Since this is Division Day in the weeklong blog conference of work and family, one of the biggest and most publicized divisions has been the tension between mothers who work outside the home and mothers who work at home.
For the first time, I picked up Working Mother magazine last week, and I have to say it enraged me. There’s the title “Working Mother.” Does that imply that other mothers don’t work? It also ridiculed Gwyneth Paltrow for planning to spend more time with her kid and less time making movies. What’s wrong with that?
I’ve also heard a couple of SAHMs (stay at home moms) say that ther were reluctant to vote for full day kindergarten in their towns, because that would only provide free childcare for the office mothers. The SAHMs felt that they had made sacrifices, others should as well.
Clearly this in-fighting is not good for bringing about any large scale political and social changes. Beyond these couple of observations, I’m not sure how large of a problem this is. Have you witnessed this tension? Is it really a large problem? Why are mothers turning on each other, rather than working together?
Apt. 11d 
Well, I don’t know about SAHMs, but I am a SAHDad, and I would happily vote against full-day kindergarten. Not because of any sacrifice issue or anything like that; no, I would vote against it because I think there is too much pressure being placed on children with regards to schooling already.
I remember kindergarten. Half-day.
I remember school. School was fun.
It’s no longer like that for kids. I can’t even remember carrying books home until I was in high-school. Now, kids have SUITCASES just to schlep everything around!
I still haven’t figured this whole thing out. How is it that kids aren’t learning enough these days, even though they are learning more than I did, and I seem to have learned enough? I didn’t even go to college, and I manage to pull down a decent salary working for myself at home… I think that’s pretty good for not having “enough education”.
No, I don’t think there is an issue with outside-the-home employment parents getting something that I didn’t/don’t get; I think there is an issue with people forgetting what their own schooling experience was like. I think there is an issue with too many parents being caught up in the latest “new information” about parenting.
(Generalizations ahead)
We all survived;
We all ate dirt, even though “evidence suggests eating dirt is bad”.
We all had milk, even though “evidence suggests milk is bad”.
And, apparently, we all got at least enough education to have jobs.
Perhaps we would all be wise to remember THAT next time we are considering the latest “new information”…
P.S. Your comment system says my URL is invalid;
http://vernsblog.thegillfamily.us:8180/
This is a valid URL…
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I’ve noticed the same thing. Currently I’m a ‘in between job’ (read laid off) “Working Mother”. My son is 2 and a half, and he goes to daycare 9:30-5pm, 5 days a week. It is very similar to a preschool, he loves it. I don’t see any horrible effects to what some people might consider ‘overschooling’. He is a charming, extremely active 2 year old, who loves to run around, eat dirt and scream. Whereas he has also learned many songs, to count, to say his ABCS at his ‘school’. Yes, we could have taught him all this at home, but we are pleased that he is learning the ‘social aspects’ of dealing with other people. And since he is an only child at the moment, without seeing close relatives everyday like his other cousins, I think the daycare experience ha s been an excellent thing for him.
Since I’m looking for work and home, I have volunteered alot of time to events in the neighborhood. I know alot of SAHM’s and Dads, there is no tension in the ‘real’ world. It is all in the hands of the media, those cr appy Parents magazines and books.
Because I guess that tension sells more magazines than peace and harmony.
michelle
ne
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I’ve noticed the same thing. Currently I’m a ‘in between job’ (read laid off) “Working Mother”. My son is 2 and a half, and he goes to daycare 9:30-5pm, 5 days a week. It is very similar to a preschool, he loves it. I don’t see any horrible effects to what some people might consider ‘overschooling’. He is a charming, extremely active 2 year old, who loves to run around, eat dirt and scream. Whereas he has also learned many songs, to count, to say his ABCS at his ‘school’. Yes, we could have taught him all this at home, but we are pleased that he is learning the ‘social aspects’ of dealing with other people. And since he is an only child at the moment, without seeing close relatives everyday like his other cousins, I think the daycare experience ha s been an excellent thing for him.
Since I’m looking for work and home, I have volunteered alot of time to events in the neighborhood. I know alot of SAHM’s and Dads, there is no tension in the ‘real’ world. It is all in the hands of the media, those c r appy Parents magazines and books.
