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BY
SUSAN DOUGLAS
AND MEREDITH MICHAELS
|
It's
5:22 p.m. You're in the grocery check-out line. Your three-year-old is
writhing on the floor, screaming, because you have refused to buy her a
Teletubby pinwheel. Your six-year-old is whining, repeatedly, in a
voice that could saw through cement, "But mommy, puleeze, puleeze,"
because you have not bought him the latest Lunchables, which features
as the four food groups: chips, a candy bar, fake cheese, and
artificial coloring.
To
distract yourself, and to avoid the glares of other shoppers who have
already deemed you the worst mother in America, you leaf through People
magazine. Inside, Uma Thurman gushes, "Motherhood is sexy." Moving on
to Good Housekeeping, Vanna White says of her child, "When I hear his
cry at 6:30 in the morning, I have a smile on my face, and I'm not an
early riser." Brought back to reality by stereophonic wailing, you feel
about as sexy and euphoric as Rush Limbaugh in a thong.
Meanwhile,
Newsweek, also at the check-out line, offers a different view of
motherhood. In one of the many stories about welfare mothers that
proliferated until "welfare reform" was passed in 1996, you meet
Valerie, 27, and "the three children she has by different absentee
fathers." She used to live with her mother, "who, at 42, has six
grandchildren." But now Valerie resides with other families, all of
whom "live side-by-side in open trash-filled apartments." Hey, maybe
you're not such a failure after all.
Motherhood
has been one of the biggest media fixations of the past two decades.
And this is what so many of us have been pulled between when we see
accounts of motherhood in the media: celebrity moms who are perfect,
most of them white, always rich, happy, and in control, the role models
we should emulate, versus welfare mothers who are irresponsible,
unmarried, usually black or Latina--as if there were no white single
mothers on the dole--poor, miserable, and out of control, the bad
examples we should scorn.
Beginning
in the late 1970s, with the founding of People and Us, and exploding
with a vengeance in the '90s with InStyle, the celebrity-mom profile
has spread like head lice through popular magazines, especially
women's. "For me, happiness is having a baby," gushed Marie Osmond on a
1983 cover of Good Housekeeping, and Linda Evans added in Ladies' Home
Journal, "All I want is a husband and baby." These celeb biographies,
increasingly presented as instruction manuals for how the rest of us
should live our lives, began to proliferate just as there was a
dramatic rise in the number of women who worked outside the home while
raising small children. Pulled between established wisdom--if you
worked outside the home before your child entered kindergarten you were
bound to raise an ax murderer--and the economic and psychic need to
work, many of these mothers were searching for guidance. And celebrity
mom magazine articles seemed to provide it.
Celebrity
moms were perfect for the times. They epitomized two ideals that sat in
uneasy but fruitful alliance. On the one hand, they exemplified the
unbridled materialism and elitism the Reagan era had spawned. On the
other, they represented the feminist dream of women being able to have
a family and a job outside the home without being branded traitors to
true womanhood. Magazine editors apparently figured they could use
stars to sell magazines and to serve as role models.
But
now, in the year 2000, things have gotten out of control. Celebrity
moms are everywhere, beaming from the comfy serenity and perfection of
their lives as they give multiple interviews about their "miracle
babies," what an unadulterated joy motherhood is, and all the things
they do with their kids to ensure they will be perfectly normal Nobel
laureates by the age of 12. These stories are hardly reassuring. They
make the rest of us feel that our own lives are, as the great
seventeenth century philosopher Thomas Hobbes put it, nasty, brutish,
and short. So why should we care about something so banal as the
celebrity mom juggernaut? One answer is that it bulldozed through so
much of American popular culture just when working mothers, single
mothers, and welfare mothers were identified, especially by
conservative male pundits, as the cause of everything bad, from the
epidemic of drug use to the national debt to rising crime rates.
Remember all the hand-wringing by George Will, William Bennett, and
Allan Bloom about America's "moral decay"? The biggest culprit, of
course, was the single welfare mother. These guys attacked celebrity
single mothers now and then, but the mud never stuck--not even, heaven
help us, on that fictional celebrity single mother Murphy Brown.
As the
push "to end welfare as we know it" gained momentum and reached its
climax in the welfare reform of 1996, the canonized celebrity mom and
the demonized welfare mother became ever more potent symbols, working
in powerful opposition to each other. We rarely saw these very
different mothers in the same publication, or even considered them in
the same breath. Celebrity moms graced the covers of magazines designed
for self-realization and escape; welfare mothers were the object of
endless stories in newspapers and newsmagazines and on the nightly news
that focused on public policy and its relation to the tenuous state of
morality in America.
