(no subject)
I should totally be sleeping, but I'm not. I'm going to be cranky again tomorrow. There are a lot of things I want to write about though.
But I just read this excerpt from Judith Warner's recent book Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety. It read to me a lot like The Feminine Mystique. The subjects of her book, it sounds like, are middle class women who, despite seeking balance between work and home life, instead succumb to an inarticulable sense of dissatisfaction, anxiety, guilt, and regret.
" The feeling," she writes, "has many faces but it doesn't really have a name. It's not depression. It's not oppression. It's a mix of things, a kind of too-muchness. An existential discomfort. A 'mess,' as one woman I interviewed called it, for lack of a better word."
Though it's been 45 years since FM 's first publication in 1962, and obviously there's been a lot of progress made toward improving the choices and freedom mothers (granted, those who enjoy a certain level of privilege) have, what Warner is describing sounds like a subjectively similar experience. To acknowledge the differences between the realities for Frieden's subjects and Warner's, the latter hold down relatively high-powered and sometimes high-profile, albeit part-time jobs; Frieden's housewives barely went to PTA meetings. But even Warner's mothers express dissatisfaction with what they fearfully refer to as "mommy-track lives".
So I have to wonder whether (and if so, why and how?) motherhood ends up ever being satisfying or fulfilling for anyone. Are the issues (discrimination, pressure to stay home, under-appreciation and failure to thrive) largely the same now as they were for Frieden's housewives? Have we not gotten past any of that? Or are the issues for modern mothers distinct? I also wonder whether what Warner is describing is a real phenomenon for this demographic of mothers today, or just an extraction from the complaints of her own friends and acquaintances, passing as an excuse to write a book.
I ask this, of course, without having read the book (yet) and without knowing to what Warner attributes this particular anxiety. Knowing this might answer both of my questions.
But I just read this excerpt from Judith Warner's recent book Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety. It read to me a lot like The Feminine Mystique. The subjects of her book, it sounds like, are middle class women who, despite seeking balance between work and home life, instead succumb to an inarticulable sense of dissatisfaction, anxiety, guilt, and regret.
" The feeling," she writes, "has many faces but it doesn't really have a name. It's not depression. It's not oppression. It's a mix of things, a kind of too-muchness. An existential discomfort. A 'mess,' as one woman I interviewed called it, for lack of a better word."
Though it's been 45 years since FM 's first publication in 1962, and obviously there's been a lot of progress made toward improving the choices and freedom mothers (granted, those who enjoy a certain level of privilege) have, what Warner is describing sounds like a subjectively similar experience. To acknowledge the differences between the realities for Frieden's subjects and Warner's, the latter hold down relatively high-powered and sometimes high-profile, albeit part-time jobs; Frieden's housewives barely went to PTA meetings. But even Warner's mothers express dissatisfaction with what they fearfully refer to as "mommy-track lives".
So I have to wonder whether (and if so, why and how?) motherhood ends up ever being satisfying or fulfilling for anyone. Are the issues (discrimination, pressure to stay home, under-appreciation and failure to thrive) largely the same now as they were for Frieden's housewives? Have we not gotten past any of that? Or are the issues for modern mothers distinct? I also wonder whether what Warner is describing is a real phenomenon for this demographic of mothers today, or just an extraction from the complaints of her own friends and acquaintances, passing as an excuse to write a book.
I ask this, of course, without having read the book (yet) and without knowing to what Warner attributes this particular anxiety. Knowing this might answer both of my questions.