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 Mommy Wars: Stay-At-Home and Career Moms Face Off on Their Choices, Their Lives, Their Families
By Leslie Morgan Steiner
Random House, $24.95
368 pages, ISBN 1400064155
Review by Heather Hoffman
For the last few decades, working and stay-at-home mothers have waged a covert, vicious war against each other. They are not fighting over resources, money, or influence. They fight for things all women strive for: pride, validation, and a decent ten-minute bubble bath.
In Leslie Morgan Steiner’s Mommy Wars, twenty-seven mothers talk about one of the most important choices a new mother must make– to work or not to work. Their personal essays are revealing, at times harrowing, and frequently hilarious. They are all well written and about the length of a magazine article, the perfect reading material for busy, no-time-to-read mothers.
Mothers will pick up this book seeking validation. Therefore, stay-at-home mothers should start at the beginning of the book with Sandy Hingston’s “Neither Here Nor There” essay about how she suspects her choice to work outside of the home might have caused emotional damage to her two children. Working mothers should skip the first few essays and begin Mommy Wars with Ann Misiaszek Sarnoff’s essay, “I Do Know How She Does It". Sarnoff’s decision to divide her motherly responsibilities into the Mommy, Mommy/Daddy, and Nanny “buckets” is a powerful statement on the merits of shared parenting.
Mommy Wars, through these gifted, honest women, sheds light on one of the most secret conflicts in our modern society. In the past, women fought over men. Mothers of small children, however, fight other mothers, their husbands, and the government for acceptance and recognition of their hard work. Mommy Wars is a little like Chicken Soup for the Soul if all the chickens, rejecting their sacrificial role as warm, comforting, soup, broke out of their pens and made a loud noise everybody knew they were capable of but no one wanted to hear.
Novelist Jane Smiley talks about how she placed her children in daycare so she could continue writing novels. She theorizes as to why it is so difficult for women to both raise their children and work outside the home.
“Feminists ‘made it’ one at a time rather than as a group,” explains Smiley. “Progressives in general should feel humiliated that we allowed the debate to shift away from the goal of a decent, humane society where both genders…have a sense of partnership in the larger whole. We allowed both government and business to be taken over by…hyper masculine exaltation of winning at all costs, ignorance, and simplistic thinking.”
Stay-at-home mothers speak of growing more fulfilled and surprisingly less bored with the details involved in raising children and managing a household. Unlike their 1950s counterparts, they do not keep their houses very clean, preferring to devote non-childcare hours to writing, yoga, and volunteering. Anne Marie Feld, like many of the stay-at-home mothers in Mommy Wars, had planned to return to work, but once she began caring for her infant daughter, she changed her mind. On frustrating days when the loneliness and boredom begin to drive her insane, she says, “I try to remember that accomplishments don’t mean happiness, and they’re a fatal substitute for relationships.”
Carolyn Hax, in her essay “Peace and Carrots", provides a perfect litmus test for mothers who are torn between the monotony of home life versus the stimulation of the workplace. Hax, a stay-at-home mother with three children under nineteen months of age, writes a syndicated advice column while her children are asleep. While she does not explain how she convinces three small children to nap at the same time, she does take a confrontational tone with both working and stay-at-home mothers.
“I hear people agonizing or passionately debating about the ways they ‘should’ raise kids,” says Hax, “and I feel bad for them…any arrangement can work as long as the parents are selfless enough to make it work.” Hax has one question for mothers, one which may help end the Mommy Wars. “Would you want to be your kid?” she asks. “Own up. Then make peace with your choices from there.”
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