Perfect Madness, by Judith Warner
Feb. 28th, 2006 09:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fleaBook read:
Judith Warner, Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, 2005.
I was disappointed in this book - from the buzz and a review I read I was expecting more discussion of pratical public policy solutions that could help improve the national climate for parenting, and I was not at all expecting a chapter on how the 1980s trend of anorexia and bulimia has been transmogrified into a trend of obsessive mothering at the end of the 1990s and early 2000s. I am antsy, as are most people I think, when "our generation" is the focus of a book ("our generation" being defined by Warner as women born between 1957 and the early 1970s; as a 1972 baby I guess I qualify) and I find very little reflection of me or my friends in it. Also, I thought I was a Generation Xer, i.e. a slacker? Yet here's Warner telling me I was deeply influenced by the workaholism of the 1980s. Yeah, whatever.
Mostly what I wanted to say to this book and the women quoted anonymously in it is, if Warner is accurately reporting your lives and feelings, Ladies, you are letting the side the fuck down. You've decided to work part-time, or stay home with your child, but have big regrets about sacrificing your careers. You've ceded financial and some social power in your relationship to your husband, about whom you now feel resentful, distant, or not at all turned on. Your kids are not particularly happy that you stay home, and are suffering from the classic suburban malaise and overscheduling. You are in some competitive vortex with the other mothers in your social set, so that instead of supporting each other though the demanding work of full-time parenting, you are sniping at each other, often behind your backs. Get a fucking grip! Get a real life, a real partnership, a real relationship with your kids, and real friends, and get over yourself. Deal with life.
Realistically, I don't know anyone who really fits the stereotypes that Warner reinforces. And I don't want to. Why can't anybody write a book that's about how parenting really is? Oh yeah, it wouldn't sell.
Judith Warner, Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, 2005.
I was disappointed in this book - from the buzz and a review I read I was expecting more discussion of pratical public policy solutions that could help improve the national climate for parenting, and I was not at all expecting a chapter on how the 1980s trend of anorexia and bulimia has been transmogrified into a trend of obsessive mothering at the end of the 1990s and early 2000s. I am antsy, as are most people I think, when "our generation" is the focus of a book ("our generation" being defined by Warner as women born between 1957 and the early 1970s; as a 1972 baby I guess I qualify) and I find very little reflection of me or my friends in it. Also, I thought I was a Generation Xer, i.e. a slacker? Yet here's Warner telling me I was deeply influenced by the workaholism of the 1980s. Yeah, whatever.
Mostly what I wanted to say to this book and the women quoted anonymously in it is, if Warner is accurately reporting your lives and feelings, Ladies, you are letting the side the fuck down. You've decided to work part-time, or stay home with your child, but have big regrets about sacrificing your careers. You've ceded financial and some social power in your relationship to your husband, about whom you now feel resentful, distant, or not at all turned on. Your kids are not particularly happy that you stay home, and are suffering from the classic suburban malaise and overscheduling. You are in some competitive vortex with the other mothers in your social set, so that instead of supporting each other though the demanding work of full-time parenting, you are sniping at each other, often behind your backs. Get a fucking grip! Get a real life, a real partnership, a real relationship with your kids, and real friends, and get over yourself. Deal with life.
Realistically, I don't know anyone who really fits the stereotypes that Warner reinforces. And I don't want to. Why can't anybody write a book that's about how parenting really is? Oh yeah, it wouldn't sell.
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no subject
Date: 2006-02-28 03:58 pm (UTC)I don't identify either. (Born in 1973.) I did experience a lot of pressure about breastfeeding, and felt uncomfortable formula-feeding in public because of what other mothers would think. But the whole competitive thing is just not on the radar screen in my social circles. Hysteria about getting our kids into the "right" preschool? I don't even know what the "right" preschool is, for Baltimore. When I get in conversations about baby activities, it's on a level of "oh, that sounds like a fun way to fill up some time," not "you must give your baby the right advantages."
I'm not saying the social milieu she writes about doesn't exist, I just think it's far narrower than she, and the Newsweek editors, and all the other media people who have elevated her book to importance, believe.