The Cultural Cover-up
IN the apartment across from the little study where I work there is a large bay window that never fails to catch my eye. Peering out from inside, wide-eyed and still, is a life-sized female mannequin in an apron. Her arms are folded and have been for years. She’s there guarding the place, waiting. She reminds me and other passersby that no one is home. Maybe she’s a spoof on the nostalgia for the 1950s “mom,” waiting with milk and cookies for the kids to come home in the era before the two-job family.
Perhaps the mannequin mom is the occupant’s joke about the darker reality obscured by the image of the woman with the flying hair—briefcase in one hand and child in the other. “There’s really no one home,” it seems to say, “only a false mother.” She invites us to look again at the more common image of the working mother, at what that image hides. The front cover of the New York Times Magazine for September 9, 1984, features a working mother walking home with her daughter. The woman is young. She is good-looking. She is smiling. The daughter is smiling as she lugs her mother’s briefcase. The role model is taking, the child is a mini-supermom already. If images could talk, this image would say, “Women can combine career and children.” It would say nothing about the “extra month a year,” nothing about men, nothing about flexible work hours. That would be covered up.
There is no trace of stress, no suggestion that the mother needs help from others. She isn’t harassed. She’s busy, and it’s glamorous to be busy. Indeed, the image of the on-the-go working mother is very like the glamorous image of the busy top executive. The scarcity of the working mother’s time seems like the scarcity of the top executive’s time. Yet their situations are totally different. The busy top executive is in a hurry at work because his or her time is worth so much. He is in a hurry at home because he works long hours at the office. In contrast, the working mother is in a hurry because her time at work is worth so little, and because she has no help at home. The analogy suggested between the two obscures the wage gap between them at work and helps the gap between them at home.
The Times article gives the impression that the working mother is doing so well because she is personally competent, not because she has a sound social arrangement. Indeed the image of her private characteristics obscures all that is missing in public support for the working parent. In this respect, the image of the working mother today shares something with that of the black single mother of the 1960s. In celebrating such an image of personal strength, our culture creates an ironic heroism. It extends to middle-class white women a version of womanhood a bit like that offered to poor women of color.
In speaking of the black single mother, commentators and scholars have sometimes used the term “matriarch,” a derogatory term in American culture, and a term brought to popular attention by Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s controversial government report The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. In a section of the report entitled “Tangle of Pathology,” Moynihan cited figures showing that black girls scored higher on school tests than black boys. He also showed that 25 percent of black wives in two-job families earned more than their husbands, while only 18 percent of white wives did. Moynihan quotes social scientist Duncan MacIntyre: “… the underemployment among Negro men and compensating higher labor force propensity among Negro women … both operate to enlarge the mother’s role, undercutting the status of the male and making many Negro families essentially matriarchal.”1 The implication was that black women should aspire to the standards of white women: perform more poorly on educational tests and earn less than their mates. Reading this, black social scientists such as Elaine Kaplan pointed out that black women were “damned if they worked to support their families and damned if they didn’t.” Black women were cautioned against being so “matriarchal.” But as working mothers in low-paid jobs without much male support, they also legitimately felt themselves the victims of male underemployment. While at the bottom of the social totem pole, they were described as if they were at the top. These women pointed out that they “took charge” of their families not because they wanted to dominate, but because if they didn’t pay the rent, buy the food, cook it, and look after the children, no one else would. Black women would have been delighted to share the work and the decision making with a man. But in Moynihan’s report, the black woman’s dominance came to seem like the problem itself rather than the result of the problem.
Similarly, the common portrayal of the supermom suggests that she is energetic and competent because these are her personal characteristics, not because she has been forced to adapt to an overly demanding schedule. What is hidden in both cases is the extra burden on women. The difference between Moynihan’s portrayal of the black working mother as matriarch and the modern portrayal of the white supermom is an unconscious racism. The supermom has come to seem heroic and good, whereas the matriarch seems unheroic and bad.
This same extra burden on women was also disguised in the Soviet Union, a large industrial nation that had long employed over 80 percent of its women, and who, according to the Alexander Szalai study (described in Chapter 1), work the extra month a year. In a now legendary short story entitled “A Week Like Any Other” by Natalya Baranskaya, Olga, twenty-six, is a technician in a plastics testing laboratory in Moscow and a wife and mother of two. Olga’s supervisor praises her for being a real Soviet Woman—a supermom. But when Olga is asked to fill out a questionnaire listing her hobbies, she answers, “Personally my hobby is running, running here, running there….” Like the black matriarch, and the multiracial supermom, the image of the real Soviet woman confines a social problem to the realm of personal character.