But
what if we put these portrayals side by side and compare what these
different mothers were made to stand for? Could it be that the tsunami
of celebrity-mom profiles helped, however inadvertently, to justify
punitive policies toward welfare mothers and their children? While the
"you can have it all" ethos of these pieces made the rest of us feel
like failures as mothers, and upped the ante in the eyes of employers
and coworkers about how much working mothers can handle, a little
side-by-side reading also exposes some rather daunting hypocrisy.
Often, one group is glamorized and the other castigated for precisely
the same behavior.
Let's
take a look at a celebrity mom first. Kirstie Alley, for example. It's
1994. The star of Cheers and the Look Who's Talking movies graces the
cover of InStyle, a magazine that pays fawning tribute to the charming
idiosyncrasies and lifestyle choices of our nation's most glamorous.
Among Kirstie's recent choices is the purchase of her third house.
InStyle advises us respectfully that "as with all of her houses,
Kirstie paid cash." On a tour of her new Bangor, Maine, retreat (the
renovation of which was paid for by a quick voice-over job she did for
Subaru), we discover that both Kirstie and her house are "at once
down-to-earth and whimsical."
Kirstie
must be down-to-earth, of course, because now, at long last, she is a
mother. Her "playful sense of style" is made evident by the decoupage
grapes that grace her son True's high chair. "It was painted and
cracked to make it look old," InStyle informs us. (Why not simply rely
on natural toddler effluvia to give the chair that petroglyph look?)
True has just turned one; his whimsical high chair faces an equally
whimsical ceramic pig holding a blackboard on which a new word appears
each day to encourage his reading.
In
our tour through Kirstie's hideaway, we encounter an
entourage--decorators, a nanny, a cook, and various personal
assistants. Kirstie spends True's two-hour nap time working out with
her personal trainer and then being served a healthful, fat-free lunch
by the cook. Lounging in her living room (painted to "echo" the
surrounding firs and elms), reflecting on the challenges of motherhood,
Kirstie gushes, "Being a mother has given me a whole new purpose. Every
day when I wake up it's like Christmas morning to me, and seeing life
through True's eyes gives me a whole new way of looking at the world."
Perfect house. Perfect husband. Perfect child. Perfect career. Perfect
life. Kirstie is a perfect mother. InStyle invites you to curl up on
the sofa with Kirstie, but then implies that you'd probably just spill
your tea on it.
Forward
to 1997. There's Kirstie again, now the star of the television series
Veronica's Closet, beaming at us once more from InStyle. "A new man, a
new show, a brand-new life," proclaims the cover. Since 1994, her
island mansion has "become a place to play." Each of the 15 bedrooms is
decorated with Kirstie's "eclectic and playful eye." According to
InStyle, most people would have found decorating this
16,000-square-foot house daunting, but not Kirstie. "I'm very fast,"
she explains. "I don't shop. I just point: boom, boom, boom." Having
outgrown his high chair, True now has his own miniature lobster boat.
In addition, he and his new sister, Lillie, can frolic in their
personal nursery-rhyme garden, complete with Mother Goose figures
especially commissioned by "fun-loving" Kirstie because, as she puts
it, "I hope I give my children a spirit of play."
Kirstie
swears by the facial treatment she receives every morning on her
terrace as the fog burns off Penobscot Bay. It involves "blasting her
face with oxygen and enzymes . . . through a plastic hose hooked up to
two pressurized tanks." Though her life was perfect in 1994, she has
since set aside her husband, Parker Stevenson, in favor of her "soul
mate," James Wilder, who "is a cross between Houdini, Errol Flynn, and
Marlon Brando." Apparently Kirstie uses the same technique for choosing
her lovers as she does for choosing sofa fabrics. With James, "it was
like comet to comet. Boom . . ."
Not
that we ought to single out Kirstie (although such self-serving bilge
makes it irresistible). Celebrity-mom profiles are almost all alike and
haven't changed much over the years, except that the houses and toys
are more lavish. Celebrity moms are shown embracing motherhood after
years of sweating under klieg lights, which apparently brings them in
touch with their true, essential, feminine natures. Most important,
motherhood is a powerfully transforming experience, akin to seeing God.
It always changes these women, and always for the better. "I feel more
enriched and compassionate toward others since having my son," says
Elle McPherson.