Because I guess that tension sells more magazines than peace and harmony.
michelle
nec
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Ah, the “Mommy Jungle” as I call the so-called wars between the moms. Yes, it’s real, but not as huge as the media makes it out to be. However, since I freelance from home, I am able to go undetected in and out of both circles, and so I am privy to a lot of the sniping.
Most moms who are at their office jobs until 5:30 p.m probably aren’t privy to what the PTO moms have to say about the moms who don’t volunteer for everything. I get to see the PTO moms at school pick-up, and they have no idea that I toil away on my computer most days so they let the comments fly. I often wonder what they think of me, because they probably feel I should be volunteering non-stop — you know, since I’m home.
But as a mom with somewhat of a career, I often hear the other side of it from those who consider me “one of them.” I hear about the “lazy soccer moms who do nothing all day.” I actually have a lot of respect for soccer moms because they provide an invaluable, free service to the neighborhood. Many of these programs like the PTO, Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, soccer, Little League, football, and more would not exist without the “man hours” contributed by parents who have the time, or rather, make the time for it. These programs help keep communities vibrant and safe and they serve a purpose. I don’t feel it does anything to demean women who provide such services.
I do think there is tension between those who work outside the home and those who do not. And those of us who work from home are somewhere in the middle. But in the end we are all just trying to do what works best for us and our families. And I’m not sure why we feel we need to compete with each other in that respect.
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At least in my neighborhood, I don’t see much of this tension. This could be because whether we work outside the home or not, we spend a lot of time together through moms nights out, weekend playgroups, parties, and school events. I think we can see how each mom works hard to make her own life work.
What we miss when we talk about working mothers vs. stay at home mothers is the individuality of every mother. As Lizbeth says, we are all trying to do what works best for us and our families. Each mom makes a different set of choices that may or may not include paid work and may or may not include outside childcare.
Also, each mom makes different choices at different periods of time. The mom that was once a full-time working mother might stop out for a while then come back part time. When her children go to junior high, she might start a new career. An executive mom might resign when her kids hit high school so she can spend more time with them before they’re off to college. Wouldn’t this sequencing tend to make mothers more accepting of other women’s choices?
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There is an underlying class issue that is rarely addressed in these discussions. Some families must have both parents working to support the family. And I don’t mean support them in style at the top of a high earning bracket, I mean support at the most minimal levels of rent, food, childcare, and healthcare. These families would very much welcome a full-day kindergarten as it would releive a significant cost in their childcare budget. This is particularly important for single parents who often don’t have anyone to fill in the gaps when childcare falls through.
Families that are in a situation where one parent is able to stay home full or part time with the child(ren) are in the minority in our country. Many stay home because they are between jobs (as some of the participants here noted), not because it was a choice they made. And there are real financial consequences to that situation. I think the hidden class issues involved in these discussions make it hard to find answers that benefit those most in need.
If we recognize that working outside the home is not a choice for most parents, but a necessity, the arguments about staying at home vs. working outside the home can be recognized as having value primarily for those in a social class who can afford to make that choice. That certainly isn’t the vast majority of us. If those of a certain social class want to decide who is the better parent based on who has time to stay home with the kids, they are condemning an entire class of parents how simply have no choice in the matter.
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I am a working mom. I think that we are envious of each other because the grass is always greener. I think working mom’s have a perception that after the kids go off to school that non working mom sits down with coffee and watches TV or goes back to bed. They don’t realize that the non working moms are the ones that are on the school boards, they do PTO, they man the school stores and set up the fundraising. We working mom can owe a lot to the non working mom.
But the working mom has her own issues. We are trying to keep a job in a very difficult market, maybe it is a choice to work maybe it’s not. We are constantly trying to navigate through days filled with tough clients or tough bosses or co workers who do not have children and see us as taking advantage of them because we need to leave for teachers conferences and MD appt’s We come home to the same thing at night that the stay at home mom does. Dirty laundry, homework, dinner and housework.
If woman could switch their lives non working to working, and vise versa I think that no one would envy the other. I think that both of us are snobs about our choices feeling the other is somewhat diminished by theirs. We have become a nation of us vs. them and it needs to stop. Instead of judging each other we need to reach out to each other because only then can we truly reach the equality we are looking for. Honest, it sounds hocky but we have got to stop pulling each other down.
