I love that Mother's Day has morphed into Let's-Talk-About-How-Screwed-Mothers-Are Day.
- The Nation reprints a column of Katha Pollitt's from last February. Pollitt writes, "Are you a tiger mother, a soccer mom, a helicopter parent, an attachment mom, a permissive free spirit who just wants your child to be herself? Congratulations. Your kids have a good chance of turning out reasonably well." Parenting styles don't matter. Poverty does.
- Mother's Little Helper? Stephanie Coontz writes that the 50s housewife wasn't more appreciated than today's SAHMs. Back then, the 50s mom spent 55 hours per week doing house work.
- Nicholas Kristof says that mothers would be a lot happier if they weren't dieing in childbirth. 350,000 women die in child birth every year, and 215 million women need birth control.
- Nancy Folbre looks at unemployment rates in single moms and gives a shout out to a Elizabeth's study on stimulus money and employment programs.
Happy Fucking Mothers Day!
Apt. 11d 
“Your kids have a good chance of turning out reasonably well.” Parenting styles don’t matter. Poverty does.”
Some years ago, before my relatives decided to do the writing project themselves, one of my relatives was meeting with a “professional” writer about doing my great-grandmother’s biography. The professional told my relative that what women readers today would be interested in was a lot of stuff about how my great-grandmother managed to combine and balance motherhood and an unusual outdoorsy career. Of course, my great-grandmother wouldn’t have thought in those terms at all. She was up in the mountains doing her thing, the four kids helped in the mountains sometimes, but at other times, they were home on the farm, left very much to their own devices. And on at least one occasion, my great-grandmother and great-grandfather came home to discover that there was rather less dynamite at home than when they left. (Dynamite was a typical farm supply at that time and place, because there’d be enormous tree stumps in the pastures to deal with.) Similarly, I was visiting a homeschooling family with four kids a few days ago and the kids are pretty independent. The two big sisters (13ish and 11ish) are in charge of the two little brothers (4ish and 2ish) and the mom has some sort of part time job, as well as a very active biking schedule. The big sisters look a bit burnt out, though.
“Back then, the 50s mom spent 55 hours per week doing house work.”
I read that and thought it very dubious. I can believe it if the family hadn’t yet gotten the modern conveniences (which a 50s family would be in the process of acquiring–see Death of a Salesman) or if the children were very small, but do we really think that a woman with a washer, a refrigerator, a vacuum cleaner and a 1000 sq. ft. home and kids in school was really spending 55 hours a week just on house care? Cooking, gardening, canning, washing diapers on the stove (!!!), and carrying laundry back and forth to the clothesline would consume a lot of time, but I don’t think you can get to 55 hours of just housework for a mother of school age children. My grandma is a very energetic specimen, but once she had her kids in school (which would have been in the early/mid-50s), she had lots of time to devote to Garden Club, the PTA, the John Birch Society, Young Republicans and Goldwater’s presidential campaign. I think you have to chart according to the youngest child’s age. Also, at least some house stuff and some garden stuff would need to be categorized as a leisure activity.
As a historical tidbit, my grandparents tell me that back in the 1950s/early 1960s, the saying was that a Republican is a person with two cars. At the time, owning two cars was an example of wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. My father, when he was a very small boy, finally acquired a second pair of shoes and asked his parents if this made him a Republican.
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I should mention that my great-grandmother (herself having something like an 8th grade education) sent all four of her kids to college during the Great Depression and WWII. Only two of them graduated from college, but they all went.
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If a woman sleeps 56 hours a week, then devotes half her remaining waking hours to housework, that would be about 55 hours. Makes sense to me. That’s 8 hours a day of non-housework time.
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There’s a great book called “More Work for Mother” about how adding technology like washers and fridges really didn’t make anything easier, but instead raised the standards for cleanliness. Once you could wash your clothes, people thought you should wash them more often, and once you had more cold storage, you should be buying more cold groceries and storing more leftovers, etc, in it, and so on.
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On the other hand, clean clothes are really nice. And clean sheets and towels are just great things to have.
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I’m not sure I find the 55 hours a week that dubious. I actually used a wringer-washer in the late 70s (as a child) like this one and I have no trouble believing that was a lot of work. Also no microwaves, self-cleaning ovens, cake mixes were around but still relatively new, you had to wax your floors on your hands and knees (and strip the old wax), and so on.
I know I maintain my home to a much lower standard than my grandmother did in many ways. We have more stuff, which contributes.
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I somehow omitted dress-making and ironing from my list. I think a lot of this would be highly individual to the household. My grandma doesn’t even own a sewing machine and I don’t know that she has ever sewn a dress, while my mom (her daughter-in-law) was expected to sew practically all her clothes in high school.
Put me down as thinking that the washing machine was a big step forward. I did my laundry in my bathtub on a wash board every week for two years in the Peace Corps (just for me) and I wound up with raw spots on my hands just about every time.
Here’s a passage from the poet Phyllis McGinley’s “A Sixpence in Her Shoe” (1960–it was a rebuttal to “The Feminist Mystique”), discussing the ebb and flow of a housewife’s career. She’s comparing a man’s life with a woman’s:
“True, a man can change his job if he finds it altogether too trying to put up with. Or at least he can if he is bright, educated, successful, and lives in a prosperous era. And, true also, we are saddled with the selfsame duties pretty much for a lifetime. But then our difficult chores shrink faster than his. He will find time for leisure at a not much earlier age than sixty-five, and then sometimes too late to know enjoyment in it. We will have ten years of great effort; if the family is large, perhaps twenty. After that we will have more hours on our hands than some of us will know what to do with. The children will be in school or even away from home altogether. Drudgeries will dwindle. We’ll have time for any avocation to which our gifts entitle us. We’ll be free to paint, write, garden, run for Congress, chair the Woman’s Club, talk from soapboxes, change the color of our hair, do good works, take up petit point, read good books, or start a business.”
I should add here that McGinley had a hired girl, but she also had a length of steel in her spine, so there were a lot of things she couldn’t do around the house.
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Thanks for the link to the Pollitt article. I hadn’t seen that one. I think she got it absolutely right.
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