Posted on 02/20/2005 9:05:34 PM PST by tbird5
When Judith Warner returned to Washington after several years of living in France, she felt she was a pretty good mother to her two young daughters.
A few months back in the States cured her of that. Suddenly, she was caught up in the modern American mommy rat race and wondering why on Earth what had been so easy in France was so hard back at home.
Friends and acquaintances all seemed fellow sufferers, despite outward appearances. "They had comfortable homes, two or three children, smiling, productive husbands, and a society around them saying they'd made the best possible choices for their lives," she writes, "yet many of them seemed miserable." Like hers, their unhappiness was "a choking cocktail of guilt and anxiety and resentment and regret," a mixture that is "poisoning motherhood for American women today."
Taking a page from Betty Friedan, Warner calls this situation "the Mommy Mystique." (Many of the 150 women Warner interviewed for this book call it merely "this mess.") It's a "culture of total motherhood," she writes, that demands the suppression of mothers' ambitions -- unless those ambitions were directed toward getting Jackson into the best preschool in town or helping Maya score a better grade on her social studies test. Stay-at-home mothers are made to feel inadequate if they want too much time away from their kids. Working mothers are giving up on careers, either because the cost of child care proves prohibitive or because they can't tune out the guilt. Many end up living a souped-up version of a June Cleaver lifestyle, complete with breadwinner dad and PTA-obsessed mother, all the while reassuring themselves that this was their choice. Their toned-down expectations and low-level resentment manifest themselves in sexless marriages and increased rates of depression.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
What she is saying is that they want government to raise the kids so mommy can do what she feels like and to heck with the kids
Life is all about choices. If you want the It's all about my ambitions career, take a pass on the kids. One or the other is going to suffer and I'm sorry to say it's usually the children.
Honestly, I don't know why people like this even have kids. I've always been a SAHM and I've never been bored or felt I was missing out on anything. I just can't understand the mindset that values working for someone else over being with your own kids. Life is as exciting, fulfilling and stimulating as you make it no matter what you do everyday.
Oh, yeah...right, Stephanie Wilkinson. Mothers in the USA are all forced to be something like real mothers, because our Government won't be moms to all the kids for your kind. That's a load. ...feminazi.
Hold on here. Plenty of women use the excuse that they're too tired from working for any fooling around. So if hubby graciously works extra hard to support a non-working wife, now she has "low-level resentment" towards him and cuts him off from sex anyway? How is a guy supposed to react?
Ladies, this is why your men have affairs or patronize hookers. Not saying it's moral or right, but it does provide an explanation.
-ccm
Well Said!
Hm. Now it sounds like I'm the one who's being resentful, because I can't go back to being a stay-at-home-mom for the moment like the spoiled liberal sows! I'd better adjust my attitude with a little prayer.
If you choose to work, it's up to you to find quality day care. If you choose to forgo the second income and stay home, it's up to you to find a way to afford preschool or a morning out for yourself.
Government should do everything for us! We should have to go to the trouble of finding and paying for our own child care if we want to get away from the kids we brought into the world!
The only way out, Warner says, is for mothers to rejoin the political scene and to call for a new "politics of quality of life" that would create institutions to help us care for our children so that we don't have to do it all on our own.
Yes! And get rid of those icky tax cuts so that government will pick up the tab for spoiled women to have more time for themselves! God forbid we should raise our own kids ourselves!
Interestingly, in the previous paragraph the author wrote about how there should be preferential tax exemptions for people who have children. So, let's see, she wants taxes raised so that the government will fund her free time, but she doesn't want to pay higher taxes. I see. Typical liberal illogic.
*YAWN*
Thanks for the Tightly Wound article. It was very entertaining. Are these people affiliated with FR? If not, sounds like they ought to be. It was refreshing to read.
Why, of course. It's her world and we're just bit players in it. This woman should be embarrassed to allow herself to be the subject of an article like this. I know the Post meant it to be a sympathetic take on another of its certified "victims" groups, but to me it makes these women look selfish, frivolous and weak. Don't even the editors of the Post at some point get tired of re-running these drippy stories?
Stephanie Wilkinson writes like a biter single feminist (paging maureen dowd club). ALL her arguments are the same arguments that have been made from the early days of feminism.
This woman has never raised a child, she has never maintained a household. This type of mandatory ignorance in girls is now standard procedure for all young ladies.
(of course Stephanie Wilkinson is probably no lady.)
You analysis is simple and correct. However the liberal left can not make choices because they have no training to make choices.
They are taught to never deny themselves any tactile experience. Never worry about money because they can talk others into giving them money. Thay have been taught there is no morality since no moral choice is right or wrong.
....and odly the left teaches the only wrong absolute is anything associated with the right/conservative.
This woman does not even "get it" that being religious is in no way required to being a mother.
I am very blessed to have a wife that *really* understands women work largely for their own benefit.
Left to our own devices, most men would be quite content to live in a nice, warm, cave as long as it fulfilled our gadget requirements.
All that "I make you a nice home, raise your children, etc." nonsense is just the female version of giving her a vacuum for her birthday.
"low-level resentment" towards him and cuts him off from sex anyway"
Working women tend to have affairs, not at home moms. Most stay at home moms adore their husbands for the sacrifice they make for the family.
I'd bet you could interview some workaholic, suck-ups and they'd say basically the same thing.
I've seen these women and they think raising a child is some kind of competition. The kids have to wear the best, ride in the best, go to the best school, be in the right sports, blah, blah, blah. They are obsessed with them and it's all for their own ego.
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