The Mother Sell
August 28, 2009
I have been very successful in getting a lot of cooking done on my vacation – but I’ve failed at most of the reading and writing. I’m a little more than halfway through The Feminine Mystique. This is my first time reading this book.
It’s especially interesting to read as we are watching the new season of Mad Men, because it’s clear that Betty Draper is the unhappy homemaker Betty Friedan is describing. I’ve just finished the chapter about corporations marketing the image of the housewife. Their tactic was to sell many different kinds of soap – for clothes and floors and dishes and windows – and make the housewife feel just important enough my making her feel like she was managing all those kinds of soap. They wanted housewives to feel satisfied with their lives if they used the right kind of soap or canned soup.
Friedan is devastating in this chapter. She goes through marketing strategies and surveys to make her point that corporate America had a financial interest in maintaining the idea that women could only be totally fulfilled if their sole purpose in life was to take care of their housewifely duties – by buying products. It’s an image, one Friedan elsewhere refers to as “occupation: housewife.” It’s Betty Draper. No, it’s Betty Crocker, a perfect housewife made up just to sell a convenience food.
It reminded me of a PR email I got a while ago. It struck me to much that I kept it.
I wanted to let you know about an interview opportunity with Cat Schwartz, the Hi-Tech Mommy.
School’s out, summer’s here and although Moms can’t go back to the days when summer simply meant no responsibilities or cares in the world, it doesn’t mean they can’t loosen up, relax and enjoy themselves this season. It’s time to take advantage of the warm weather, without dropping responsibilities at work and around the house. Moms everywhere will want to take a look at the latest technology on the market to ensure they’re “living easy” and staying connected.
In this segment, Cat Schwartz, the “Tech Chick” and “Hi-Tech Mommy” can discuss:
* How to stay connected during the summer
* The latest gadgets to help make those daily household tasks a lot easier
* Insight into the latest and greatest technology coming out on the market this season and how you can get your hands on them
This email is over the top, but I think it signifies something that is very truthful: what we think of as “the mother” has changed. It used to be Betty Friedan’s “occupation: housewife” or Betty Draper. Now, as evidenced by this email, “the mother” means “the over-busy multitasker.” From the high-powered-attorney to the working-poor bus driver who also cleans houses for more cash, the primary image of a mother is now this: a woman with children who is pressed for time.
“Stay connected,” “make those daily household tasks much easier.” All that stuff is about the over-busy woman who has too many jobs and too many demands on her time. This Cat Schwartz isn’t trying to free mothers from some of the multi-tasking. She wants to help them multi-task even more. The over-busy multitasking is being sold as a positive image here, just as the cake mix makers tried to sell the empty-headed housewife as a positive image. I see this in commercials all the time, for cars and paper towels and rice in a boil-in bag; the sell is to the glamorized over-busy multitasker.
The image of the mother has slid from being a brainless happy homemaker to being a person whose defining characteristic is that she is overly busy, the thing that makes her feel like she’d falling behind all the time.
August 30, 2009 at 8:35 am
I tried the Facebook thing, and for some reason it didn’t take. My comment is in response to your NYTimes article in Modern Love:
Hi:
I’ve thought quite a bit about the division of household labor thing. Having been a wife (hetero variety) for over 12 years now, I’ve lived, eaten, and breathed the unfortunate inequality of being a wife. Originally I thought it was tacitly assumed that whoever earned the most, got the most homelife largesse. Not. I’ve gone from being the stay at home mom/wife to making millions. The inequality still persists in all its glory, by which I mean all family tasks are handed to you as the wife, all the cleaning, homework, school admin, social admin, food shopping, cooking, pet care, relative care, finances, taxes, and in my case all the car care. I have no educational, organizational or life skills that uniquely qualify me to scrub a toilet. I also have less home time. Yet the expectation is that it is still my responsibility to see that it is done. As my professional life has heated up it has been my responsibility to hire the outside care to replace myself, I also get stuck with the management thereof. Believe me, I’ve tried to delegate to my husband. Delegation, it’s what a president/ceo does. And it’s like husbands are made of household responsibility teflon. Yes, there is power in being able to know where the kid swim goggles are and how to contact the 4th grade teacher. But guess what? In the heat of argument the husband thinks there’s another wife around the corner to replace you. The nicer, no household expectations wife. And guess what? From the aftermath of all the divorces and remarriages I’ve seen, he’s probably right. There’s also tremendous power having economic freedom (where you are paid more than the equivalent woman, and have had the time to do a little more career building while the wife rushed from work picking up children, making dinner and scrubbing that toilet.) I’ve always thought the most dangerous job was being a stay at home mom, it’s unappreciated, in fact unseen and degraded work, and you can be fired on a moment’s notice by a capricious boss.