Ladies'
Home Journal tells us that Christie Brinkley's third child, daughter
Sailor (her father, Brinkley's fourth husband, is a descendant of
Captain Cook), "barely tipping the scale at eight pounds . . . has
become Brinkley's anchor, a midlife miracle well worth waiting for." Of
her second child, Jack (from her third marriage, which lasted only a
few months), Christie was equally lyrical: "It's like I went to hell
and came back with this angel." We assume that most (but not all) of
these celebrity moms are not trying to gloat, or to rub our noses in
our own poor lifestyle choices (which invariably include the failure to
choose being thin, white, gorgeous, and rich). And we've all said mushy
things about how much our kids mean to us, especially in the immediate
aftermath of birth, before the months of sleep deprivation and
projectile vomiting produce a slightly more jaundiced view of the joys
of motherhood.
Ah,
but you could be worse. What about media motherhood on the other side
of the tracks? Celebrity mom profiles place us on the outside looking
in; stories about welfare mothers invite us to look down from on high.
Welfare mothers have not been the subject of honey-hued profiles in
glossy magazines. They are not the subjects of their own lives, but
objects of journalistic scrutiny. We don't hear about these women's
maternal practices--what they do with their kids to nurture them,
educate them, soothe them, or keep them happy. It is simply assumed
that these women don't have inner lives. Emotions are not ascribed to
them; we don't hear them laugh or see their eyes well up with tears.
One of the most frequent verbs used to describe them is "complain," as
when they complain about losing health care for their kids when they go
off welfare. When they are quoted, it is not their feelings about the
transformative powers of motherhood to which we are made privy. Rather,
we hear their relentless complaints about "the system." In many
articles about welfare, we don't hear from the mothers at all, but
instead from academic experts who study them, or from politicians whose
careers are devoted to bashing them. The iconography of the welfare
mother is completely different, too--she's not photographed holding her
child up in the air, whizzing her about. In fact, she's rarely, if
ever, shown smiling at all. It's as if the photographer yelled "scowl"
just before clicking the shutter.
These
mothers are shown as sphinx-like, monolithic, part of a pathetic
historical pattern known, familiarly, as "the cycle of dependency." In
a major article in Newsweek in August 1993 titled "The Endangered
Family," we learned that "For many African Americans, marriage and
childbearing do not go together." Not to mention the 25 percent of
white women for whom they don't go together either, or the celebrity
single mothers like Jodie Foster, Madonna, and Farah Fawcett.
It
isn't just that the conservative right has succeeded in stereotyping
welfare mothers as lazy, promiscuous parasites; the media in which
these mothers appear provide no point of identification with them. At
best, these mothers are pitiable. At worst, they are reprehensible
opposites of the other mothers we see so much of, the new
standard-bearers of ideal motherhood--the doting, conscientious
celebrities for whom motherhood is a gateway to heaven. During the
height of welfare bashing in the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton
administrations, the stereotype of the "welfare queen" gained
mythological status. But there were other, less obvious, journalistic
devices that served equally well to dehumanize poor mothers and their
children. Unsavory designations proliferated with a vengeance: "chronic
dependents," "the chronically jobless," "welfare mothers in training,"
"hardcore welfare recipients," "never-married mothers," "welfare
careerists," and "welfare recidivists" became characters in a
distinctly American political melodrama. Poor women weren't
individuals; instead their life stories became case-studies of moral
decay, giving substance to the inevitable barrage of statistics
peppering the media's presentation of "Life on the Dole." In
publications everywhere, we met the poster mother for welfare reform.
She only had a first name, she lived in the urban decay of New York,
Chicago, or Detroit, she was not married, she had a pile of kids each
with a different absent father, and she spent her day painting her
nails, smoking cigarettes, and feeding Pepsi to her baby.
As
sociologists have pointed out, even though there consistently have been
more white people than black on welfare, the news media began, in the
mid-1960s, to rely almost exclusively on pictures of African Americans
to illustrate stories about welfare, reinforcing the stereotype that
most welfare recipients are black. Occasionally readers are introduced
to the runner-up in the poster competition: the white welfare mother,
whose story varies only in that she lives in a trailer in some
godforsaken place we have never heard of and is really, really fat.