In terms of kindergarden; there are a lot of pressures on children today and they are being ramped up by politicians that are looking for easy solutions to complex problems. Kindergarden gives children a head start on the basics like reading. I had my older child involved in 1/2 day kindergarden (that really only ends up being about 2 hrs)and another son involved in full day. Let me tell you my younger son read faster and still is a better reader than my older one.
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I feel like the animosity has decreased over the last three or four years, particularly with the boom of the internet and the various blogs from so many women and their varying choices on motherhood vs. work. There’s so much more ability for us all to interact and get to know the cultures / lifestyles / choices behind the labels.
Like Lizbeth, I too freelance from home and sort of fit in easily with each group. A lot of SAHMs would seem defensive about their choices (they felt looked down on for not trying to “have it all” the way they were supposed to, in order to uphold the hard-won place in the workforce gained by feminism), and a lot of the work-force moms were defensive because they felt looked down upon as if they didn’t value their child enough (if they had the choice to stay at home. Those who had to work for economic reasons figured it didn’t much matter what people thought, they didn’t have a choice anyway.)
The disparity increased as SAHMs were presumed not to be “doing” anything, and there was also the assumption that the SAHMs weren’t going to be very interesting to talk to because they didn’t “do” anything all day except play with their kids. It was as if as soon as a child had shown up, the SAHM had sacrificed her brain to the OB-GYN for the next fifteen years, and moms in the workplace wouldn’t know what to talk about with a SAHM. I know a lot of SAHMs who felt invisible… there were no grown ups to talk to or interact with during the day and keeping up on news / events or topics of interest were much more difficult because there just wasn’t the access to the info or people to talk to, and so the assumed divide widened. (Maybe it was a self-fulfiling prophecy. Maybe it was an inherent problem both sides felt defensive about.)
As a mom of two older boys (17 and 21), I started off raising my children while I freelanced from home and helped run our small construction company. The perception that because I was “at home” meant I was lazy and doing nothing was extremely common when my kids were small. People in the work force tended to assume I was uneducated (I have two masters) or lazy (or both) because I could have chosen to work outside the home. In the 80s, people tended to equate what you did with your value, your social identity and my not choosing to have a high-powered corporate career was often viewed as betrayal to those who were struggling against the glass ceilings. I could understand how they felt because they worried that my choosing to stay at home in spite of my degrees reinforced the stereotype of “don’t hire moms, they have other priorities except for work and can’t be relied upon for a career.”
It has felt much different with the advent of journaling and then blogging online. The perceptions are still prevalent between the two groups, but the cross-overs or acceptance is a little more common now.
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http://www.electricmist.net/archives/001204.html
Laura over at 11D has invited us to participate in a week long discussion about various mothers / workforce / childcare issues because she has the ear of a set of academics and writers who are very interested in this topic. Today, she’s talking about M…
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Intersting to note that, as far as I can tell, I am the only SAHD….
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I think one of the reasons the “Mommy Wars” are such popular staples in the media, is that focus on how women are tearing each other down makes it easier to avoid looking at the really tough issues about how our society is structured. It’s so much easier to do a little fluff piece about how working moms feel superior to stay-at-home-moms than to actually listen to a working mom past the soundbite stage and get to the insecurities about whether the daycare is good enough, what she’s missing out on by not spending more time with her child, etc. Or to listen to the stay-at-home-mom past the obvious PTA gripes and get to the nostalgia for dry-clean-only clothes, having people want and value your thoughts, being a person who *counts* in the world. After all, if we really listened to the deeper concerns of both groups, we’d have to recognize that offering women such binary choices is a really dumb way to manage an economy, that it’s stupid to relegate so much management talent exclusively to the PTA just because we can’t figure out how to structure some reasonably appealing part-time work options, that we really have to find the political will to get serious about decent childcare for every kid in the richest nation on earth, that we need to figure out a way to value all the unpaid labor performed by women. Everyone would much rather write about the latest little catfight between mommies because that’s easier and more titillating than serious thinking about the policy and politics of caring for children.
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Didn’t Dr. Phil do a show on this last winter? I was volunteering at the Family and Home Network (http://www.fahn.org/) and one of their board members was on it.
Personally, I prefer the term full-time mom to SAHM, but that certainly stirs the pot around working moms.