Missing from the image of the supermom is the day-care worker, the baby-sitter, the maid—a woman usually in a blue collar position to whom some white collar couples pass much, although not all, of the work of the second shift. In the image, the supermom is almost always white and at least middle class. In reality, of course, day-care workers, baby-sitters, au pairs, nannies, maids, and housekeepers are often part of two-job couples as well. This growing army of women is taking over the parts of a mother’s role that employed women relinquish. Most maids and baby-sitters also stay in their occupations for life. But who can afford a house cleaner? In 2010, the median household income was about $50,000. There were 1,470,000 maids and house cleaners and 312,000,000 Americans. So for the average American, outsourcing is not a primary solution.
In the world of advertising images, the maid is often replaced by a machine. In television ads, for example, we see an elegant woman lightly touching her new refrigerator or microwave oven. Her husband may not be helping her at home, but her machine is. She and it are a team.2 In the real world, however, machines don’t always save time. As the sociologist Joan Vanek pointed out in her study of homemakers in the 1920s and 1960s, even with more labor-saving appliances, the later homemakers spent as much time on housework as the earlier ones. The 1960s homemakers spent less time cleaning and washing the house; machines helped with that. But they spent more time shopping, getting appliances repaired, washing clothes (as standards of cleanliness rose), and doing bookkeeping. Eighty-five percent of the working couples I interviewed did not employ regular household help; it was up to them and their “mechanical helpmates.” Since these took time they didn’t have, many dropped their standards of housekeeping.
The image of the woman with the flying hair is missing someone else too: her husband. In the absence of a maid, and with household appliances that still take time, a husband’s hand becomes important. Yet in the popular culture the image of the working father is largely missing, and with it the very issue of sharing. With the disappearance of this issue, ideas of struggle and marital tension over the lack of sharing are also smuggled out of view. One advertising image shows us a woman just home from work fixing a quick meal with Uncle Ben’s rice; the person shown eating it with great relish is a man. In a 1978 study of television advertising, Olive Courtney and Thomas Whipple found that men are shown demonstrating products that help with domestic chores, but usually not using them. Women are often shown serving men and boys, but men and boys are seldom shown serving women and girls.
In the world of print as well, the male of the two-job couple is often invisible. There are dozens of advice books for working mothers, telling them how to “get organized,” “make lists,” “prioritize,” but I found no such books for working fathers. In her book Having It All, Helen Gurley Brown, inventor of the “Cosmo Girl” and the author of Sex and the Single Girl, tells readers in a chatty, girl-to-girl voice how to rise from clerical work to stardom, and how to combine this career success with being feminine and married. She offers women flamboyant advice on how to combine being sexy with career success, but goes light and thin on how to be a good mother. Women can have fame and fortune, office affairs, silicone injections, and dazzling designer clothes, in Brown’s world. But the one thing they can’t have, apparently, is a man who shares the work at home. Referring to her own husband, Brown writes: “Whether a man will help in the kitchen depends on his mother, says Carol (a friend). Mine doesn’t. You also can’t send him to market … he comes back with tiny ears of corn vinaigrette, olives and pâté—but it’s no good banging your head against the stove because he hasn’t got a cassoulet simmering on top of it. Usually they do something to make up for household imbecility … like love you and pay a lot of bills.”3
In another advice book to women, The Superwoman Syndrome, Marjorie Hansen Shaevitz more candidly admits to losing a struggle to get her husband to share housework: “I spent a lot of time smoldering internally over his apparent recalcitrance. I took it one step further by judging that if he really loved me, he would see how hard I was working, how tired I was and would come to my rescue with cheerful resourcefulness. Need I tell you this never happened?”4
Shaevitz became overworked, overwhelmed, and out of control. The answer? She should make lists, prioritize, or hire a maid. Shaevitz suggests having few children, having them late and close together because “this leaves more time in which the parents may pursue careers or other activities.” She remarks that “some relief is available if you have a child-oriented spouse” but cautions “many women don’t have that luxury….” What changes does Shaevitz recommend? Ask more favors of friends and do fewer for them. Indeed, for the working woman the very principle of reciprocity is a “problem.” As she explains, “The Superwoman not only has some anxiety about asking people for help, but the internal ‘catch 22’ is that she probably feels she’s going to have to repay that help in some multiple way. And that is also losing control of your life.”5 So she should not do such things as “agree to pick up your friend’s child for a school play …” or “listen to a friend’s laundry list of problems with her husband and kids.”
