Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety
Judith Warner
Language: English
Pages: 352
ISBN: 1594481709
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A lively and provocative look at the modern culture of motherhood and at the social, economic, and political forces that shaped current ideas about parenting
What is wrong with this picture? That's the question Judith Warner asks in this national bestseller after taking a good, hard look at the world of modern parenting--at anxious women at work and at home and in bed with unhappy husbands.
When Warner had her first child, she was living in Paris, where parents routinely left their children home, with state-subsidized nannies, to join friends in the evening for dinner or to go on dates with their husbands. When she returned to the States, she was stunned by the cultural differences she found toward how people think about effective parenting--in particular, assumptions about motherhood. None of the mothers she met seemed happy; instead, they worried about the possibility of not having the perfect child, panicking as each developmental benchmark approached.
Combining close readings of mainstream magazines, TV shows, and pop culture with a thorough command of dominant ideas in recent psychological, social, and economic theory, Perfect Madness addresses our cultural assumptions, and examines the forces that have shaped them.
Working in the tradition of classics like Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique and Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism, and with an awareness of a readership that turned recent hits like The Bitch in the House and Allison Pearson's I Don't Know How She Does It into bestsellers, Warner offers a context in which to understand parenting culture and the way we live, as well as ways of imagining alternatives--actual concrete changes--that might better our lives.
Color-coordinating paper goods. Piecework, pre-gluing of arts-and-crafts projects. Uniformity of felt textures. Of buttons and beads. Of cookie-cutter shapes and sizes. And the selection of holiday candies that were not made with one very specific (and widely used) shade of red food dye. There were the phone calls, too. From other parents. With criticism, complaints, and “constructive” comments that had her up at night in bed, playing over conversations in her mind and drowning in bile. “I can’t
billion tax exemption: Analytic Perspective, Fiscal Year 2002, Office of Management and Budget (Washington, D.C., 2001), Table 5-1. 272 $85 billion a year: Karen Christopher, writing in American Prospect (and citing a January 1-15, 2001, Prospect article by Janet Gornick and Marcia Meyers) noted that “if the United States were to spend the same share of gross domestic product on subsidized child care and paid leave as France does, we would need to increase expenditures by at most $85 billion
the government should play in providing additional benefits to American families? 10. Are there any solutions to alleviating the age of anxiety that accompanies modern motherhood? Did you gain any inspiration from Perfect Madness? JUDITH WARNER is the author of a range of nonfiction books, among them You Have the Power: How to Take Back Our Country and Restore Democracy in America (with Howard Dean) and the bestselling biography Hillary Clinton: The Inside Story. A former special correspondent
your husband and children in running the support systems that keep you all happy and well.” It all sounded so simple. And natural. And possible to achieve. THE 1980S BEGAN with a great air of congratulation for self-actualizing, self-fulfilled motherhood. “The new sanity—Mothers’ Lib,” shouted Vogue in May 1981. Women, Vogue said, were becoming mothers “because they want to be, maybe the most radical shift of all.” The magazine quoted the feminist psychotherapist Phyllis Chesler, who said the
for being the women of the future and focused narrowly upon not being the women of the past. Journalist Peggy Orenstein recalls, in her generational saga, Flux, how as a teenager in the late 1970s she saw “anything that smacked of conventional feminine behavior—from motherhood to female-dominated professions—as retrograde, a threat to my new-found selfhood, unthinkable.” Before she made it to college, she was diagnosed with an eating disorder. “I still don’t know exactly why it happened. Perhaps