I used to be more strident, its a hard choice for a lot of moms to make, whether and how much to work. It wasn’t for me and I’m really happy being “home.” So happy, in fact, that I’m extending my contract — I plan to homeschool because I like being with my kids and I see how well they learn outside of school.
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One of the problems in this debate is the belief on both sides that the other gets preferential treatment in the press and in the culture. I used to moderate with an online women’s community commercial site and the most vicious fights on the message boards were fought between SAHM and WOHM mothers.
What most of those conflicts involved, I noticed, was the belief that the other side was privileged, in some way, by society, the tax system, the press, the schools or culture. Many also seemed to only feel justified if they could invalidate the others’ lifestyle, totally negating the other option as a rational or possible choice. Then there could be no doubt that they had made the objectively “right” choice.
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Kristine makes several very good points. I’m not sure why Sparky wants to “stir the pot,” as she says, by implying that women who work outside the home are not full-time mothers; that’s akin to saying that women who stay home with the kids aren’t working.
Not only must many parents work to keep a roof over the kids’ heads, many are divorced. My SO and his ex both work; there’s no way one could stay home. And it’s a challenge to find appropriate care for the kid, after school and especially in the summer (he’s 7). Her parents help out a lot, which has its own costs, and we all pitched in this summer (her parents, his mom, her, him, and I, each took off work for a week, plus there were some other school- or camp-ish-related options that were not cheap), but it’s a challenge.
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Great post Kristine. I think you’ve gotten to the crux of the matter.
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I don’t really see any tension between “working” and SAHM’s in my world (although like you all i hear a lot about it from others and from the media) but I am a little bit in both worlds as I work 3 days a week and am home the rest. I am lucky in that I think I get to see the best and the worst of both sides.There are many wonderful exciting and fulfilling days both at home and at work but there are also a lot of crummy, frustrating and boring days both places too.
I think this perceived tension between the 2 groups may stem from frustration on both sides as to how little support and appreciation both get. It is SO hard staying home some days (unless some of you are way more patient than I am!) and my contributions feel completely unappreciated most days. (kids don’t tend to say “thank you mom for providing a stimulating environment, providing for all our clothing/food/diapering needs and for showing us tons of affection). But getting kids ready for daycare (plus getting myself ready for work as well), getting everyone everywhere on time and then settling down with any focus at work can be very hard many days too. And then you come home and try to scrape together a healthy dinner……well, it can feel like a long day too!
I guess this is all pretty obvious but I think it kind of sums it all up for me. We all need a little more recognition of all we do and how hard it all can be regardless of which side you fall on.
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Hi Laura, it’s Miriam from Playground Revolution, and thanks for inviting me over for the discussion.
I’m an author, and finishing up a book right now called “The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars: Who Decides what Makes a Good Mother.” It’ll be out this spring from Seal Press. The book’s all about how media-driven the mommy wars out, and how often they are repeated, and about how in real life, our days as mothers and fathers are less divided, and more complex. A ton–a good third, anyway– of us work part time, and that’s totally off the radar. And many mothers move in and out of the workplace throughout our parenting lives.
The mommy wars pick up on real frustrations that mothers–and some fathers–feel, and instead of giving voice to what’s really bothering us, like the lack of real support for families, the media’s narration of motherhood has us venting against each other. Actual women then do this, so in a way, the mommy wars are real, women really do treat each other at times with terrible disrespect. But at stake here is that we’re all quite frustrated, feel judged, and take it out on other vulnerable people, the women around us.
And the thing that bothers me most about the media mommy wars is that they’ve figured out that it sells magazines and newspapers. So instead of giving us real info on what’s happening to parents and what our real needs are, all we get is the repetitious catfight of “working moms” vs. “stay at home moms.” It’s their way of keeping us in the style section, basically.
Anyway, this is the kind of stuff I’m writing about–what issues get erased by the media’s insistence on continuing the mommy wars. You can imagine I could write all night about, but I’ll check out now before I do!
I’ll stay part of this discussion, but feel free to check out http://www.playgroundrevolution.blogspot.com for some of this stuff; I’m just getting it going.
