JUDITH WARNER ON MOTHERS ATTACKING MOTHERS !!

[Daanyeer]

Source: mensdaily
By Robert Franklin, Esq. | Jul 1, 2009

Several years ago, a young female attorney came to me for advice. She worked at a medium-sized firm (about 70 attorneys), whose managing partner was a woman and a 70s-era feminist. The problem was that the young attorney was pregnant and astonished to find that the firm had no policy on pregnancy leave. She was terrified that when she started to 'show,' she'd get fired on some trumped-up basis. She was particularly terrified of the managing partner whose take on the work/family balance for women was all work and no family. I advised the young attorney on some common-sense steps to take to protect herself, and, the last I heard, all had turned out well.

That personal story of the antipathy many women feel for other women concerning pregnancy, childcare and work is by way of introducing this article by Judith Warner (The New York Times, 6/25/09). It's about all the petty grief meted out to mothers on a daily basis, often by strangers. Warner asks,

Why do people so often permit themselves to dump — verbally, emotionally, with a surgically precise ability to wound viscerally — on mothers? Why do they so easily dare, not just to judge, but to give expression to their disdain, disapproval, smug superiority? And why — perhaps most to the point — do we put up with it?
She relates incident after incident in her life and her friends' in which other people take it upon themselves to criticize the most trivial of parenting behavior. Warner recruits author Ayelet Waldman to provide still more examples of the same behavior.

Now, interestingly enough, Warner never gets around to saying just who it is who does this - men or women. But her description of the behavior (above) sounds to me like it's done by women. And in all of the examples in which the sex of the offender is revealed, she's a woman. In all the other examples, the offender sounds like a woman, e.g. a school official who criticizes a cake because it wasn't baked in a Bundt pan. I could be wrong, but the barbs Warner describes just don't sound to me like anything men would direct at women, but women would.

Whatever the case, Warner's reticence to say just who it is that's doing this is telling.

But more importantly, what she's describing is the flip side of what the young attorney came to me about. Warner and Waldman are talking about women sticking the knife in other women for being perceived to be insufficient in the motherhood department. In some cases, that may be because they're trying to work and mother, but in other cases it's got nothing to do with that. In most of the cases Warner describes, the other woman has no idea of what, if anything, Warner does for a living.

The conclusion that Waldman comes to and Warner adopts is that the "Bad Mother police" aren't out to protect children but to punish mothers.

That may well be true, but neither author asks the question "why?" Why would mothers punish other mothers? I'd venture to say that it's female socialization in action. It's women telling women how to be women, and more specifically, how to be mothers. It looks a lot like anxiety on the part of women about their changing roles away from motherhood and towards work.

There are a lot of societal messages out there telling women that motherhood is their highest calling, that to be too involved in a career is to deny their true selves. It's worth remembering that the most powerful of those messages come from women themselves.