CHAPTER 4

Motherhood as Conspicuous Leisure in the Twenty-first Century

In my playground set, the urban moms in their tight jeans and oversize sunglasses size each other up using a whole range of signifiers … But breast-feeding is the real ticket into the club … So I was left feeling trapped, like many women before me, in the middle-class mother’s prison of vague discontent: surly but too privileged for pity, breastfeeding with one hand while answering the cell phone with the other, and barking at my older kids to get their own organic, 100 percent juice—the modern, multitasking mother’s version of Friedan’s “problem that has no name.”

—Hanna Rosen, “The Case against Breastfeeding,” Atlantic Monthly (April 2009)

For us Anglophone mothers, the length of time that we breastfeed—like the size of a Wall Street bonus—is a measure of performance … We all know that our breastfeeding number is a concrete way to compete with one another.

—Patricia Druckerman, Bringing Up Bébé, Penguin Press (2012)

In 2012, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) reaffirmed its long-standing recommendation that all children be exclusively breastfed through 6 months old and continually breast-fed through 12 months.1 Countless studies have reported the substantial benefits of breast-feeding a child rather than using infant formula (stronger immune systems, fewer gastrointestinal problems, less frequent earaches, and even higher IQs). A more recent UK-based study links breastfeeding to increased upward social mobility and decreased downward social mobility, suggesting that the combination of particular nutrients in breast milk along with the skin-to-skin mother-child bonding improves neurological development and emotional stress levels, thus enabling a child to thrive and subsequently move up the social ladder.2

Many critics note that some women are physiologically unable to breast-feed or have trouble with their milk supply; consequently, such a recommendation generates enormous amounts of pressure on women. However, according to a lactation consultant whom I interviewed, fewer than 1% of women fall within the aforementioned category, whereby they have trouble with their milk supply such that they are unable to breast-feed at all. As an added benefit, breast milk is free, breast-feeding is associated with lower postpartum hip-to-waist ratio (read: more post-pregnancy weight loss), and is a lot less messy than putting together a bottle of infant formula. At first glance, it seems simple (i.e., just breast-feed your child), but when you dig deeper, it’s much more complicated.

For starters, according to the Centers for Disease Control, just 16.4% of children are exclusively breast-fed through 6 months, 27% are breastfed (in conjunction with other food) through 12 months, and just three-quarters initiated (which could mean they were breast-fed just one time, for one day, or one week)—a far cry from the goals of pediatricians and Health and Human Services.³ Regional studies suggest wild discrepancies across states too: A study of a small town in northwestern Pennsylvania reported that just 13% of children are breast-fed at all at 6 months.⁴ In Oregon and California, 40% of mothers are still breast-feeding their babies at 12 months of age, as compared to 10% for Mississippi and 11% for Alabama.⁵ In these former more bohemian states, women may feel a greater pressure but also a greater cultural acceptance to breast-feed.

But the single leading indicator of breast-feeding is education level—17% of college graduates exclusively breast-feed through the first six months, compared to just 9.3% of those without a college degree. In fact, 95% of women with a college degree or higher initiate breast-feeding versus 83% of women with just a high school degree or GED (these numbers are almost exactly the same for the father’s level of education).^6,7 Being wealthy helps. In a CDC study of breast-feeding rates from 1999 to 2006, 74% of high-income mothers initiated breast-feeding versus 57% of low-income mothers. Of those women coming from households earning 400% or more above the poverty line, almost 96% breast-feed versus fewer than 83% of those at or below the poverty line.8

On the surface these numbers don’t make sense. Breast-feeding is free, it’s better for the baby, and it’s better for the mother, yet it’s practiced mainly by women who could afford the best formula out there and, as college-educated women, many have full-time, high-pressure jobs (particularly the over-30 set, who often have children at a later age, after completing their education and establishing themselves in a career). In fact, as a result of all of the overwhelming evidence that breastfeeding is good for both mother and child, the AAP stated explicitly that “choosing to breastfeed should be considered an investment in the short- and long-term health of the infant, rather than a lifestyle choice.”

Nevertheless, lifestyle—and socioeconomics—seem to be important factors in whether or not women choose to breast-feed. While the ostensible economics of breast-feeding do not explain the statistics, social mores and what one’s work group deems acceptable explain these breast-feeding rates. Breast-feeding in the twenty-first century, like many other aspects of motherhood, has become an issue of class and its accoutrements.

Mothering, writ large, has become a new channel for engaging in what Veblen termed conspicuous leisure. Breast-feeding and birthing practices are the most obvious examples of this, as playing sports or studying Greek were in Veblen’s time. Unlike a Louis Vuitton bag or a luxury car, these signifiers are not explicitly expensive but they do require significant investments of time, an even more precious commodity in modern society. Like in Veblen’s era, much of contemporary conspicuous leisure is suggestive of money. While many aspects of motherhood seem costless—birthing choices, co-sleeping, carrying your baby, breastfeeding—women can only engage in these activities if they have the luxury of time and leisure and membership into cultural and social groups that encourage this form of motherhood. Certain maternal choices demonstrate the possession of both time and cultural capital that is truly impossible for many women to attain.

In 1957, the French semiologist and linguist Roland Barthes wrote a small but powerful book entitled Mythologies. Barthes argued that through the dominant values upheld by society we create “myths” around particular practices and consumer goods, which become “signifiers” of particular messages or dominant belief systems.9,10 In his chapter “Wine and Milk,” Barthes discusses the symbolism of red wine and framing of red wine as an egalitarian and healthful substance. Red wine’s color suggests vitality, a substance thought of as “the juice from the sun and earth.” Like the English royal family drinking tea or milk from Dutch cows, red wine is the “signifier” of French culture and a “collective morality” and “décor for all facets of French life.”¹¹ In fact, red wine is so synonymous with the French that when President René Coty was photographed with a beer on his coffee table rather than a bottle of wine, the nation was shocked. But this depiction of red wine ignores and glosses over other negative aspects of the drink. For example, that people get drunk from wine is not a goal but rather a consequence. (By extension, bad things that happen when one is drunk are more superficial or theatrical rather than truly evil.)¹² Or, as Barthes observes, red wine is as much a part of French capitalism as culture: The land used to grow grapes is taken by settlers in Algeria “who impose on the Muslims on the very land of which they have been dispossessed, a crop for which they have no use, while they actually lack bread.”¹³ Similarly, in his chapter “Steak-Frites,” Barthes discusses the prestige of this national dish and the semi-rawness and visibility of blood in saignant (rare) steak which symbolizes strength and nature—the act of eating a bloody steak almost suggests these qualities “pouring into man’s very blood.”¹⁴ In contemporary times, we know that steak is equally a signifier of industrialized food systems and a host of heart problems brought on by saturated fat. But the myth of red wine like that of steak-frites is a function of how society chooses to interpret it. As Barthes remarks, “Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.”¹⁵ Similarly, the choices around motherhood become embedded in a value system determined by elite members of society. Breast-feeding thus becomes a Barthesian mythology: the twenty-first century signifier of what motherhood ought to be.¹⁶ Similar to Barthes’s red wine, this semiology obscures and distorts the nuances of how difficult it is to breast-feed, why some mothers actually have the choice to do so and why others do not. Indeed, it is an inflexion of motherhood as upheld by the ideologies of the dominant aspirational class.