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Kristine’s got it right. This is also essentially the point of The Mommy Myth, I think. For how many centuries must women be split into two camps (virgin/whore, sahm/working mom, anyone?) for us to figure out that we have more in common than not? Or, that other things divide and unite us besides our choices–and opportunities-regarding care for our children? In past centuries mothers were not the sole care-providers for their children; why do we suddenly think somehow they should be? No, a paid child-care staff isn’t the same thing as a grandparent or a cousin or a big sister or big brother (sometimes they’re better), but the point is that caring for kids is HARD WORK that no one, really, should have to do on his/her own. If parents could somehow unite around the cause of excellent care for children (excellent medical care, schools, day care, parental leave, etc.), all as one big package, perhaps we’d see less of these media-generated catfights.
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ps–Miriam and I were posting at the same time so I wasn’t responding to her–but the book sounds great, and I’m glad to have your comments here as well!
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Speaking from my perspective as a Grandma – (Sometimes worked full-time, sometimes worked part-time, sometimes went to school and sometimes stayed at home fulltime when my boys were young).
I just have one thing to say – every Mother I know is too busy to care too much about what the other Mothers are or are not doing.
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I’ve read about this and heard about it but I’ve never experienced it. I’ve made an effort to tread lightly in areas I thought SAHMs made their territory, and it’s been easy since I’m not normally available to contribute during the times they choose. But my efforts have been probably precautionary. Really, so very few people ever ask me what I do.
Most acquaintenances via the kids probably wouldn’t know whether I was faultlessly home-schooling five kids or a successful professional with a satisfying career; and I don’t fault that because I don’t ask either. The connection is usually the children. I only discuss it with moms socially when they are moms who I’ve known for years, and after years of talking at these tangential kid-related events, we know a few basics about one other. But we support each other as mothers for our kids; why would we turn on each other for our life choices separate from that?
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I’m surprised to see so many of you saying that there doesn’t seem to be the same animosity, because I get it all the time. From parenting gurus like Dr. Sears who talk in books about how your children are destined to be drug addicts if you work out of the home, to the La Leche League which won’t allow you to be a leader if you have to work and you child needs to be fed bottles, even of expressed breast milk, to the constant media barrage. I’ve lost more than one friend to these SAH v. WOH mom debates, including one who took positive comments about how happy I was with the care and socialization my kids were getting in their new daycare as a slam directed at her decision to keep her kids home. As if. And just last night I was deleting some old emails, and came across one from about two years ago in which one mother misconstrued something I’d said on a message board and wrote me a long diatribe about how she knew I was a kindred spirit and would agree with her that any mother who could leave her kids with someone else between the hours of 8 and 6 (or something like that) was no mother at all–well, maybe an abusive mother, but certainly not a good mother. I can’t remember if I replied to her. Probably not. I was too busy dropping my kids off at daycare by 8 so I could work until 6…
Obviously, this becomes less of an issue as the kids get older (at which point it turns into homeschooling v. public schooling v. private schooling, but I suppose that’s another thing entirely). But, dayum. I still find the whole thing painful and bewildering.
Also, I think one of the least mentioned and possibly most prevalent parts of this is the way in which working moms are expected to justify their decision to work. You’re “OK” if you’re forced into it by circumstance, for instance, but if you choose to work? Then you’re looked down upon.
This is timely for me, since yesterday I had to go into my son’s preschool–which is actually a daycare center located on the campus of the medical school/medical center where I work–and have a long talk with the director about their “fall parent meeting,” where they talk about what hte kids will be doing that year and give you an idea of the curriculum, and let you ask questions, etc. Well, they scheduled it for 10 am. On a workday. And then were upset when only about a quarter of the parents were able to show up. I went into the director and said: “You know, it’s hard enough out there for a working mom. I already feel guilt simply for having to put my child in daycare rather then being at home with him. I’d think you guys wouldn’t want to compound that guilt by making it impossible for me–and most of the other parents–to attend critical meetings at the center, wouldn’t you?”
To her credit, she looked truly embarassed, and promised that next year’s meeting would be at lunch time.
But, really. It’s almost too much.
Sorry for taking up so much space! Guess this is a topic I’m passionate about.
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The Wall Street Journal ‘family and work’ columnist had a very nice column about how to talk with your kids about working – the point she made was that you should talk about the good things at work, give your kids the sense that work is a good thing, rather than, well, I’ve got to pay for the groceries. And I do want my kids to understand that good and satisfying work is a wonderful thing.
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