Michelle Kuhl, Michelle Mouton, Margaret Hostetler, Druscilla Scribner, Tracy Slagter, and Orlee Hauser
IN 2006, six academic mothers from four disciplines at the University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh started a sociable reading group focused on the “mommy wars.” According to Toni Zimmerman, and her colleagues (2008), the media derives high ratings by explicitly pitting working moms against stay-at-home moms on TV programs. Many in our group had noticed a growing literature of mainstream articles and books on the subject, such as Lisa Belkin’s New York Times article “The Opt-Out Revolution” (2003), Linda Hirshman’s manifesto Get to Work (2006), and Danielle Crittenden’s What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us (1999). Women’s hallway conversations evolved into a reading group that tapped into a real need for a discussion of the work–life balance as it applied to our immediate academic community. For two consecutive summers, we met monthly to examine common readings. We found we agreed on many issues, mainly the difficulty of juggling work and motherhood, but disagreed on the exact nature of the problem and the best solutions. Our meetings mixed the personal and the political as we debated feminism, swapped personal stories, and lent each other used baby clothes. Most important, we learned to stop worrying about the “mommy wars” and to value our social ties to one another.
We are exactly the target demographic at which current media judgments and exhortations are directed: thirty-five- to forty-five-year-old Generation X women. We are all middle- and upper-middle-class professional women with advanced degrees and children. Judith Warner calls us “a generation of control freaks” who have turned inward to focus exclusively on ourselves and our immediate social and familial circle, causing our motherhood instincts to blossom freakishly into “perfect madness” (2006, 47). Linda Hirshman calls us “the backlash generation” who deserted the gains of the second-wave feminist movement (2006, 1). Caitlin Flanagan thinks we have a “stubborn longing for an earlier way of life” that undercuts our desire to leave children for work (2006, xxxiii). We fit the generic caricature of the stressed-out woman stuck in the office racing to meet deadlines as her child languishes in a never-ending string of day-care and nanny situations. Depending on which author one reads, we are the generation that is opting out or opting in, destroying the family or carrying the torch of progress, or squandering the feminist revolution.
The members of our reading group acknowledge that we are elite. We recognize that we are more privileged than the majority of women in America and in the world. We are non-Hispanic white, heterosexual, highly educated, and relatively affluent, and we have flexible schedules. Not every woman gets to wring her hands over whether to put her baby in a quality day care so she can work at an intellectually stimulating job and go home to share housework with a feminist husband. However, research suggests that the very flexibility of academic work may make it more difficult to carve out time to do the intellectual projects required of the job. As Belinda Probert reports, “Much of what academics do can be done from home, at night or on weekends. This maybe, however, have [sic] precisely the opposite of its expected consequences.… [T]he flexibility of academic work makes it more difficult for women to exert the power of absence since there are relatively few hours when they are required to be in the workplace (2005, 69).
The notion of “the power of absence” originated with Alison Morehead’s assertion that the ability to be absent from the household to do paid or meaningful work or both is essential to increasing gender equality in the workplace (cited in Probert 2005, 69). Our identities as professional women also make our work flexibility problematic. Although research has shown that working-class women and middle-class women share values of motherhood and fulfilling work, and both are pulled in different directions by commitments to work and family, middle-class (defined as professional) women “were unable to resolve their dilemmas in favor of one direction,” whereas working-class women “tended to orient their lives more around their families” (Walker 1990, 313, 314). Professional women felt more commitment toward their jobs for a variety of reasons, but they used the flexibility of their work to try to resolve the work–family dilemma—for example, “cut[ting] out lunches rather than stay[ing] late in the office” (Walker 1990, 314). In many ways, these findings dovetail with Linda Hirshman’s assertion that “educated and privileged women matter” because they influence a wide array of decisions at top levels of society, politics, the economy, and the media, which can have positive effects (2006, 9). After all, if we (privileged women) can’t make this work, what chances do women with fewer resources have? And it seems that professional women are using all their resources and working very hard to make it work.