Ask Corky Harvey, the founder of the LA–based breast-feeding and baby boutique The Pump Station. With outposts in Santa Monica, Hollywood, and throughout the city, Harvey’s little boutiques garner an almost cult-like following. Her stores offer everything from high-end newborn onesies to CPR classes to breast-feeding classes and consultations, replete with breast pump rentals and sales (thus the name of the store). A new mom can find anything she needs for her baby. Before the average upper-middle-class Angelino mother gets pregnant, she likely doesn’t know what The Pump Station is; thereafter it almost becomes a rite of passage to attend classes and get one’s Medela breast pump “serviced.” Yet, as Harvey herself explained, “We would never survive in rural Mississippi or NE Pennsylvania,” where the notion of a breastfeeding boutique would be hilariously weird.

What is weird in Mississippi is the status quo in California. Many of the discrepancies in breast-feeding rates can be explained by the fact that women of different social and economic groups are simply treated differently and presented with different choices. Breast-feeding may be free, but to a certain extent, formula is free too. The biggest purchaser of formula in the nation is the US government, which channels much of it through Women Infants and Children (WIC), the federal assistance program for low-income pregnant women and mothers. As Harvey put it, “Why wouldn’t you take it for free if you’re poor? Medicine plays a role [by not advocating heavily enough with mothers]. For instance, in cultures like low income African Americans in Atlanta Georgia nobody breast-feeds and if you do you’re a fool … As my son, who is a physician in Atlanta, explained to me, ‘Mom, it isn’t even discussed here.’” The research suggests that mothers who are eligible for WIC (and use it) are less likely to breast-feed than mothers who are not.17 There have, however, been improvements with the new WIC package that was introduced in 2009, resulting in some studies showing WIC mothers significantly increasing their exclusive breast-feeding rates.¹⁸ Another pediatrician, who worked at a community clinic, explained to me that, in the past, in some populations, the women were given a shot of Depo (a birth control medicine) almost immediately after birth. Depo has the effect of significantly reducing milk supply when given right after birth versus being administered 4–6 weeks later. As the physician explained, “I used to have to tell them [the women visiting her clinic], ‘Do not let them give you that shot.’” She went on, “Luckily now, the obstetricians who take care of our clinic patients have been educated and have stopped routinely giving Depo to the women right after delivery. If you have a family who shows up [at the clinic] and they are feeding their children formula at three days or two weeks of life, you need to ask them why, since most of these mothers are doing it because of breast-feeding challenges and not because they wanted to give their child formula.”

Despite the health imperative, breast-feeding at 6 and 12 months remains a rarefied practice. It is mainly prevalent in particular cultural and class groups—women with higher education levels who learn about the benefits of breast-feeding and women of higher income groups who can afford the insurance to deliver in baby-friendly hospitals with round-the-clock nurses and lactation consultants providing breastfeeding classes, expensive and efficient breast pumps, and help throughout the mother’s entire stay. One of the other significant predictors of breast-feeding success is duration of maternity leave: Those mothers who receive fewer than 12 weeks of maternity leave have up to four times higher odds of failing to establish breast-feeding.19 In the United States, good maternity leave is a rare thing for all women, but those who receive it are primarily women in high-level professional jobs. The irony is that women with ostensibly higher pressure jobs (e.g., managers, lawyers, CEOs) are those who have better maternity leave and thus are better able to breast-feed successfully. Of course, their education level and access to knowledge around the benefits of breast-feeding are closely linked to their choice (and also their attainment of these professional high-powered positions). In recent years, as many as 10% of highly educated women (i.e., master’s degree or greater) are “opting out” of work to stay home with their children. These women also tend to be affluent and have a working spouse,²⁰ all factors that indicate higher breastfeeding rates.

Consider the alternate and far more realistic universe that most moms face. “How can you pump if you’re a cab driver, or you’re working in an industrial setting, where there is no support, no break and even though it’s the law but no one cares?” Harvey asked. “You’ll get fired. So formula is easier.” Or, as the sociologist Cynthia Colen summed it up, “In the United States, where only 12 percent of female workers and 5 percent of female low-wage workers have access to paid leave, most women are required to forgo income in order to breast-feed. This may be a less-than-ideal situation for middle-class women but an impossible situation for poor women who already are having trouble making ends meet. No wonder, one of the most critical determinants of who starts and who continues breast-feeding is socioeconomic status.”21 This precise distinction is why Sheryl Sandberg can pull off being a top executive at Facebook while breast-feeding two kids, while the average hourly worker cannot.²²

In other parts of the world (just as in the United States), good maternity leave is associated with higher rates of continued breast-feeding (see figure 4.1). As the journalist Hannah Rosen calculates, “Let’s say a baby feeds seven times a day and then a couple more times at night. That’s nine times for about a half hour each, which adds up to more than half of a working day, every day, for at least six months. This is why, when people say that breast-feeding is ‘free,’ I want to hit them with a two-by-four. It’s only free if a woman’s time is worth nothing.”

To the rest of the world, the battles on the New York Times opinion pages about the moral imperative of breast-feeding may seem like aspirational class navel gazing—it reflects a debate completely detached from most mothers’ lives, and indeed it is. The Mommy Wars—to breastfeed or not, the stay-at-home versus the working mother face-off, C-sections, and home births—are debates for a particularly privileged set of women.

To actually talk about the nuances and choices of motherhood (rather than simply being a mother and taking care of one’s children) implies the luxury to do so. “We focus on motherhood as the province of privileged women with no greater struggles than whether or not it is possible to have it all,” writes Mikki Kendall in Salon. “Meanwhile, mothers who do not fit into this narrative feel excluded. Motherhood is supposed to be a choice, but what kind of choices are mothers making? Concerns over access to food, healthcare, education, even safety somehow don’t make the main stage of these discussions. At its base, motherhood encompasses all of that, and mothers who don’t have many choices (or, in some cases, any choices) need support that they are not getting.”²³ Nancy Chin is a professor in the University of Rochester’s Department of Public Health Sciences and author of a number of key studies on low-income women’s breast-feeding experiences. As she put it, poor women spend most of their days dealing with risk ratios. “Every day you are exposed to risk—so if you have a 100% chance of running out of food by the end of the month, a 75% chance of being evicted, a 50% chance of the baby’s daddy not being around,” Chin explained, “then a 10% chance of an ear infection because of formula feeding doesn’t seem so bad. [Further], low-income women don’t necessarily feel safe enough to breast-feed in public if they live in unsafe neighborhoods.”

Figure 4.1. Maternity leave and breast-feeding (BF) rates.
Source: State of the World’s Mothers, Save the Children, May 2012.

