You're not alone if you've felt besieged lately by ads, news stories and government policy urging women to quit their jobs and return to the kitchen for the sake of America's newest endangered species, the child. In their eye-opening new book The Mommy Myth, Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels detail a snowballing anti-feminist zeitgeist for our modern times, one that presses women on all sides to ignore the reality of 21st-century life and return to the 1950s. As they put it: "Whether you are a married religious fundamentalist, a partnered lesbian, a divorced secular humanist with a Ph.D., or a single twenty-year-old trying to make it in the big city, if you are a female human, the new momism has circled the wagons around you." That Douglas and Michaels present their arguments with style, panache and a wicked sense of humor is what makes The Mommy Myth a compulsive read instead of a boring academic tome.

Douglas and Michaels continue in the literary vein of Douglas' intelligent Where the Girls Are. They use humor like a fine-edged sword to hilariously dissect the subtle effects of media agendas, supermarket shelf presentation and government policy on our evolving social roles for post-feminism women. Their conclusions are frightening, angering and too well-documented to be anything but convincing. Douglas and Michaels argue that, despite all available evidence to the contrary, the media has systematically exaggerated the face of motherhood with idealized versions of bliss and racist pictures of failure. In tandem with this is a conservative political agenda that successively destroyed all governmental support for working mothers, such as daycare and welfare. The result: women are squashed between guilt, fear and the reality that they simply can't quit their jobs.

Meanwhile, our social systems and mores become ever more out of sync with reality and our family-related social problems keep escalating. But instead of being a societal issue, Mom is to blame and the solutions to these problems are her responsibility alone. The ones who suffer most from this disconnect are the very ones the new momism trumpets as its champions -- our children.

While their wit occasionally strays from well-deserved mockery into cruel potshots, for the most part Douglas and Michaels do a remarkable job with The Mommy Myth. Their sharp-edged humor, Perry Mason-solid evidence and truly righteous indignation shine a light of sanity on our schizophrenic ideas on motherhood. The Mommy Myth should be required reading for everyone, whether you have a uterus or not.

- Rambles
written by Tracie Vida
published 31 July 2004