Book description
Susan Douglas first took on the media's misrepresentation of women in
her funny, scathing social commentary
Where the Girls Are.
Now, she and Meredith Michaels, have turned a sardonic (but never
jaundiced) eye toward the cult of the new momism: a trend in American
culture that is causing women to feel that only through the perfection
of motherhood can true contentment be found. This vision of motherhood
is highly romanticized and yet its standards for success remain forever
out of reach, no matter how hard women may try to "have it
all."
The Mommy Myth takes a provocative tour through
the past thirty years of media images about mothers: the superficial
achievements of the celebrity mom, the news media's sensational
coverage of dangerous day care, the staging of the "mommy
wars" between working mothers and stay-at-home moms, and the
onslaught of values-based marketing that raises mothering standards to
impossible levels, just to name a few. In concert with this messaging,
the authors contend, is a conservative backwater of talking heads
propagating the myth of the modern mom.
This nimble assessment of how motherhood has been shaped by
out-of-date mores is not about whether women should have children or
not, or about whether once they have kids mothers should work or stay
at home. It is about how no matter what they do or how hard they try,
women will never achieve the promised nirvana of idealized mothering.
Douglas and Michaels skillfully map the distance traveled from the
days when The Feminine Mystique demanded more for women than
the unpaid labor of keeping house and raising children, to today's
not-so-subtle pressure to reverse this thirty-year trend. A must-read
for every woman.
Katha Pollitt author of Subject to Debate: Sense
and Dissents on Women, Politics, and Culture I have one word for
The Mommy Myth: FINALLY! With humor, wit and solid
information, Douglas and Michaels take on the sentimentalized,
privatized moralism of contemporary motherhood and show how it harms
both women and children.
Susan J. Douglas is the Catherine Neafie Kellogg
Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan. She
is the author of Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination,
Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media, and
Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899-1922. Her journalistic
articles have appeared in The Nation, Ms., In These Times, TV
Guide, and The Progressive. Meredith W. Michaels is
a writer who doubles as a philosophy professor at Smith College. Her
research and writing focus on the way that cultural changes affect our
understanding of reproduction, parenthood, and childhood.