Our plan was simple: we would collectively decide on a book list and meet once a month, rotating living rooms, to discuss the book we read. Unlike all of the other scholarship we are expected to produce, this informal book club was the result of an organic process. We were curious about the “mommy wars,” but we did not plan to cover the literature exhaustively or write a paper. The book group started in the summer of 2007 and read Hirshman’s Get to Work (2006), Caitlin Flanagan’s To Hell with All That (2006), and Judith Warner’s Perfect Madness (2006). In the summer of 2008, we read Leslie Bennetts’s The Feminine Mistake (2007), Amy Richards’s Opting In (2007), and Allison Pearson’s I Don’t Know How She Does It (2003), and we revisited Betty Friedan’s classic The Feminine Mystique ([1963] 1997). We also branched out individually and shared choice bits of other relevant works, including Danielle Crittenden’s What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us (1999), Neil Gilbert’s A Mother’s Work (2008), Arlie Hochschild’s The Time Bind (1997), and Pamela Stone’s Opting Out (2007a).
For each of us, combining motherhood and an academic career is a patchwork, and we all feel compromised in both the work we accomplish and the mothering we do. This chapter interweaves our analysis of the literature on working mothers with reflections from individual group members that bear witness to the personal nature of our struggle. After introducing ourselves, we compare the authors’ suggestions to our own experiences. The chapter concludes with a discussion of what we have gained through our participation in this reading group and the subtle impact it has had on our university community.
STRUGGLING ALONE
Among the six group members, we have ten children. Some of our children were born while mom was in graduate school, others while mom was junior faculty; only one was born after tenure. To cope with work and children, we utilized many different strategies that hinged on a host of factors, including job flexibility, spousal participation, and individual children’s emotional and physical needs. Most of us used day care, although two fathers stayed at home full-time at least temporarily, and one of us had an au pair. We also discovered how even a good child-care situation can devolve into a problem, forcing readjustment: day-care hours are limited, children become ill, cross-country moves are disruptive, and our stay-at-home fathers also needed time to write. These moments are stressful. And yet we all remained committed to juggling work and motherhood. As one of us put it, “It’s not possible to balance it all.… It’s just possible to tread water and hope not to drown. But I’m happy just to be in the pool—wouldn’t trade it for anything.” For all of us, this reading group helped us stay “in the pool” as we balanced jobs, children, and our personal lives. Many of us had experiences in graduate school at universities that were hostile to women with children. When we arrived at Oshkosh, there was neither a maternity policy nor a network in place to help working mothers, something not unique to our institution. We started this group to read books and to develop such a network.
The following reflections provide a glimpse of our struggle to balance work and family when we started the group.
“During the first year of my son’s life I felt very much like an imposter. I pretended to be a ‘real professor,’ up to date on my material, up to date on my research. Anyone who managed to look past my clumpy clothing and my raging acne seemed to be fooled, but I was not.”
“I am tired all the time (but joyful) and have to compromise on both work and parenting all the time.”
“By the time I returned home after a day of teaching and then carting a five-month around, I was too exhausted to do anything else. This meant that the household organization slipped, my quality time with my husband and older son slipped, and my time to work on anything aside from my teaching slipped.”
READING TOGETHER
Many of us joined this reading group hoping to discover the secret to living a fulfilling, organized, balanced, guilt-free life that had thus far proven to be elusive. Despite our “flexible” academic schedules, the consensus was that none of us had the time we wanted to devote to our scholarship, our marriages, our children, or ourselves. Our feelings were not unusual. Karen Walker’s 1990 sociological study found that mothers in both working-class and professional jobs were tired, felt tension between their roles as mothers and workers, and felt guilt over inadequate time with their children. The following discussion synthesizes our responses to the books we read.