Society is incessantly judging the mothering practices and consequences of lower socioeconomic groups—and that certainly has an impact on the mothers’ decisions. As Chin illustrates, “If you’re a poor woman, you feel you are constantly under surveillance. [For example], the other confounder is that mothers who stop breast-feeding often say, ‘I didn’t have enough milk; it was insufficient.’” Chin continues, “The medical view is that’s a rare condition, so [if you don’t have enough milk then] you’re not doing this right.” Given that breast-feeding requires a whole host of resources and time that poor mothers may not have, low-income mothers are limited in their ability to breast-feed, even if it is not physiologically based. Breast-feeding might be the ideal choice, but these women often do not have the chance to do so. As Chin explains, “Can you imagine if you’re a low-income mom, and you’re worrying about feeding your baby and they [the doctors] say ‘It’s your fault.’ [If you’re that mother] you’re going to say, ‘Let’s just give that child a bottle.’”24

Yet if you subscribe to the thesis put forth by Joan Wolf, a professor at Texas A&M and author of the 2010 book Is Breast Best?: Taking on the Breastfeeding Experts and the New High Stakes of Motherhood, all of this debate may really be just aspirational class self-preoccupation. Wolf argues that we have not even statistically proven that breast-feeding is actually better than formula.²⁵ As Wolf remarked in a 2013 interview, “When it comes to other outcomes, such as intelligence or obesity or diabetes, etc., it is simply not possible to separate any benefits that have been attributed to breastfeeding from the general health behavior of women who choose, for various reasons, to breastfeed.” In the same interview, Wolf continues, “Mothers who breastfeed promote health in all sorts of ways that could have a positive impact on obesity, IQ, colds, etc.”²⁶ A 2014 study of breast-feeding focused on “discordant siblings”—those where one child was breast-fed and the other not. The sample, some 1,773 sibling pairs, enabled a wide-scale analysis to tease out the extent to which breast-feeding (rather than other hidden variables) might explain the health, achievement, and other metrics of success over formula-fed babies. Turns out, at least according to this study, breastfeeding confounds a more basic explanation: socioeconomic class. Those siblings born to wealthier (and healthier) mothers thrived regardless of being formula or breast-fed. And in fact, it is a circular causation: Breast-fed babies tend to be born into families with higher incomes, more educated parents, and safer neighborhoods.²⁷ Or as Hanna Rosen candidly admits in The Atlantic, “One day, while nursing my baby in my pediatrician’s office, I noticed a 2001 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association open to an article about breast-feeding: ‘Conclusions: There are inconsistent associations among breast-feeding, its duration, and the risk of being overweight in young children.’ Inconsistent? There I was, sitting half-naked in public for the tenth time that day, the hundredth time that month, the millionth time in my life—and the associations were inconsistent?”28

I can relate. I live in a bohemian bourgeois Los Angeles neighborhood filled with farmers’ markets and cafés obsessed with the art of coffee making. Other than the artists who live here, the neighborhood is filled with families who are drawn to the playground and public space and, especially, the really good public school district. Our tastes may be slightly different from our counterparts in the suburbs, rural America, or the East Coast, but just like parents across America, childrearing and the values that surround it are the most important aspects of our lives.

One fine morning when my oldest son was just more than a year old, I was strolling down our street and ran into a woman I’d seen around. We started chatting across from a housing construction site with a large and active cement truck (a perennial attraction for little boys). Her son was a few years older than mine, and at some point she commented on my use of an Ergo baby carrier with my already enormous child. I said that my back was killing me and I was trying to figure out how to get him out of it, to which she responded by recommending one she had purchased for her bigger child which allowed her to “breast-feed him in the grocery store.” I tried not to skip a beat but I was certain that kid of hers was over three years old, so between the baby carrier and the public breast-feeding of a child swiftly entering pre-K, this woman immediately became a source of fascination. As we continued talking she went on about the ongoing “nighttime feedings” (something most moms are happy become less frequent after 5 months old) and the co-sleeping (she in his bed, not he in mom and dad’s bed) and the fact that only children were special, and that having multiple children was “different … not necessarily worse” (although her inflections clearly indicated that it was, indeed, actually worse).

I consider myself a babyled mom. I never even remotely “sleep trained” (and for that I spent years on the brink of exhaustion). I would have made the La Leche League proud with my dedication to breastfeeding way past the recommended year. Yet even I was unable to make sense of this mom’s approach. Here’s the thing: True to aspirational class mothering, as I said good-bye and walked away, I couldn’t decide whether to judge her for being a crazy person who was setting up her son for years of psychotherapy or feel bad and insecure for not being as much of an alpha mom as she. At that time, my husband and I were trying for a second child and suddenly I thought, “Maybe I’m being a bad mom by having another child. Here I thought having more kids was fun and fulfilling, but maybe I’m doing something that is clearly both different … and worse.” To be a mother, whether in Santa Monica or St. Louis, is to feel judged on an almost daily basis. But, unlike Chin’s mothers who are worried about simply being able to breast-feed (or feed) their children at all, upper-middle-class mothers genuinely stress themselves out over breast-feeding tenure and organic peaches. Such anxieties seem absurd. Unless you’re in the thick of it.

It goes on. As one young mother in San Francisco remarked, “Here, many pregnant women join a prenatal yoga class, take childbirth classes, and join Golden Gate Mothers Group. GGMG is a mothers group that has an active online forum and hosts events, playgroups, and meetups … Depending on preference and need, a pregnant woman in San Francisco might have a mix of acupuncture sessions, chiropractor appointments, working with birth doulas, and even taking hypnobirthing classes. Getting through pregnancy can seem to involve a whole team of people, not just your partner and OB.”

Given this level of micromanaging of pregnancy and early childhood, it’s not surprising that my friend who got breast implants (ok, a boob job) and cracks open the bottles of formula at our local playground elicits stares of shock (simple disdain would be easier to handle). Moms sit around comparing first sentences (not first steps, mind you) and boast about how much wild salmon their toddlers can consume, and then there’s the breast-feeding bragging rights and casualness to the whole practice—at the playground, coffee shop, nursery. I’m grateful. I certainly am one of those moms who liked being able to meet a friend outside of the house for a coffee and yet know I could feed my baby in peace. But public breast-feeding is a luxury of this little myopia of society. Or, as the mother from San Francisco reported, “After my baby was born my new mom friends from my prenatal yoga classes would send me text messages inviting me to join them at post-natal yoga classes (with baby) and ‘discover your baby’s RIE’ classes. Other moms have told me about music, swim (starting at two months!), and language classes for parent and baby.” These are not the things Nancy Chin’s low-income moms are fretting about, even if they wish they could.

Breast-feeding as status signifier is something of a new construct. Historically, having a wet nurse symbolized wealth. Let’s take the case of France, which still remains the United States’ counterpoint in mothering today, with books such as Bringing Up Bébé demonstrating the virtues of the French modus operandi as compared to America (less indulged, better behaved children, skinnier moms, and virtually no breastfeeding at two to three months postpartum).29

The values upheld today were in place some 300 years ago as well. In eighteenth-century France, the rule among the upper classes was to send one’s children off to wet nurses, whose occupation it was to breastfeed other women’s children. The upper-class decline in use of wet nurses only occurred in the latter half of the nineteenth century, when the practice became commonplace among women working in factories during the Industrial Revolution (in 1869, more than 40% of all babies were commercially nursed). Remember, infant formula was yet to be invented and the use of animal milk caused infant mortality of up to 50%, thus any woman who was unable to be with her baby round the clock found herself in a predicament (for the wealthy it was mainly a matter of convenience and freedom from maternal duties). While one cannot say with certainty that the adoption by lower-class women deterred the wealthy from wet nurses, two important events coincided with the mainstream use of wet nurses and decline among the upper classes. First, the increasingly wide-scale use of wet nurses in France encouraged an official government regulation of the practice through the Bureau des Nourrices, which primarily made sure the wet nurses were paid for their service. In post-Revolutionary France, however, the bureau emerged significantly weaker and unable to imprison debtor parents (i.e., those parents who used wet nurses but did not pay for their services). In fact, those parents who couldn’t pay were dismissed as charity cases, rather than penalized. This in combination with the country’s general economic distress forced the bureau to close its doors in 1876.³⁰ In its place, and due to the increasing demand for wet nurses by factory workers, a commercialized, private “business” arose, which was less regulated and subsequently mismanaged. While the nurses were almost certainly paid and at higher wages, they were also less carefully supervised: They were not subject to a strict medical evaluation and could take on children outside of work with the private firm. The lack of regulation and management caused a host of issues, from increased infant mortality to the spread of syphilis.31 These health concerns caused great alarm and made wet nurses a much less desirable option to those who had alternatives.

