Stereotypes and Archetypes

Reviewed: The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined Women by Susan J. Douglas and Meredith W. Michaels. Free Press. 352 pages. $26.

Bitches, Bimbos and Ballbreakers: The Guerrilla Girls' Illustrated Guide to Female Stereotypes by the Guerrilla Girls. Penguin Books. 96 pages. $20.

American popular culture has long cast women -- and in particular, mothers -- according to rigid scripts. Two new books take on the age-old myths that have shaped our ideals of womanhood. Both books craft feminist history with the tools of irony and humor.

Arriving in the wake of Lisa Belkin's October 2003 New York Times Magazine cover story on women who "opt out" of fast-track careers in order to stay home with their kids, books questioning media-generated images of motherhood couldn't be more timely. In The Mommy Myth, authors Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels harness the anger of Cathi Hanauer's The Bitch in the House and the critical prowess of Ann Crittenden's The Price of Motherhood in a witty look behind popular images of motherhood.

Surfacing at a time when manifestos are out of style and mass market fiction featuring the antics of the working mom, such as Allison Pearson's I Don't Know How She Does It, is decidedly in, The Mommy Myth is a wise-cracking indictment of what the authors call "the new momism": a set of ideals that daily assault and guilt-trip women by tacitly insisting that, to be fulfilled, they must have children and be their primary caretakers.

The authors reclaim "momism" from the journalist Philip Wylie, who coined it in his 1942 bestseller, Generation of Vipers. Wylie used the term to attack the mothers of America for smothering their sons and turning them into mama's boys unable to fight for their country. Douglas and Michaels adapt it here to refer to a highly romanticized view of motherhood in which the standards for success are impossible to meet.

Speaking as two sardonic mamas and savvy media consumers, the authors lead us on a whirlwind romp through the magazines, movies, television shows, and political debates about motherhood over the past thirty years. They sneak in terms like Jeremy Bentham's "panopticon" (from his design of a round prison with a central columnar guard tower) to describe how motherhood has become, in their view, "a psychological police state." From the fawning coverage of the celebrity mom to the staging of the "mommy wars," media messages about mothers, the authors maintain, have been fueled by unacknowledged conservative -- and ultimately unattainable -- mores.

The journey begins with a backward glance at the heady days of the 1970s -- a time when women (many of them mothers) articulated a collective "we," resisting and fighting rigidly constructed gender roles. The idealization of the era is thick, and it is here that the authors risk losing younger readers more inclined to identify with the barbed rants of Kate Reddy, working mom heroine of I Don't Know How She Does It, than Jane Alpert, underground seventies radical and author of "Mother Right." Yet the storytelling is rich, and readers are treated to a detailed recount of exhilarating moments: WITCH's Mother's Day Protest in 1969, the eleven-hour sit-in on March 18, 1970, at the offices of Ladies' Home Journal, the founding of Ms., the publication of Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born.

"Once feminists disrupted the common sense about motherhood and the family," the authors contend, "the mainstream media had to respond. The feminine mystique was out -- but what was in?" The bulk of The Mommy Myth posits answers to this question, offering a scathing look at the media environment that has surrounded American mothers since the early 1970s.

That environment always has been full of contradictory impulses. The authors unearth scads of conflicting icons across the decades. In the 1970s, as the number of famous-kid shrinks and celebrity pediatricians rose, the child-rearing advice column became de rigueur, advocating a kind of intensive mothering that undermined feminist successes. At the same time, for a brief period, the feminist insistence on the political aspects of motherhood found its way, circuitously perhaps, into the mass media via the voices of mouthy TV moms like Maude, Florida, Ann Romano, and Alice.