One characteristic of much of this genre of literature is its overt proscriptive nature. Most blatant in this regard is Linda Hirshman’s manifesto Get to Work. Although we were enamored with Hirshman’s contention that women deserve a flourishing life and that it is a societal problem when elite women drop out of professional careers for family, we were surprised to discover how far we were from her model of a successful woman. Hirshman demands that women (1) take financially lucrative jobs, (2) take work seriously and refuse to mommy-track their careers (that is, put their careers on hold as they raise their children), (3) bargain aggressively in their marriages for an equal division of household work, and (4) bear only one child. As professors in the liberal arts, we have failed her first test by not seeking financially rewarding jobs. Hirshman would say that many of us have failed her second test, too, by taking jobs at a comprehensive university and by scaling back scholarship goals. However, we feel that Hirshman misses the mark by defining too narrowly her proscription “take work seriously.” Despite our adjustments, none of us has been mommy-tracked; our salaries and responsibilities continue to be in line with our male colleagues; and we all are active scholars in our fields. Although we negotiate responsibilities within our marriages, we disagree widely about what shape this bargaining should take. The most obvious (and least regretted) breach of Hirshman’s rules is that four out of six of us have two children.
Hirshman’s model is elegant and clean. In contrast, our lives are realistic and messy. Perhaps this explains our positive responses to Allison Pearson’s novel I Don’t Know How She Does It. The main character, Kate, a frantically overstretched mother of two who loves her job in the high-stakes world of international finance, is a witty, overdrawn portrayal of the crisis all working moms suffer. We found it both hilarious and cathartic to read about fictional Kate’s attempt to “distress” a store-bought cake and try to pass it off as her own. We related as Kate worked the “third shift,” worrying obsessively over every piece of her carefully crafted child-care system and its potentially detrimental long-term impact on her children. However, we hated the ending as Kate concedes defeat, quits her job, and moves away from London. We questioned Alison Pearson’s decision to have Kate give up her career rather than seek a less perfectionist strategy to balance work and family.
Our frustration with Kate and our acceptance of the chaos of our own lives explain why Leslie Bennetts’s The Feminine Mistake resonated the most clearly for us. She argues forcefully that women should continue to work not only for personal fulfillment, but also for economic security, thus rejecting the false dichotomy of work and feminism. Bennetts suggests that the most intense years of mothering are when children are young. Unlike Hirshman, she thinks it is appropriate to be flexible and scale back career ambitions, as she herself did for roughly fifteen years out of a fifty-year career (she calls this period the “fifteen-year paradigm”). Bennetts validates our own life decisions by emphasizing that though it is difficult to balance young children and a career, it is worthwhile both personally and economically.
Our overwhelmingly negative reaction to Caitlin Flanagan’s To Hell with All That was equally revealing. Challenging the traditional feminist contention that a career is a vital part of a woman’s life, Flanagan presents herself as a stay-at-home mother. However, because she has continued to write and has outsourced her duties to housekeepers and nannies, many of us questioned her credentials. Her muddled narrative offers the tempting fantasy that opting out of employment and being a stay-at-home mom would be easier and more fulfilling based on the assumption that financial resources come from a male breadwinner. Flanagan admits to shifting her allegiances from stay-at-home mothers to working mothers depending on the social context. We felt that the real problem lies in the difficulty women face when American culture offers so few positive social identities for working mothers. In addition, the fact is that many mothers have no choice but to work outside of the home for wages.
Judith Warner rejects Flanagan’s suggestion that solutions are personal. In her book Perfect Madness, she calls for the government to provide more family-friendly programs. Critiquing women’s increased devotion to motherhood as status anxiety, Warner claims that women internalize the pressure to perfectly, madly mother their children in an effort to maintain a white middle-class lifestyle in the increasingly high-stakes economy. Warner believes that American individualism and choice feminism have combined to give women the false illusion of free choice. Her argument complements Lynn O’Brien Hallstein’s mistaken assertion that second-wave feminism’s silence on motherhood and emphasis on choice encouraged the next generation of women to think that they needed experts to guide them (because motherhood was not natural) and that because motherhood was their choice, they alone should shoulder its burdens (2008, 148–149).