Second, and hardly unrelated, the upper-class consciousness began to change. From doctors’ reproach to the outcry of Rousseau in the mid-1700s, maternal nursing was considered the more morally sound approach. Among both the middle and upper classes, a “revolt of conscience” emerged with regard to hiring wet nurses to do the duty of a mother. Even though it had been practiced for many years among these very same economic elite, the use of wet nurses by mothers, unless they had rare physical limitations, was now thought of as essentially criminal.³² Thus, as the historian George Sussman remarks, “It would appear that in Napoleon III’s capital—and perhaps all over his empire—a paradoxical position had been reached: The demand for wet nurses had never been greater because the cities and the female working population in the cities had never been larger, while at the same time the idea of maternal nursing, and perhaps the revulsion against commercial nursing, were spreading downward from the upper levels of society.”³³ Breastfeeding one’s own child began to be viewed as a sign of high society. But things changed again—the invention of formula, the adoption of breastfeeding by other parts of society, and changing dynamics in the workforce. Thus, the status signals of motherhood changed as well.

In the early twentieth century, for fashionable women in England and America, infant formula became the more accepted means of feeding one’s baby. Wet nurses (not as popular in these countries as in France) were working-class and rural women and thus the distinction between whether one fed her child maternal milk or formula (or had a wet nurse do it instead) became a distinct class issue—poor women nursed, wealthier women did not. In addition, wealthier women were convinced of the “scientific” and modern superiority of manmade formulas over nature (even though it was clear through the medical studies of the time and the great Margaret Mead herself, that infants were more likely to survive and thrive on human milk). There was another implicit deterrent to breast-feeding: Fashionable society women who did not want to be burdened by the social limitations of nursing could point to modern medicine and even popular literature, which characterized upper-class women as physically weak and “unable” to nurse.34 Yet, as in most cultural arenas, the habits of the rich were emulated by the lower classes too, and soon formula was ubiquitous and breast-feeding declined rapidly. By the middle of the twentieth century, many middle-class American families chose the bottle over maternal milk, and from 1946 to 1972, universal rates of breast-feeding fell to 22–25%. Additionally, middle-and upper-class motherhood became a different experience, or what the historian Janet Golden calls the changing “cultural meaning of motherhood”: rather than basic nurturing and survival, more affluent women were thought to be responsible for character-building.³⁵ A dramatic increase in overall breast-feeding rates in the 1970s was followed by a decline in the 1980s. That dip in the 1980s is explained by the same factors that influence low levels of breast-feeding today: poverty, lack of education, lack of employment, race, and WIC. Public awareness, medical intervention, and access to more advanced breast pumps have all increased the rate of breast-feeding overall, and particularly with socioeconomically disadvantaged groups. Gains in those disadvantaged categories account for much of the increases in breast-feeding from the mid-1980s to the present day (although these rates are still significantly lower than those of higher income and highly educated Caucasian women, who have been breast-feeding at a static rate since the 1970s).³⁶

Contrast this trend with the French. Upper-middle-class French women, unlike their American counterparts, do not see breast-feeding as de rigueur. Today in France, barely half of women are still breastfeeding when they leave the hospital a few days after giving birth, and breast-feeding after a few months is thought to be a genuine oddity, let alone breast-feeding in public or keeping up with the AAP’s 12-month recommendation.³⁷ For French women, the badge of postpartum status is losing weight quickly and looking sexy again, contrary to the American mold of tent dresses and justifying one’s mom clothes as a result of being preoccupied with breast-feeding and attachment parenting.

In the United States, the now dominant practice of breast-feeding among upper-middle-class, educated non-Hispanic whites is rooted in something else too: the overall return to nature as superior to modern science, and the luxury to engage in the time-consuming practices that go with this ethos. Since the 1960s, the natural childbirth movement and the increase in home births have been adopted by well-educated, Caucasian women.38 Part of this evolution in how we give birth to and raise children is clearly rooted in the cultural revolution of the 1960s; it has now become the norm for conventional, affluent, educated white women to spend hours reading baby books, attending birthing classes, writing detailed birth plans, and in general getting very prepared for the business of having a baby. One of the ongoing conversations among them is the distinction between the natural birth versus one involving an epidural (the C-section is, theoretically, at least, an emergency-only option for these mothers). Women of this set not infrequently believe that the extreme pain of an unmedicated labor and delivery is part of the full experience of giving birth, while others worry that epidurals are harmful to the baby (although no medical evidence supports this concern). In fact, drug-free births are almost a rite of passage and the home birth is the holy grail, as giving birth goes. Yet these cultural and social beliefs are powerful and shape how women make decisions, so much so that they can put their own health in jeopardy. Emergency C-sections after 30 hours of home birth labor are not unheard of. In some medical opinions, while epidurals can slow labor, the pain and stress of natural birth can be bad for the baby.

Newborns room with their mothers in the days following delivery, “baby-friendly” hospitals offer constant lactation support and immediate “skin-to-skin” contact. In fact, the pressure to be a baby-friendly hospital is so great that hospitals aiming for this distinction refuse to provide even a drop of infant formula in the early days, even before a woman’s milk comes in and a baby might be starving. According to one obstetrician I spoke to, even one drop of formula means a child has not been “exclusively breast-fed” for the first six months, and thus the hospital’s statistics and subsequent ranking are compromised. And mothers are onboard with this no-formula mantra. As another physician I spoke to described, “A baby will be born with low blood sugar and we will need to give it sugar water. The mother will freak out and say that her baby is to be exclusively breast-fed, completely ignoring the medical imperative to give the baby sugar for her well-being.”

All of these new norms place a greater emphasis on nature rather than scientific medicine, a far cry from the gestalt of the mid–twentieth century. The luxury of time enables a mother to attain the information about these practices and to engage in them. Of course, as noted earlier, frequent breast-feeding, home births, and parenting classes involve time, acquisition of knowledge, and often money (or the luxury to trade money for time). In the example of breast-feeding, learning to nurse effectively, particularly with no supplemental formula, can involve practice, a number of classes during pregnancy, and, for some, encouragement from lactation specialists. Natural births, too, involve extensive classes on breathing and muscle relaxation rather than simply arriving at the hospital and relying on the doctor. A vaginal delivery takes a significant amount of time (e.g., waiting for a woman to go into labor, to dilate, and to deliver the baby). And those wishing for natural births by refusing medicine that induces or speeds up labor invest even more time in their child’s birth. While the national rate of C-sections is more than 30%, non-Hispanic whites and Asians, and particularly educated non-Hispanic whites, are the least likely to have one, leading researchers to conclude that C-sections, outside of emergencies, are most associated with poor-quality medical care.39 Twenty-five years ago, the New England Journal of Medicine reported the exact opposite finding: The majority of C-sections were occurring among wealthy, white women, suggesting that high socioeconomic status rather than medical indication drove this delivery outcome.⁴⁰

Today, the highest order of childbirth among wealthy American women is the home birth, again suggesting the changing tides of status and values in the whole childbirth and motherhood experience. More than 2% of well-educated, non-Hispanic white women (that’s 1 in 49) choose a planned home birth, and that number has continued to rise over the last ten years and shows no signs of slowing down. When a profile of midwife Ina May Gaskin and the home birth movement made the feature article of the New York Times magazine, it became clear that while the home birth movement may not statistically dominate delivery among the rich and educated (yet), as a cultural interest and genuine alternative, it’s become a desirable way of doing things. At the very least, home births are worth talking about among those who have the luxury to do so.41 Home birth is indeed a privilege for those who can afford to pay out of pocket (insurance doesn’t cover it).⁴²

