Chapter One: Revolt Against the MRS Imagine it''s Mother''s Day, and you are being taken out to one of those god-awful brunches where you and hundreds of other mothers will be force-fed runny scrambled eggs and flaccid croissants by way of thanking you for the other 364 days, when instead of the brunch you get "Mom, you shrank my sweater in the dryer and I need a new one by tomorrow," or "All the other mothers will be at the hockey banquet," or, simply enough, "I hate you. You never listen to me! I wish you weren''t my mother!" As you walk toward the restaurant, you notice broadsides posted on the telephone poles all over town. They begin, "Today, one day of the year, America is celebrating Motherhood, in home.church.restaurant.candy shop.flower store." Obvious enough.
But then the tone changes. "The other 364 days she preserves the apple pie of family life and togetherness, and protects the sanctity of the male ego and profit. She lives through her husband and children." Now things get more radical. "She is sacrificed on the altar of reproduction.she is damned to the dreary world of domesticity by day, and legal rape by night.She is convinced that happiness and her lost identity can be recovered by buying -- more and more and more and more." Or a bunch of women are handing out flyers.
They are titled "Notice to All Governments" and then demand "Wages for Housework." (Yes!) They read: "We clean your homes and your factories. We raise the next generation of workers for you. Whatever else we may do, we are the housewives of the world. In return for our work, you have only asked us to work harder." As a result, "we are serving notice to you that we intend to be paid for the work we do. We want wages for every dirty toilet, every painful childbirth, every indecent assault, every cup of coffee, and every smile. And if we don''t get what we want, then we will simply refuse to work any longer.
" The result? "Now you will rot in your own garbage." The broadside ends with "We want it in cash, retroactive and immediately. And we want all of it." Oooo-weee. Don''t you think this would make Mother''s Day a lot more, well, interesting? The poster described above actually appeared in Cleveland on Mother''s Day, 1969, courtesy of The Women''s International Conspiracy from Hell (WITCH, founded in 1968 with the express purpose of staging outrageous and often very funny profeminist actions). "Wages for Housework" was a feminist broadside as well, one of many that appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s denouncing the fact that housewives and mothers were overworked, underpaid, and very much underappreciated. Once upon a time, and not so very long ago, millions of women across the country, many of them mothers, stood up for themselves, and demanded to know why women, and housewives and mothers in particular, were second-class citizens, consigned to financial dependence on men, relegated to do housework that was necessary, endless, yet looked down upon, and why women were deemed to be the only gender who should give up everything in exchange for raising children. Young women started wondering why they should get married at twenty-one, let alone eighteen, if that meant getting chained to the diaper pail all the sooner.
Simply put, motherhood became political. Welcome to the Women''s Liberation Movement, which was, for those involved, lots of hard work, scary, exhilarating, dangerous, exasperating, infuriating, and fun. "Fun?" you ask. "Weren''t feminists these grim-faced, humorless, antifamily, karate-chopping ninjas who were bitter because they couldn''t get a man?" Well, in fact the problem was that all too many of them had gotten a man, married him, had his kids, and then discovered that, as mothers, they were never supposed to have their own money, their own identity, their own aspirations, time to pee, or a brain. And yes, some women indeed became bad-tempered as a result. After all, no anger, no social change. But to see that you had common cause with other women, to fight for your rights, to believe that you could change the world, your very own future, and that of your kids -- all this was bracing, invigorating. So we want to unearth from the graveyard of history the brazen, outrageous, passionate things that women dared to say about motherhood and child-rearing in the late 1960s and early 1970s so we can see how far mothers have and have not come since those heady, rebellious days.
As outlandish as the expectations are today surrounding intensive mothering, they are hardly the fault of feminists. Feminists never said, "Hey, great, mothers are working ninety hours a week as it is, let''s add a forty-hour-a-week job on top and not ask Dad to do an iota more than he''s already doing." Feminists were the ones who tried to make motherhood less onerous, less lonely, less costly to women. Look at Gloria Steinem''s hopes for the future, printed in U.S. News and World Report in 1975. She predicted, "Responsibility for children won''t be exclusively the woman''s anymore, but shared equally by men -- and shared by the community, too. That means that work patterns will change for both women and men, and women can enter all fields just as men can.