Warner ends by encouraging women to band together for “a politics of quality of life” and mobilize in moving the United States toward the western European model of expanded state “institutions that can help us take care of our children so that we don’t have to do everything on our own” (2006, 268). Although we did not agree with Warner’s solutions, her assertion that women tend to struggle alone and tend to believe that their choices are theirs alone did hit a raw nerve. We agreed that a state that economically subsidized quality day care and publicly accepted as normal women’s use of day care would help us financially and psychologically. We also heard Warner’s criticism echo in Pamela Stone’s suggestion that the unrelenting demands of both high-powered jobs and modern motherhood are forcing women out of the labor market.
One of our largest critiques of the books we read concerned the virtual nonexistence of fathers in them. Although several authors devoted a chapter to men and marriage or mentioned paternity leave, the work–family balance remained essentially a women’s issue according to them. We all agreed that the relative absence of men and partners from the literature is shocking given how integral our spouses have been to our personal solutions. Because fathers’ roles, like mothers’ roles, are culturally constructed, even men with the best intentions sometimes feel pressured by traditional expectations. Indeed, one member’s husband found that fatherhood intensified his sense of financial responsibility and pulled him away from domestic work. Conversely, some women’s decisions to stay home reinforce a male breadwinner role. We criticized Flanagan’s whining about her husband’s absence from home even as she recognized that his high-paying job enabled her to stay home and pay for housekeepers and child-care workers. Flanagan’s isolation is a result of a stay-at-home culture that values a father’s income more than his parenting. And herein lies the crux of the “mommy wars”: the suggestion that those who can afford to stay home with their kids make better parents than those who seek professional fulfillment.
Even though we disagreed with some authors, overall we enjoyed engaging with their ideas and acquiring a language that clarified feelings we previously could not articulate. We loved the snarky term choice feminism, coined by Hirshman (and echoed by others)—that is, a woman’s choice is not necessarily a feminist choice. We explored the moral high ground that certain economically well-positioned stay-at-home mothers have staked out in the media and mourned the lack of national support for working moms. Hirshman and Bennetts’s affirmation of work as valuable hearkened back to Betty Friedan and countered the cultural stereotype that working moms are selfish. One of the most helpful results of our reading was the connection to the larger cultural conversation on the work–life balance. The readings and the conversations made us realize we were not alone in the struggle to balance work and motherhood, as indicated in the following comments by group members:
“It was bracing to hear Hirshman say that my participation in a profession was not just about my individual success but part of maintaining and extending the feminist movement. Aha! My crying kid, my paltry scholarship, my messy house, my attention-deprived husband are not my individual failure, but part of the revolution!”
“As academic mothers we all are trying to get our kids good educations, good medical care, diverse extracurricular stimulation while keeping our marriages intact and getting our work done—all the while at least partially skirting madness.”
“I did find my validation … that working was a reasonable choice, that it was not selfish, that it is possible to do it well, but that balance is not attainable.… Mostly I learned to just stop worrying about achieving the unattainable balance and enjoy the messiness of trying to do it all.”
If the books made it easier for us to gain peace of mind as mothers and connected us to a national discussion, the group strengthened our ties to one another and to our wider university community.
REACHING OUT
Social relationships matter because they build networks that help to build social trust, tolerance, and, ultimately, shared values and norms of reciprocity. Norms of reciprocity and social trust are like savings in the bank, a stock of “social capital” that we can collectively draw on to solve social problems. Social capital theorists such as Robert Putnam suggest that “bridging social capital,” resulting from social networks of friends and colleagues, widens our awareness of how our individual experiences are similar and interconnected and serves as a way to disperse information and develop shared understanding (2001, 22). We had no such lofty goals in the beginning. At our meetings, we had fun: we socialized, sampled home-baked goods, traded parental and professional advice, and cooed over new babies. The sociologist Karen Walker (1990) has found that professional women were more likely than working-class mothers to socialize less on the job after they had children (as a time-management strategy), but that they missed out on that aspect of their life. We all were excited that the group, ostensibly for academic and social reading, gave us more time to develop friendships. Our experiences confirm what Jocelyn Crowley and Stephanie Curenton assert in their study of mothers groups: “The most frequently cited benefit … was social support via networking with adult friends who provided a way to de-stress, to socialize with like-minded women, and to gain information about parenting and educational opportunities” (2011, 10). Yet we also created benefits that diffused beyond the confines of our small group.