A look at different places and different social groups makes it clear that even when we think we are making clinical or medical decisions, our social and cultural environment matters. In the early twenty-first century, while affluent women in the United States are considering natural or home birth, South American women pride themselves on C-sections as a way to avoid vaginal stretching, schedule their deliveries, and have control over their lives. Some 80–90% of private hospital deliveries in Brazil are Cesarean, some up to 99%. The World Health Organization believes that a rate exceeding 15% of women having Cesarean deliveries is too high. Or, as NPR put it succinctly, “C-Sections Deliver Cachet for Wealthy Brazilian Women … The emphasis on status begins at birth—and cesarean deliveries are the Louis Vuitton of the maternity world.”⁴³ In China, the Cesarean rate is 50%. (The number one reason why? “Everybody else is having surgery.”)⁴⁴

Practices of aspirational class conspicuous leisure extend beyond birth and breast-feeding. Parenting styles also have become symbols of socioeconomic position. Consider attachment parenting: Advocated by Dr. Sears, it requires the mother to be around her child nonstop, to continue to breast-feed on-demand extensively after one year, to co-sleep until five years old (or whenever the child is ready to leave his parents’ bed), and to “wear” one’s baby most of the day. This approach is parenting in the extreme, and admittedly has its anthropological merits: Sears found that children in less developed countries who were comforted by their mothers round the clock tended not to cry so much, and were much more secure in the long term. The geographer Jared Diamond came to a similar conclusion observing the childrearing habits of more primitive societies where co-sleeping, extended and on-demand breast-feeding, and mother-to-child skin contact are omnipresent well into the toddler years. Children were much better off (and less likely to be sociopaths). The time compression of Western society and its working mothers, Diamond argues, has created the social constructions of scheduled sleeping and feeding we associate with modern childrearing.⁴⁵

While not economic per se, the social practices of upper-middle-class motherhood are in and of themselves elitist and exclusionary, and they rely on cultural and symbolic capital and extensive unencumbered time that is not a part of most families’ prosaic interactions and daily life. Nevertheless, by virtue of engaging in these parenting behaviors, upper-middle-class parents acquire the material means that ultimately reveal their conspicuous parenting and therefore their and their children’s social position. Day-to-day objects like the Baby au Lait designer nursing covers, Ergo and Baby Bjorn baby carriers, and cloth or compostable diapers operate as efficient signals of this particular type of motherhood. The nursing cover itself is not expensive or even overly conspicuous; rather it is a material sign of an often expensive and time-intensive mode of parenting. Thus, the increasingly in-vogue practices of attachment parenting, home births, and breast-feeding signal an elite position vis-à-vis most American mothers who face time and money constraints that prohibit them from these behaviors. I don’t mean to suggest that women engage in these practices for the sake of status, but I am reminded of my own experiences in dissecting these phenomena.

I became a mother in my early thirties, and prior to the birth of my first son I had babysat for fewer than ten hours in my life. When I found out I was pregnant, I had little more than a vague notion that there were benefits to breast-feeding, and yet, without much prompting, I took breast-feeding classes, learned infant CPR, did my research to find a great obstetrician and pediatrician, and read dozens of books and articles on childrearing. As I write about motherhood, I realize I am the very woman I write about.

As I write, I continue to ask myself the extent to which my choices are conscious, and if conscious, what are my motivations? They are not status-driven in any intentional way (there are much easier, less time-consuming ways to attain social position), they are not a response to medical evidence (I am a mere layperson on such matters). Rather, I am propelled by something that transcends empirics: my friends and all those mothers at Mommy&Me playgroups and the playground—essentially the milieu in which I exist every day. But truthfully, I do not absorb these practices in such a conscious manner. In my habitus, this is just how we do things; it is in the air. It feels unconscious and intuitive, like one’s personal sense of morality or the desire to eat when hungry. Yet national statistics show me there is nothing unconscious about my decisions. My choices are influenced all the time by where I live, financial means, and the resources offered close by and those mothers also engaging in these practices thus affirming my choices: Living in California, getting paid maternity leave, being able to afford a breast pump, knowing that lactation consultants exist (let alone talking to one), taking classes on mothering which espouse these practices, having email access to my obstetrician and pediatrician who answer all and any of my questions at all times of day and night. This style of motherhood, like other styles of life, to use Max Weber’s term,46 may not be material or ostensibly conscious, but its implications and influencers are just as dramatic and wide as the more physical consumer objects that divide across race and class lines. To quote the sociologist Annette Lareau from her book Unequal Childhoods, “Individuals carry out their lives within a social structure.”

The question then emerges, why have some mothers (and parents more generally) adopted practices that are difficult, time-consuming, and sometimes even painful instead of using that very same time for leisure? In Veblen’s time one would not have made such an effort during leisure time. Veblen defined conspicuous leisure as the unproductive use of time, time that was not used for any greater utility. In short, leisure was actually leisure: People watched sports, went to university to study the “Classics” like Greek and Roman simply for the sake of learning (rather than practical application), went on extensively long holidays, and lived a life of idleness.⁴⁷ But it’s not just mothers who channel money and time into things that are far from leisurely. As a 2008 analysis shows, for all parents, as income and education increase, leisure time and housework decrease, yet simultaneously, time with children increases. The Brookings Institute scholars Garey Ramney and Valerie Ramney find this trend has been going on since the mid-1990s. High socioeconomic women spend two to three times more time with preschool children than those of lower socio-economic groups.⁴⁸

Why, Ramney and Ramney ask, would parents whose own time is increasingly economically valuable, give more of it away for “free” (i.e., to spend time with their kids)? These scholars believe that the answer lies in “cohort crowding”—it’s so much harder to get into an elite college these days that elite parents need to focus more time on priming their children. Or as these economists put it, “We argue that increased competition for college admissions may be an important source of these trends. The number of college-bound students has surged in recent years, coincident with the rise in time spent on childcare. The resulting ‘cohort crowding’ has led parents to compete more aggressively for college slots by spending increasing amounts of time on college preparation.”49 As a study in the journal Demography reports, wealthy, educated parents are not just spending more time with their children, they are also spending significantly more money on them. While historically that money was devoted to the teen years, after the 1990s, most of the financial resources of wealthy families have been devoted to under-six-year-old children and those in their mid-twenties.⁵⁰ In short, schlepping one’s child to those pre-K Saturday morning violin lessons really may pave the way for Princeton.

These parenting practices fit into the frame of what Annette Lareau calls “concerted cultivation.” Whether pursuing breast-feeding to increase baby’s IQ, or art classes at the age of three, or lacrosse in high school, aspirational class parents see their children as developmental projects and initiate structured and cultivated modes of parenting to maximize their children’s future success. As Lareau notes in her book, these choices in parenting both suggest present social class and impact future social, educational, and work outcomes. Along with the structured activities from birth to high school, children of upper-middle-class families are encouraged to question authority, engage in constant negotiation with their parents and, through their various engagements, become socially adept. Contrast this type of parenting with “accomplishment of natural growth,” which Lareau argues is the dominant style of parenting among poor and working-class parents. This type of parenting emphasizes respect for authority, more parental directives (i.e., “go wash your hands” rather than an extensive discussion on the origins of germ theory), and far less structured activity (e.g., fewer music classes, play dates, and gymnastics). These aspirational class children are reared to feel empowered, and tend to have larger vocabularies and greater social aptitude (but are criticized for being entitled), while the working-class kids, often more independent, learn the skills of following orders that are thought to be important in their future work in more rote jobs (but also limiting for upward mobility).