Shaevitz doesn’t feel sharing is wrong, only that women can’t get it. In a four-page epilogue to The Superwoman Syndrome, the dread issue of sharing resurfaces in a strangely sour exchange between Shaevitz and her husband, Mort:
MARJORIE: … Right now I think we’re in for some rough times between men and women, unless men begin participating a little more (you notice I say a little more) in the household and with their children. I don’t think bright, competent, educated women are going to put up with men who are unwilling to participate in a sharing kind of relationship. You notice I say “sharing,” not “equal sharing.” Many women tell me they want to have a man in their life, but they are no longer willing to be the only person giving in the relationship. They don’t want to be with a man who needs to be taken care of. In that case, it’s easier and more pleasant to be without a man.
MORT: Marjorie, that’s really infuriating to most men. It’s quite clear that men are doing more and that this trend is likely to increase. What men find difficult to accept is that they get little credit for what they do, and an incredible list of complaints about what they don’t do. Men and women may give in different ways. Women continue to set ground rules for what they expect, what they want, and how they want it delivered. I can tell you that most highly competent, successful men—the kind of men most women look for—simply will not respond to a behavioral checklist.
MARJORIE: … The consequence of letting your wife do it all is that she is likely to get angry, resentful, and maybe even sick.
MORT: Couples need to take a look at what this situation is behind the wife’s pointing a finger at the husband. You know that doesn’t work either. I think many men will probably be happy to “let her go”—they’ll find someone else to take care of them.6
Marjorie talks about “many women” and Mort talks about “most men,” but the dialogue seems obliquely infused with their own struggle. In the end, Mort Shaevitz refers obscurely to the idea of a woman “getting help from everyone—her husband, her children, and society,” a faceless crowd through which the Superwoman once again strides alone. Having It All and The Superwoman Syndrome advise women on how to do without a change in men, how to be a woman who is different from her mother, married to a man not much different from her father. By adding “super” before “woman” and subtracting meaning from the word “all,” these authors tell women how to gracefully accommodate to the stalled revolution.
There have been two responses that counter the supermom: one is to poke fun at her and one is to propose an alternative to her—“the new man.” The humorous response is to be found in the joke books, memo pads, key chains, ashtrays, cocktail napkins, and coffee mugs sold in novelty and gift shops especially around Mother’s Day. It critiques the supermom by making her look ridiculous. One joke book by Barbara and Jim Dale, entitled the Working Woman Book, advises, “The first step in a good relationship with your children is memorizing their names.” In a section called “What You Can Do” in a chapter on raising children, The Superwoman Syndrome seriously advises: “A. Talk with your child, B. Play a game, C. Go to a sports event….” and under “Demonstrate Your Affection By” it helpfully notes, “A. Hugging, B. Kissing….”7
Or again: “The famous Flying Wallendas were renowned for their feat of balancing seven Wallendas on a thin shaft of wood supported only by four Wallendas beneath whom was but one, strong, reliable, determined Wallenda … undoubtedly Mrs. Wallenda.”
One mug portrays a working mother with the familiar briefcase in one hand and baby in the other. But there is no striding, no smile, no backswept hair. The woman’s mouth is a wiggly line. Her hair is unkempt. One shoe is red, one blue. In one hand she holds a wailing baby, in the other a briefcase, papers cascading out. Beneath her it says, “I am a working mother. I am nuts.” There is nothing glamorous about being time-poor; the mug seems to say, “I’m not happy. I’m not fine.” Implicitly the cup critiques the frazzled supermom herself, not her inflexible work schedule, not the crisis in day-care, not the glacial pace of change in our idea of “a real man.” Her options were fine; what was crazy—and funny—was her decision to work. That’s what makes the extra month a year a joke. In this way the commercial vision of the working mother incorporates a watered-down criticism of itself, has a good laugh, and continues on.