As far as household work standards, the husband in my case has higher ones. And I’ve noticed (as I work in a completely male dominated professional field) that when men complain about their wives it is that either their wives do too much (but if she stopped or relaxed standards, believe me there would be complaints) or the lazy wench doesn’t do enough or not well enough. On occasion, one will smugly smile and say ‘She does it all,” meaning she does all the household stuff with one or more children and holds down a full time job. At least that one is proud of the abuse. If you hand over a task because you are going to collapse in a heap of overmultitasking, it just doesn’t get done. I mean, not done. It’s 8:30 at night, you come home from a meeting, kids are hypertired, climbing walls with hunger and you get a weak response about he forgot or he offered some type of leftover he himself wouldn’t touch and the kids said no and so on. My standards are pretty low at this point, McDonalds, delivered pizza, etc would work, I just want them fed, its pretty basic. Are American husbands just insanely lazy? Are they that incompetent at work? Do husbands put so little effort into a work task? If I had an employee that behaved this way they’d be fired. On the flip side, if I don’t pack wholesome lunches or make well balanced dinners there are complaints of how I’m destroying the childrens’ health, or if I just ignore dinner, like he does, there is his exasperation and the subtle put down of ‘why can’t we have sit down dinners like other families’ comment. I don’t think my case is that unusual, I constantly read of the generalized anger of married, hetero American women that boils down to ‘Wives still do everything’, now including work full time. You would have thought it would have gone better at least for me, as I went to a womens’ college where womens’ rights were daily fodder, and I have always believed in equality. Yet I couldn’t be farther from it.
I’ve often wondered if it’s just a hetero American thing. Do lesbians and gay men fall into this same power dynamic? Is it less abusive for whoever gets the household responsibility? Is there equality or a recognition thereof? Back on the hetero side, I have heard and somewhat seen that Danish and Norwegian men believe in the absolute equality of household responsibility. I often fantasize about what an equal partnership would be like, I grab the image of Per Jakobsen, my hot Norwegian Differential Equations grad TA, from a long time ago. If I had married him, maybe he’d have made dinner and done the dishes, wordlessly, happily, half the time.
Or maybe, I just need a wife.
September 2, 2009 at 9:03 am
Wow. Great post. And Ms. Goodwin is a great spokesperson for the dilemma too.
I work in the work-life balance field as a coach. Clearly balance is gender neutral, but the reason I chose to focus on women and balance was because of the BS that’s hurled toward women that it’s really “our issue to solve.”
This field is filled with productivity types, espousing the best gimmicks, gadgets and tools for doing what’s on our plates (if not more) better. Also BS.
It’s tricky to unravel the personal from the political or the collective think on this issue, but for my money women and men have skipped a critical piece. Instead of investing in the “technology” of personal inquiry and self development, we avoid it. We think we know ourselves, and like Ms. Goodwin writes, and sooner or later we wake up in our careers and relationships and realize we’ve made some unconscious choices and assumptions, and we’re pissed off! We drank the Madmen Kool-Aid and we’re not gonna take it anymore, right?
So as we become more aware of the influences we’ve internalized, the more important this personal work becomes. The goal in our work and family relationships is really to know precisely who we are, what our strengths are, what we want and don’t want, and to give up the ghost of wishing the people in our lives were different. Take 100 percent responsibility for what we say we want to create. Yes, easier said than done, but we have to be attending to the personal if we’re going to make a dent in the political.
Just to put this into the down and dirty daily perspective, my husband washes dishes every other month, but they’re never clean. He leaves a trail of stuff from one end of the house to the other. He works 14 hours a day, and all the school and childcare needs fall to me. I don’t work on him. I work on me. We have conversations of alignment, rather than agreement. Requests and agreements replace demands and blame. Fundamental to this process is the recognition that we both have certain strengths and preferred ways of being, and we either fight it, or acknowledge it and work with what is.
The rest of the time I spend trying to change the world, because that’s what women do (and the men follow our lead).
2 cents and a Wink.
January 9, 2010 at 9:45 am
[...] She writes, “…working from home does mean avoiding the “second shift,” that ’90s horror, in which the workday was said to be followed by a day of housework and child care, somehow all in 24 hours.” I don’t think it means avoiding the second shift. I work just as many hours and just as hard from home as I ever did in an office. When I do run downstairs to throw something in the oven or move the laundry from the washer to the dryer because E ripped up her shoulder, it makes me even more on edge about my deadlines, not less. When she writes that thing about pumping breast milk with a BlackBerry in hand it just makes me even more tense. Working from home won’t erase the second shift. It will just make it harder to distinguish from the first shift and thus harder to ameliorate the image of the mother as the overly-busy multitasker. [...]
April 21, 2010 at 11:39 am
I am a lesbian stay at home mom, and I still feel over tasked. I don’t have to do the finances (I am really bad with money) and I don’t shop. But I do everything else: cooking, cleaning, childcare, social directing, car care, yard work. I think it is easy to think we can do more than we really can. I know what you mean about our partners thinking we do too much and obsess on getting it all done, but if we let up at all we are accused of neglecting our families. sometimes I am so angry that I can’t express what I need and it is easier to do all the work myself, because at least I won’t harm anyone.
so, no, at least this lesbian dosen’t have it any better than you
May 7, 2010 at 7:32 am
That is nice to finally find a web site where the blogger knows what they are talking about.