For upper-middle-class children to engage in highly cultivated leisure activities, they require geographical, cultural, and financial access. Aspirational class parents (even the overworked ones) use their precious free time to cultivate this structure: They sign their kids up for extracurricular science classes, AYSO soccer, art classes, SAT prep, and they engage in extensive conversations around any array of topics their children wish to speak about. This type of parenting exhibits intense peer effects, where parents in this social echelon are trading notes and suggestions, and competing on the playground, on parenting listservs, and at school events, and in a way that low-income parents have not the time, information, or capital to participate in. As Lareau surmises, “Children grow up within a broad, highly stratified social system.”

THE PRODUCTIVE LEISURE OF THE ASPIRATIONAL CLASS

Whether parenting or exercising, paradoxically for the twenty-first century aspirational class, conspicuous leisure is actually quite productive. This contradiction is due to the fact that today’s “leisure class” is not actually leisurely. Conspicuous leisure still exists but it has changed in two profound ways. First, today’s aspirational class, many of whom have built themselves up through hard work, infuse even their leisure time with productivity and value. Second, key conspicuous leisure activities in Veblen’s time—going to college, playing sports—are now essential tickets to upward mobility.

Excepting the rare trust fund families and a few children of oligarchs, most people make their own money, and those who make the most money also work the most. The economist Robert Frank argues that these labor market elites actually experience “leisure inequality” (certainly by their own doing). The most educated and most affluent have, in absolute terms, much less free time than the less well-off. They are so accustomed to being overproductive in their work lives that it carries over into their leisure time, including their intense and active focus on childrearing. Such devotion to children is born out of love but also stems from a parental belief that this effort increases their offspring’s well-being and future success. This last point is where childrearing is not just suggestive of social position through conspicuous leisure, but actually reproduces class and socioeconomic position. Spending extra time reading to one’s children, playing with them on the floor, and providing the time, patience, and financial resources for sports and test-prep classes may be time-consuming in the present, but it also grooms these children for a bright and successful future.

Whether mothering or shuttling a child to hockey lessons, there is a constant pressure to be productive in work and in life, and this observation extends beyond parenting. The economist Staffan Linder uses the term “harried leisure class” to explain the cycle of working more to spend more, a cycle he calls the “paradoxes of affluence.”51 Because of the way in which the current capitalist economy works, to build up assets one must sacrifice time and time of course is not storable. Thus, in the cycle to attain money to consume more, we end up with less time to simply enjoy the pleasures of life. These socioeconomic conditions come from a long-standing observation of modern, industrial, and postindustrial society. Many members of the aspirational class achieved success there through hard work, and that ethos, the “Protestant work ethic” in the popular vernacular, spills over into all facets of their lives. One can trace the austerity and all-work-no-fun to Puritanism, but really the Industrial Revolution explains the rise of a new class of workers who attained capital and social mobility through hard work rather than nobility and bloodlines. Productivity is highly valued and is rewarded through economic success and in turn social position and status. Unless you are Bill Gates (who dropped out of Harvard, anyway), it is challenging to achieve upward mobility, let alone become truly wealthy, without a college degree. The university, Veblen’s veritable institution of conspicuous leisure, is the sine qua non for any member of capitalist society. Those very “idle” courses—classics, the humanities, poetry—are a dying breed as students seek out business, finance, and economics degrees.⁵² These latter course choices are an even further turn from Veblen’s notion of leisure—learning is not simply about being well-bred or well-read; it’s about translating knowledge into productivity. Sports and learning the violin—again conspicuous leisure activities during Veblen’s time—are now productive and proactive measures to make one seem desirable for university. These activities become the means for achieving acceptance into college. Playing football or running track, learning three instruments or four languages gives one a fighting chance at the Ivy League. Sports are now a means to be awarded a scholarship and show diversity and well-roundedness in an applicant. In the United Kingdom, the “gap year,” that is, the noncompulsory year between graduating from high school and starting university, allows students to travel the world, embark on fascinating internships, and work in the developing world. All of these activities are laudable, but they are also a part of the grooming process for university and making oneself more interesting to admissions committees.

These transformations have prompted new means for twenty-first-century elites to suggest social position through conspicuous leisure. Today, conspicuous leisure, so removed from its origins as a bastion of idleness and nonproductivity, allows the aspirational class to make moral judgments about their behavior (and others). As the next section will show, they find the material means to show it.

LULULEMON’S GROOVE PANT AND PRODUCTIVE CONSPICUOUS LEISURE

In the 1950s, Lotte Berk, a former ballet dancer living in London, needed to figure out a way to pay the bills. With the help of an osteopath (who was helping her recover from ballet injuries) she created an exercise routine similar in method and results to Pilates and yoga, but, it turns out, was even better. Breathtakingly difficult and strenuous, Berk’s approach focused on core stability and very specific toning exercises, with humorous and suggestive names including “the Prostitute” and “the French Lavatory,” perhaps due to the repetition of pelvic thrusts throughout the workout. Berk, described in one profile as “a bubbly German Jew who narrowly dodged the Nazis,” opened her Manchester Street Studio in the carpeted, drafty, dark basement below her friend Vidal Sassoon’s salon in West End London.53 Between the two of them, this location developed a devoted clientele among the Swinging London’s glamorous set. Sassoon styled the ladies’ hair and Berk shaped the figures of a celebrity clientele that included Joan Collins and Barbra Streisand. As the New York Observer put it, this approach to exercise was “the original, the mothership—the grand dame of making your ass smaller and higher and not quite so flat. It was there before step aerobics and spinning and Pilates and Tae Bo and a New York Sports Club or yoga center on every corner.”54

In the 1960s, a young Midwestern woman named Lydia Bach showed up at the Manchester Street Studio and was entranced by the transformative effects of the exercises and the following that Berk had cultivated. Making a deal with Berk (not a particularly lucrative one for Berk), Bach took the exercise routine across the pond. In 1970, Bach opened up the Lotte Berk Method studio on 67^th Street in the heart of New York City’s Upper East Side and later opened another studio in an old potato barn in the Hamptons, on Bridgehampton’s Butter Lane, so clients could still attend classes during summer holidays. Upper-crust WASPs, celebrities, and New York socialites attended the classes in droves—the very social x-rays chronicled by Tom Wolfe (who was also a client of Bach’s). As Bach herself reported, “I had all three generations of the Kennedys … in one class.” For many years, the studios were “a well-kept and expensive secret of New York’s upper crust,” as the New York Observer put it, and Bach refused to franchise or make deals with others to open up more studios in New York or other cities (Bach briefly opened a studio in Los Angeles). At $30 a class in the 1970s (that’s $183.87 in 2015 dollars), only the rich could afford it anyway. But its success and cult following made it hard to dissuade others from copying. These exercises really worked. Because the exercises isolated specific muscles through discrete movements, one’s body really looked different—toned and tightened in ways that an ordinary run, game of tennis, or visit to the gym could not accomplish. Within a few decades, offshoots began showing up around New York City and ultimately major metros around the country. Burr Leonard and her then-husband Carl Diehl met Berk and studied at the Lotte Berk Method studio before opening their first The Bar Method studio in Greenwich, Connecticut in 1992. In 1999, they opened three more studios in Darien, Westport, and New Canaan Connecticut. From a socioeconomic and demographic perspective, all of these Connecticut locations were essentially the suburban equivalents of New York City’s Upper East Side. A few years later, two of Bach’s star students left the Lotte Berk Method studio and started Core Fusion, which was housed in New York City’s fancy “exhale” spas. Not only did DeVito and Halfpapp catalyze an exodus of most of Bach’s instructors, but given the glamorous backdrop (and spa benefits) of Core Fusion’s new home, many clients also left. Bach’s approach was no-frills and her studio, increasingly decrepit, was housed in an old brownstone, which one client called “a dump” and remarked, “I think of my grandmother’s toilet.”55

Since these early offshoots, a number of different barre studios have opened across the country—Pop Physique (Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco), The Bar Method (after Connecticut it opened in dozens of places around the country), and perhaps most famously, Physique 57 (New York City, the Hamptons—in the old Lotte Berk studio, and Beverly Hills). Each emphasizes different measures of yoga, Pilates, and ballet using varying weights and a ballet barre.