" Well, we''re not there yet, but if you are a mother and have your own salary, let alone a job you find remotely rewarding, a day care center near you, after-school programs, maternity leave (however stingy), a daughter who gets to play soccer or basketball, a partner who understands that making lunches, finding baby-sitters, and taking the kid out in the stroller are not entirely your responsibility, and if you stay at home and see this as a choice and not an edict, then your life as a mother has been revolutionized by feminism. Nonetheless, one of the reasons so many women say "I''m not a feminist, but." (and then put forward a feminist position), is that in addition to being stereotyped as man-hating Amazons, feminists have also been cast as antifamily and antimotherhood. Since we are feminists and mothers (and married, too, to men we actually like), and in point of fact know lots of unabashedly doting mothers who are also feminists, a question persists: How, exactly, have these stereotypes been sustained? Sometime in the 1980s, in what we imagine to be a deep, subterranean grotto filled with stalactites, bats, and guano, a coven of men and women came together with an apparent simple mission: to rewrite the history of the women''s movement and distort what feminists said and did. We''ll call this group the Committee for Retrograde Antifeminist Propaganda (CRAP). The high ministers of CRAP have included -- but have hardly been restricted to -- Rush Limbaugh, Dr. Laura, Christina Hoff Sommers, Phyllis Schlafly, Anita Bryant, Pat Robertson, John McLaughlin, and George Will, to name a few. Because they were always invited to hold forth on political talk shows, or hosted their own (sponsored by GE, or cures for male-pattern baldness, or God), they got to rehearse the CRAP version of history on a regular basis, which is how you turn something that is false into something everyone starts to take for granted as true.
The CRAP version of women''s history was essential to the promotion of the new momism, because the alleged evils of feminism made the new momism seem all the more reasonable, natural, inevitable, and just plain right. Of course, millions of women see through the CRAP line and would rather leave the planet for a space station than inhabit a world designed by Pat Robertson (who, we remind you, blamed September 11, 2001, on feminists and other evildoers, like gays). But the CRAP line has nonetheless sustained major misconceptions about feminism. Let''s see how successful CRAP was, by administering the patented "Full o'' CRAP" quiz. What was the very first thing feminists attacked in the late 1960s and early 1970s? If you answered "motherhood," that is the correct CRAP answer. (If, however, you said "patriarchy, the fact that women made fifty cents to a man''s dollar, widespread discrimination against women in education and employment, and the assumption that the only things women''s tiny little brains were capable of handling was scraping cradle cap off their kids'' scalps," then maybe you were around in 1970 or have read some real history and know what actually happened.) Who did these feminists hate the most? The correct CRAP answer is "stay-at-home moms" followed closely by "children." (Now, don''t go saying things like "Wait -- I remember Gloria Steinem insisting that housewives were getting ripped off because they did so much invaluable work that was unpaid," because that does not fit into the official CRAP story.
) This is the World According to CRAP, a view and a history that CRAP has sought -- with considerable success, we might note -- to super-glue to what passes for our national "common sense." CRAP put forth two versions of the antifamily feminist man-hater. The first -- Limbaugh''s feminazi -- is the never-married, child-loathing battle-ax in steel-toed boots. The second is the overly ambitious careerist who may, indeed, have kids, but neglects them in favor of her work. At the core of both versions is their alleged hatred of kids and of "real" mothers. Let''s just briefly sample a typical CRAP offering. In 1999, CRAP sent forth one of its high ministers, Danielle Crittenden, queen bee of the notoriously antifeminist Independent Women''s Forum, with her very own CRAP history, What Our Mothers Didn''t Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman, to much media fanfare. (Danielle should never be confused with the fabulous Ann Crittenden, whose 2001 book The Price of Motherhood is must reading for every parent, male or female, in the country, and for anyone who has a.