One of the first benefits of the group was that we got to know each other well outside of our normal university spaces. Two of us came from political science and two from history; five of us also had connections through the Women’s Studies Program. But aside from these “built-in” relationships, this group was composed of casual acquaintances. After a few group meetings, feelings of friendship and professional collegiality were enhanced the more we met, traded emails, and ran into each other in the hallways. We came to see each other not only as working women with children, but as professionals to be trusted in other situations as well. For example, members called upon each other in the course of academic business for advice that was discipline specific.
The benefits of our reading group extended farther than our insulated network. Many pregnant faculty members have had difficulty finding information on whether the university provides any support outside of federally mandated unpaid leave. One member of our reading group, with the guidance of a sympathetic department chair, successfully stopped her tenure clock for one year after having a baby. The news traveled quickly, and it was not long before other members with infants also successfully worked with their department chairs to take advantage of this existing yet unpublicized option to adjust the tenure clock for maternity. After these initial successes, other women at the university who were not associated with the reading group began soliciting group members for advice on the tenure-clock issue. In addition to word-of-mouth information, the group has given three presentations on our experiences—two at our university and one at a statewide women’s studies conference. These presentations were well attended and sparked lively discussion. During the question-and-answer portion of the last in-house presentation, an administrator in attendance stood up and assured the audience that the university maintained a commitment to maternity issues and was working on creating a policy.
Women’s groups such as ours are sometimes not taken seriously in the social capital literature because they are informal and attached to a single issue (e.g., motherhood, child care). According to Crowley and Curenton, “There is little research on the benefits of formal mothers’ organizations as they related to offering maternal social support and the provision of parenting education resources” (2011, 1). Nonetheless, in our group’s experience, this dismissal underestimates the capacity of such informal groups to build the kind of relationships that result in social capital. Our group’s members have created or strengthened their social and professional relationships to one another, have accrued concrete material advantages from disseminating information, and have encouraged a wider university conversation on the work–life balance among faculty, staff, and administration.
Our reasons for joining the reading group varied: wanting to engage the “mommy wars” literature, looking for advice on the work–life balance, and wanting to build social connections. Many of us have worked together cordially for years, but until we joined the reading group, we had not realized the extent of one another’s turmoil and triumphs. Although we did not find clear or easy solutions to our difficulties, at least now our struggles are not as desperately private, and we have a measure of kinship. The woman whom Pearson describes in I Don’t Know How She Does It is the same woman whom Danielle Crittenden cites as the problem and the same woman who is suffering from perfect madness in Judith Warner’s tony suburb. All of the women in the books we read are in part versions of ourselves.
We are professors, researchers, teachers, and moms. We love all these parts of our identity, yet we battle to maintain the whole. The “mommy wars” literature presents these identities as conflicting and subject to correction rather than constrained choices. As Zimmerman and her colleagues state, the “mommy wars” have “deflected attention from the real issues that have had an impact on a family’s ability to provide good parenting” (2008, 205). Reading collectively gave us a framework and language to understand these choices. We avoid the “perfect madness” of obsessive motherhood; we defy Hirshman’s stringent rules; we do not make the “feminine mistake”; and we are not “opted out.” And to hell with Caitlin Flanagan! Instead of measuring ourselves against media abstractions, we see other women in our group facing similar challenges and making similar, reasonable choices. This reading group did not end the struggle, but it did provide a measure of comfort to us in the knowledge that at least now we struggle together.