Irrespective of where one attends, barre classes are the consummate example of twenty-first-century conspicuous leisure. Sure, there are differences in clients, peer group for one’s conspicuous leisure, and style of dress, but the effect is the same: These classes signal financial stability and free time for leisure activities. This conspicuous leisure operates on a number of levels. From a strictly economic perspective, each class is expensive by any global standards (ranging from approximately $10–$40 a class) and to achieve the desired effect one must attend classes two to four times a week. Even if each class doesn’t cost $183.87, it still adds up pretty quickly.

But there are more social and cultural signals that emerge from attending barre classes. As conspicuous leisure is suggestive of luxury of time, the hour-long classes themselves reveal one has the capacity to attend and perfect one’s body. Those who attend the Monday 11 am class (or its equivalent in the middle of a workday) are revealing conspicuous leisure to everyone else who has also shown up. In and of itself, this behavior suggests flexibility or affluence or both in one’s career, or for some, the luxury of not working at all. As Pop Physique’s Deric Williams remarked, “A single mom in Kentucky can’t do that … We used to have childcare [in the studio] but we stopped because most people had babysitters and nannies.”

Second, people who go to these classes tend to wear particular clothes to class, and to run errands. As Jennifer Williams, the former ballet dancer and co-founder of Pop Physique, remarked of her time as an instructor at The Bar Method, initially she wore nondescript workout clothing, but in the early 2000s, as she taught barre class in San Francisco, Williams noticed, “Every woman in the class had those pants with the little symbol. I realized ‘I have to have those pants.’” Those pants, Lululemon’s Groove Pant, is the signature piece of the company’s collection and materialized as the badge of the new urban conspicuous leisure. The pants are indeed very flattering (black, bellbottom style, and made of a thick spandex blend that sucks everything in). Still, the Groove Pant requires one to actually work out to look good in them and to have the financial means to purchase a pair (they sell for $100 per pair, and one presumably needs more than one pair if exercising several times a week). So in one fell swoop, the wearer of these exercise pants fully transmits the wearer’s conspicuous leisure. Each of these exercise studios also offers its own line of clothing with t-shirts, tight spandex, and the standard grip socks “necessary” for barre work (often the bottom of the sock is designed with a grip made out of the studio’s logo or name and prevents slipping on the barre or hardwood studio floor). In more recent years, many offshoots of Lululemon’s Groove Pant have appeared, including capri yoga pants with mesh cutouts, wild geometric printed leggings, and Stella McCartney for Adidas gear sold at Barney’s. Even those who do not religiously attend exercise class can evoke the patina of conspicuous leisure through the adoption of casual sportswear like Athletica or Lululemon as a part of their regular wardrobe. Designer workout clothing has become part of the aspirational class mythology.

Finally, and most importantly, if one has the time and money to attend cardio barre classes several times a week, it does start to show. As the New York Observer less than delicately put it, women who attend these classes do look physically different from their non–barre workout class attendees. So merely by picking up coffee, stopping at the grocery store, or going out to dinner, those who attend classes at Pop Physique, Physique 57, The Bar Method, or any permutation of cardio barre class, reveal their conspicuous leisure by simply living their lives. And if one is ever concerned that the world is unaware of the hard work of such conspicuous leisure, there is always the “healthy selfie,” which is a photo taken post-workout that can be instantly posted to Facebook or Instagram, or one’s blog.

This trend is visible through other types of conspicuous leisure, where many aspirational class members find the material means to make them conspicuous via the clothes, the bottles of water carried to and fro, and the murky green pressed juices slugged down after a workout, along with simply being a member or regular at elite exercise studios. In her book Fit for Consumption, the sociologist Jennifer Maguire looks at how using free time for fitness fits into the larger gestalt, viewing leisure time as an occasion for productivity and personal development. The opportunity to appropriate one’s time for exercise is a sign of social position and luxury and, as Maguire argues, studios and gyms were quick to reinvent themselves and their fitness regimes accordingly. As Maguire observes, “The future of exercise was being reformulated. Clubs sold fitness as a leisure lifestyle activity … Health club memberships and physical appearance were interrelated status markers in an overall lifestyle package.” Places like Equinox and Core Fusion, initially places to exercise, also began to offer luxury services and amenities; thus, frequenting one of these facilities in and of itself suggests social position. As n+1 co-founder Mark Greif writes, “Modern exercise makes you acknowledge the machine operating inside yourself. Nothing can make you believe we harbor nostalgia for factory work but a modern gym.”56 So, leisure is productive always and the goods and services accompanying them—certainly conspicuous consumption of a sort—are an efficient means of showing the world that you use your leisure time to stay in shape and perfect your abs. The Economist recently reported that while many industries were damaged by the Recession, exercise (in the form of gyms, clubs, classes) has remained robust and has grown. The industry’s health, in a manner of speaking, is owing to the increase in elites working out. For example, those in the top quintile exercise more than six times more minutes per week than those in the bottom quintile. As the magazine observed, “sweating on purpose is becoming an elite phenomenon…. Where once ‘prosperous’ was a synonym for overweight, being fit (and thin with it) is a marker of status.”⁵⁷ Or as the sociologist Harvey Molotch remarked, “Leisure once meant utter whiteness and lack of muscle tone. Now you need some affluence to have muscle tone. The working-class men used to be the only people with biceps, working at fast food gives you no biceps.”

These examples are no different than that of the social mores of privileged modern motherhood. “The fact that breast-feeding requires endurance, inconvenience and in some cases physical suffering, only increases its status,” writes the journalist Patricia Druckerman.58 Women who are spending the year on maternity leave aren’t getting daily manicures. Instead, they spend their time breast-feeding, bonding with their child, trying to get a head start on verbal skills. All of these practices are productive but suggest the glut of otherwise luxurious time that most moms don’t get.