A serious critique of the supermom parallels the humorous one, and in popular journalism, this serious approach seemed to be crowding out many other journalistic approaches to the woman question. In Woman on a Seesaw: The Ups and Downs of Making It, for example, Hilary Cosell bitterly rues her single-minded focus on career, which barely made time for a husband and precluded having children. For example:
There I was, coming home from ten or twelve or sometimes more hours at work, pretty much shot after the day, and I’d do this simply marvelous imitation of all the successful fathers I remembered from childhood. All the men I swore I’d never grow up and marry, let alone be like … the men who would come home from the office, grab a drink or two, collapse on the couch, shovel in a meal and be utterly useless for anything beyond the most mundane and desultory conversation. And there I’d be, swilling a vodka on the rocks or two, shoving a Stouffer’s into my mouth and staggering off to take a bath, watch “Hill Street Blues” and fade away with Ted Koppel. To get up and do it all again.8
Like the frazzled coffee-mug mom, Cosell admits her stress. Like the coffee-mug mom, she deplores her “wrong decision” to enter the rat race, but does not much question the unwritten rules of that race. Both the humorous and the serious critiques of the supermom tell us things are not fine, but like the image of the working mother they criticize, they convey a fatalism. “That’s just how it is,” they say.
A second cultural trend tacitly critiques the supermom image by proposing an alternative—the new man. Increasingly, books, articles, films, and comics celebrate the man who feels that time with his child and work around the house are compatible with being a real man. Above a series of articles in his syndicated newspaper column about his first year as a father, a series which later became a popular book entitled Good Morning, Merry Sunshine, Bob Greene is pictured holding his baby daughter, Amanda. Greene is not in transit between home and work. He is sitting down, apparently at home, where he works as a writer. He is in a short-sleeved shirt instead of a coat and tie—no need to address the professional world outside. He is smiling and in his arms, his daughter is laughing. He is successful—he is writing this column, this book. He writes on “male” topics like the Chicago mayoral election. He’s an involved father. But he’s not a house husband, like the man in the movie Mr. Mom, who for a disastrous, funny period—role reversal is an ancient, always humorous theme in literature—exchanges roles with his wife. Greene’s wife, Susan, is also home with Amanda; he joins, but doesn’t replace, his wife at home. As he writes in his journal:
Started early this morning. I worked hard on a column about the upcoming Chicago mayoral election. I had to go to the far north side of town to interview a man; then once I got back downtown I had several hours of phone checking to do. There were some changes to be made after I had finished writing. It was well after dark before I was finished. I was still buzzing from the nonstop reporting and writing when I got home, all of the elements of the story were still knocking around my head. Susan said, “Amanda learned how to drink from a cup today.” I went into the kitchen and watched her. I watched Amanda drink from the cup, and nothing else mattered.9
The new man “has it all” in the same way the supermom has it all. He is a male version of the woman with the flying hair. Bob Greene is an involved father and also successful in a competitive field. In writing only about his own highly atypical experience, though, Greene unintentionally conveys the idea that men face no conflict between doing a job and raising a child.
In fact, most working fathers who fully share the emotional responsibility and physical care of children and do half the housework also face great difficulty. As long as the “woman’s work” that some men do is socially devalued, as long as it is defined as woman’s work, as long as it’s tacked onto a regular work day, men who share it are likely to develop the same jagged mouth and frazzled hair as the coffee-mug mom. The image of the new man is like the image of the supermom: it obscures the strain.
The image of the supermom and, to a lesser extent, the image of the new man enter a curious cultural circle. First, more men and women become working couples. Spotting these men and women as a market, advertisers surround them with images—on computer Web sites, on magazine covers, in television commercials—mainly of the do-it-all woman. Then journalists write articles about her. Advice books follow, and finally, more ponderously, scientific word gets out. As a result of this chain of interpretations, the two-job couple see themselves down a long hall of mirrors.
What working mothers find in the cultured mirror has much to do with what the dilemmas in their lives make them look for. When the working mothers I talked with considered the image of the supermom, they imagined a woman who was unusually efficient, organized, energetic, bright, and confident. To be a supermom seemed like a good thing. To be called one was a compliment. She wasn’t real, but she was ideal. Nancy Holt, a social worker and the mother of a son named Joey, found the idea of a supermom curiously useful. She faced a terrible choice between having a stable marriage and an equal one, and she chose the stable marriage. She struggled hard to suppress her conflict with her husband and to perform an emotional cover-up. The supermom image appealed to her because it offered her a cultural cover-up to go with her emotional one. It clothed her compromise with an aura of inevitability. It obscured the crisis she and her husband faced over the second shift, her conflict with her husband over it, and her attempts to suppress the conflict to preserve their marriage—leaving in their place the illusive, light, almost-winking image of that woman with the flying hair.