child magazine, in Charlottesville. (If you're in the area and interested in coming, check out the evite.)

Friday, 3.24, 3 p.m. Andi and Miriam will be on NPR's Insight show in Charlottesville, VA.

Friday, 3.24, 8 p.m. Andi and Miriam will be speaking on a panel titled "Women, Family and Work: A Candid Discussion," with Barbara Ehrenreich at the UVA Bookstore, Charlottesville, VA.

Saturday, 3.25, 10 a.m. Andi be moderating a panel on motherhood & literary fiction, featuring Mary Guterson, Sharon Baldacci, and Melanie Lynne Hauser, at the New Dominion Bookshop in Charlottesville.

Thursday, April 20, 7:30 p.m. Mother Talk salon in Philadelphia celebrating the release of It's a Girl and featuring Andi Buchanan and several local contributors to the anthology.

Sunday, 4.23, 4 p.m. LiteraryMama contributors to the NPN anthology Using Our Words, will be reading at Mrs. Dalloway's, 2904 College Avenue in Berkeley, (510) 704-8222.

Saturday 4.29, 7:30 p.m. Mother Talk Salon in Washington, DC, featuring Andi Buchanan, Marion Winik, and Miriam Peskowtiz.

Monday, 5.1, 7:30 p.m. LiteraryMama contributors to the NPN anthology Using Our Words, will be reading at Black Oak Books, Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley, (510) 486-0698.

Literary Mama Book Reviewed in Washington Post

Check out the lastest review of Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined (Seal Press 2006) entitled Literary Mama: Mothers of Invention by Evelyn Small.

Here is an excerpt

Literary Mamas includes memoirs, fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry by contributors who are long-time and first-time writers, scholars and grandmothers, all focused on motherhood in its infinite varieties. Here are women "writing through the distractions" and the "domestic chaos"; women dealing with the oft-repeated theme of balancing, doing the "devastating dance" of working and mothering; mothers who go crazy and others who just go; mothers who have tantrums -- "there is something to be said for a tantrum"; a woman who "thought having a baby would not change my life"; a poet with only "a handful of poems to show," but a "poemchild, whose smile is all my sonnets." Fit and unfit mothers, all imperfect in their separate ways.

Here, too, is all the busy work of mothers -- women engaged continually in those active gerunds that have been on mothers' to-do lists through the centuries: nursing, weaning, caring, cleaning, teaching, fixing, helping, healing, hoping, fearing. Among my favorites are Megeen R. Mulholland's poem "Miscarriage of an English Teacher" and Heidi Raykeil's excerpt from her memoir about the death of her baby, "Johnny."

Read the entire review here.

Singing Our Praises

It seems like every time I sit down to write, something more immediate calls me away. The toddler refuses to nap. The baby is fussy with an ear infection. The dog needs to be taken to the vet.

The nice thing about being involved in a community of mother writers is knowing that so many others are trying to do the same thing -- balance work and writing and raising children and trying to carve out an identity outside of parenting.

And so when one of us finds professional success -- acknowldgement from the outside world that we are not toiling away in vain -- we are so genuinely pleased. There is a real desire to celebrate each other's work.

So we are thrilled to note a few recent successes by members of the Literary Mama community:

Literary Mama Contributor Gayle Brandeis's short fiction piece, A Long Time, has been recognized as a Milion Writers Award Notable Story of 2005. Judges will be selecting the top ten online short stories for 2005 in April.

Literary Mama Associate Editor Helaine Olen has had her piece, A Truce in the Mommy Wars, published on Salon.com. In her article, Olen interviews Leslie Morgan Steiner, author of the recently published anthology, Mommy Wars: Stay-at-Home and Career Moms Face Off on Their Choices, Their Lives, Their Families. (I have yet to read the Steiner book but I am thrilled to see that Amazon customers who are buying her anthology are also buying Miriam Peskowitz's wonderful book The Truth Behind The Mommy Wars.) Literary Mama has published an excerpt from Steiner's book (Terri Minsky's The Mother Load) in Literary Reflections.

Finally, the NPN anthology, Using Our Words, is in its second printing now. Hip Mama recently published a review of the anthology, and a number of the book's authors (including a number of Literary Mama contributors) will be reading at the following bookstores:

Sunday, April 23 @ 4:00 PM
Mrs. Dalloway's
2904 College Avenue in Berkeley
(510) 704-8222

Monday, May 1 @ 7:30 PM
Black Oak Books
Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley
(510) 486-0698

When the going gets tough, lower your expectations

Given that it is International Women's Day, Maud Newton's blog post today reads as particularly disheartening.

Newton links to Meghan O'Rourke's essay in Slate entitled Desperate Feminist Wives: Why wanting equality makes women unhappy. O'Rourke refers to a recent study by sociologists at the University of Virginia on happiness within marriage. The study discovered that the "single most important factor in women’s marital happiness is the level of their husbands’ emotional engagement — not money, the division of household chores or other factors. The study also finds that women whose husbands earn the lion’s share of income, who don’t work outside the home, or who share a strong commitment to lifelong marriage with their husbands report the highest levels of marital happiness — in sharp contrast to academic conventional wisdom." What the study seems to show is that when a wife's expectations of marriage are in alignment with the marriage's realities, she tends to be happy. And since in "traditional" marriages, the expectations of marriage tend to be more clearly defined and agreed to by both parties than in more "progressive" marriages (where things such as division of labor tend to be negotiated throughout the marriage), it is no surprise that the "traditional" wives claim to be happier.

But instead of seeing the study as evidence that the more narrow the gap between expectations and reality, the happier one tends to be (otherwise known as 'aim low'), O'Rourke seems to use the data as an opportunity to jump on the 'Now that Betty Friedan has died, it's OK to bash her' bandwagon. O'Rourke writes: "Feminist ideals, not domestic duties, seem to be what make wives morose. Progressive married women -- who should be enjoying some or all of the fruits that Freidan lobbied for -- are less happy, it would appear, than women who live as if Friedan never existed."

She sings the praises of having low expectations: "The sexual revolution tried to free women and men from set-in-stone roles. But the irony turns out to be that having a degree of certainty about what you want (and being in a peer group that feels the same way) is helpful in making people happy. Having more choices about what you want makes you less likely to be happy with whatever choice you end up settling on. Choosing among six brands of jam is easy. But consumers presented with 24 types often leave the supermarket without making a purchase." Right. Well, if those 6 jams so happen to be strawberry, peach, grape, raspberry, apricot and gooseberry, then fabulous, good for you, the lack of choice worked out really well. But if the 6 jams happened to be liver, onion, alum, ipecac, eye of newt and manure -- well, you'd probably be wishing that you had a bit broader selection from which to choose.

Choice has enabled women to leave abusive relationships. Choice has enabled women to escape poverty. Choice has freed us from the notion that biology equals destiny.

And yes, the choices fought for by feminists like Betty Friedan have added a measure of complication to our lives. Sometimes it feels like navigating the modern marriage of equals is a lot of work. It is hard to determine the best division of labor and to figure out what paid work/childrearing combination works best. The "man wears pants, woman wears dress" approach would be a lot simpler. Ignorance, after all, is bliss.

So why stop there? Let's ditch democracy. All of those choices about who to vote for -- golly, that sounds complicated. I'm so confused. I wish that someone would just tell me to go and bake a pie or something.

Blaming the feminist movement for raising women's expectations of what life can be is bunk.

Lobbying for fewer choices is bunk.

Telling women that happiness is simply a matter of aiming low is bunk.