Aspirational class productivity in leisure spills over into all facets of life. Some members are never able to just relax. Even watching television—Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, or HBO’s latest epic—is about being a part of the cultural zeitgeist. How else can an individual seem informed (and intellectually productive) at a dinner party if he’s not spending free time doing things that make him seem smart and culturally aware? And if a member of the aspirational class doesn’t actually have the time to watch TV or read books, forms of media from Twitter to the Daily Beast allow overly productive people to pretend to be watching or following the latest cultural happenings, television programs, or book publications so that they can appear to spend more time reading the newspaper and the New Yorker than anyone actually does. “What we all feel now is the constant pressure to know enough, at all times, lest we be revealed as culturally illiterate. So that we can survive an elevator pitch, a business meeting, a visit to the office kitchenette, a cocktail party, so that we can post, tweet, chat, comment, text as if we have seen, read, watched, listened.” Karl Taro Greenfield writes in the New York Times, “What matters to us, awash in petabytes of data, is not necessarily having actually consumed this content firsthand but simply knowing that it exists—and having a position on it, being able to engage in the chatter about it. We come perilously close to performing a pastiche of knowledgeability…. It’s not lying, exactly, when we nod knowingly at a cocktail party or over drinks when a colleague mentions a movie or book that we have not actually seen or read, nor even read a review of. There is a very good chance that our conversational partner may herself be simply repeating the mordant observations of someone in her timeline or feed.”⁵⁹

When members of the aspirational class are being so productive with their limited leisure time, they lose sight of what a luxury it is to spend time this way. They are very busy demonstrating and signifying the unique ways in which their time is used doing things that are fundamentally different from everyone else. “Just as they want a return on their investment and philanthropy,” writes economist Robert Frank, “rich people now want a return on their leisure time.” So part of that time is also used to judge those who aren’t doing these things with their time: infant formula rather than mother’s milk? Poisonous! The culturally illiterate who spend time watching lowbrow sitcoms? For shame! In other words, part of modern conspicuous leisure is a cultural and moral superiority directed toward those who don’t participate in these behaviors and an assumption that this lack of participation is always a choice.

The truth is much more complicated. These behaviors that seem so natural, that many members of the aspirational class think everyone should engage in, are deeply embedded into the social norms of the educated elite and their social groups. Breast-feeding and natural births are “intuitive” or “instinctual,” or so the mind-set goes. But they are a luxury, make no mistake, even if they are tiring and feel like work. Intuitive as such practices feel, they are not an obvious or easy option for the middle and lower classes. On this point, it’s worth referring to one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century. Daniel Bell wrote The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism in 1976 and it remains one of the most potent commentaries on modern society. Bell argues that society has taken the economic advantages offered by capitalism and its work ethic to create new sensibilities and massive freedom in our social behavior and cultural styles. Those who would once have been relegated to a lifestyle reflecting the austerity and frugality of this Protestant work value system (think William Whyte’s The Organization Man) are now embracing new forms of cultural behavior such as the avant garde (does it even exist anymore?) and bohemianism. Our economic productivity offers us the chance to be culturally liberal, or “cultural omnivores,” as sociologists refer to this particular bastion of new elite society. We remain very productive, and this quality defines the aspirational class and how its members got there. But the outward status markers of such productive success lie in accompanying lifestyle and consumption choices.60 Bell’s great contribution in this respect is that society has culturally shifted so that anti-bourgeois lifestyles (even bohemian) have become a signifier of higher economic status. Or as David Brooks remarks, bobos make every effort to turn consumer choices into sacred and moral decisions (water purifiers, private meditation classes, lactation consultants, and slate Zen bathrooms). These choices that seem to be instinctual or a return to a more natural way of living are actually a product of how capital allows us freedom to be this way. “Mindfulness” may seem like a virtuous return to the pre-digital age and suggest anti-capitalist sensibilities, but it takes time and money to learn and practice meditation. Copper cookware, much more environmentally sound than its Teflon counterpart (and of course closer to nature using a natural element), costs $1,500 a set, while the latter goes for $50. Or, to quote historian Frank Trentmann again, “Morality is woven deep into the fabric of our material lives.”61

The extent to which status decisions are a reflection of wanting to show off to the world or the basic human desire to be accepted is hard to disentangle. While we do not feel much sympathy for the woman buying the Hermès Birkin handbag in an effort to feel accepted (see also The Primates of Park Avenue), the woman who makes a choice to breastfeed, to have a home birth, to quit work to spend more time with her child, to exercise more for health reasons, seems a bit more authentic, deeper, or at least aiming for a greater good—but the ability to make these seemingly wildly different choices emerges from the same socioeconomic class and accrual of cultural capital.

Thus simultaneously, there is a clear backlash to America’s new type of conspicuous leisure—it creates even more social stratification and inequality than any form of designer handbag. At least in the case of the handbag, it’s clear that those with money get the luxury version. With conspicuous leisure, we assume that if someone isn’t doing something it’s a moral choice. We ignore the socioeconomic limitations (or the freedom, for the affluent members of the aspirational class) of how people make decisions. Why is that person overweight or another less culturally aware? Perhaps because they work for an hourly wage, and thus don’t have the resources to buy expensive fresh vegetables or the “productive leisure time” to attend evening Pilates classes or read the New Yorker. In the case of motherhood, aspirational class society makes women feel badly if they end up using infant formula or have a C-section. Mothers disapprove of pacifier use, while simultaneously using their very own finger to soothe their babies.

For aspirational class parents, sweetened drinks and Doritos are the toddler equivalent of smoking. As a recent study by sociologist Caitlin Daniel reports, it’s not that low-income parents aren’t aware of the benefits of children eating vegetables and “healthy food,” it’s that they can’t afford the waste if the children refuse to eat it or throw it on the floor. For most young children, outside of fatty, tasty items like chicken nuggets and French fries, it takes 8 to 12 tries of broccoli, salmon, or other more virtuous foods before a child will properly eat it. So every time a poor mother spends her minimal income on Brussels sprouts that end up on the floor, she is not just wasting money she doesn’t have but is also giving up the opportunity to buy something her child will actually consume. As Daniel remarked, “Poor parents not only have to calculate how much their food costs, they must also consider what happens if no one eats it.” Daniel also studied well-to-do parents. Upon asking one such mother how she felt about the waste of food and money associated with her toddler’s food rejection the mother remarked, “Honestly, it never crossed my mind.”62 And yet such an aspirational class mother will gasp at the sight of a fellow mom purchasing her young child a McDonald’s happy meal for lunch, secure in her own decision to make her toddler a bento box of perfectly grilled chicken and a rainbow array of vegetables. This aspirational class mother has the very best intentions to provide healthy food for her own child, but she forgets that the former mother almost never has that choice.

Consider the maelstrom of aspirational class parenting: the elite, private preschool. Tuition runs $10,000–$40,000 a year and wait-lists start before a child is even born. Forty-five-year-old dads race out of work to pick up their kids by 5 pm (only to work into the wee hours after bedtime). Some dads work in the broadly drawn “creative class,” and thus their flexible hours allow them to join their children for lunch. Stay-at-home moms, some with Ivy League graduate degrees, are shopping for organic vegetables and organizing play dates and music lessons while their children are at school. These are parents who, steeped in Lareau’s concerted cultivation, spend most of their free time thinking about how to make their children’s lives better. Yet, by default, in many of their decisions they are subconsciously judging those who make different ones, oblivious to the fact that each decision ultimately rests on the economic and social freedom a mother does or does not possess, and that this freedom is derived almost entirely from her position in a capitalist society.

Not all conspicuous leisure is about status, nor are all breast-feeders alpha moms looking down upon the rest. In fact, many members of the aspirational class who engage in exercise, attentive parenting, and acquisition of cultural knowledge are doing it with good intentions. But the point remains that the mythologies that surround twenty-first-century conspicuous leisure are those of a dominant social class who has the luxury of time and knowledge to partake. As the next chapter will demonstrate, this luxury of affluence and information can inspire very important social movements and pushback not just against conspicuous consumption, but also against the very means of production that transformed capital, consumption, and status in the first place.