For
example, in a 1995 edition of CBS's 48 Hours, titled "The Rage Over
Welfare," we met two overweight white women who live on welfare in New
Hampshire. The very first shots--just to let us know the kind of lazy,
selfish mothers we are in for--are close-ups of hands shuffling a deck
of playing cards and, next, a mom lighting a cigarette. The white male
journalist badgers one of the women, who says she can't work because
she has epilepsy and arthritis in both knees. "People with epilepsy
work. People with bad knees work. People do," he scolds. As she
answers, "I don't know what kind of a job I could find," the camera
again cuts to her hands shuffling the cards, suggesting, perhaps, a
bright future in the casino industry if she'd only apply herself.
Or
there's Denise B., one of the "True Faces of Welfare," age 29, with
five daughters, from ages one to 13. "All, after the first, were
conceived on welfare--conceived perhaps deliberately," Reader's Digest
sniffs, conjuring up the image of Denise doing some quick math
calculations, saying to herself, Oh boy, an extra 60 bucks a month, and
then running out to find someone to get her pregnant. The other thing
we learn about Denise is that she's a leech. Why not get a job, even
though she has toddlers? Because she's lazy. "To get a good job, she
would first have to go to school, then earn her way up to a high
salary," Reader's Digest reminds us, and then lets the ingrate, Denise,
speak. "'That's going to take time,' she says, 'It's a lot of work and
I ain't guaranteed to get nothing.'" What we learn of Denise's inner
life is that she's a calculating cynic. Her kids don't make her feel
like every day is Christmas; no, we're supposed to think she uses her
kids to get something for nothing.
Even
the New York Times' Jason De Parle, one of the more sympathetic white
male journalists to cover welfare, gets blinded by class privilege.
Roslyn Hale, he wrote in 1994, who had been trying to get off welfare,
had a succession of jobs that "alternatively invite and discourage
public sympathy." She had worked as a maid and as a clerk in a
convenience store during the overnight shift when drunks came in and
threatened her with a knife. Hale "blames economics for her problems,"
De Parle reports, since these were crappy jobs that paid only minimum
wage. "And sometimes she blames herself. 'I have an attitude,' she
admitted." Hello? What middle-class woman would not have "an attitude"
after having been threatened at knifepoint or being expected to be
grateful for such jobs? In the Boston Globe's "Welfare Reform Through a
Child's Eyes" we see little Alicia, who now has a room of her own,
Barbies, four kittens, and a ferret because her mother got a job. But
although this story appears to be through the child's eyes (never the
mother's), it's actually through the judgmental eyes of the press.
Sure, the mom has quit drinking, quit crack, and is now working at a
nursing center. But the apartment is "suffused with the aroma of animal
droppings and her mother's cigarette smoke." Presumably everyone but
welfare mothers and former welfare mothers knows how to make their
litter boxes smell like gardenias. One of the sentences most commonly used
to characterize the welfare mother is "Tanya, who has ____ children by
____ different men . . ." (you fill in the blanks). Their lives are
reduced to the number of successful impregnations by multiple
partners--like zoo animals, but unlike Christie Brinkley, although she
has exactly the same reproductive M.O. And while the celebrity
magazines gush that Christie, Kirstie, and Cindy are sexier than ever,
a welfare mother's sexuality is depicted as her downfall.
In
the last three years, we've seen the dismantling of the nation's
welfare system. Meanwhile, the resentment over the ridiculous standards
we're supposed to meet is rising. Sure, many of us ridicule these
preposterous portraits of celebrity mom-dom, and we gloated when the
monumentally self-righteous "I read the Bible to Cody" Kathie Lee
Gifford got her various comeuppances. But the problem is bigger than
that: the standards set by celebrity motherhood as touted by the media,
with their powerful emphasis on individual will, choice, and
responsibility, severely undercut sympathy for poor mothers and their
children. Both media characterizations have made it easier for
middle-class and upper-middle-class women--especially working women
facing speed-ups at work and a decline in leisure time--to resent
welfare mothers instead of identifying with them and their struggles.
Why
does the media offer us this vision? Not surprising, many reporters
bought into the myths that began in the Reagan era, with its dogma of
trickle-down economics, its attacks on the poor and people of color,
and its antifeminist backlash, through which patriarchy got a new
name--family values. Becoming rich and famous came to be the ultimate
personal achievement. Reagan's message was simple--the outlandish
accumulation of wealth by the few is the basis of a strong economy.
In
that context, celebrity-mom profiles haven't been just harmless dreck
that help sell magazines. They have encouraged self-loathing, rather
than reassurance, in those of us financially comfortable enough not to
have to worry about where our kids' next meals are coming from. And
they play a subtle but important role in encouraging so many of us to
think about motherhood as an individual achievement and a test of
individual will and self-discipline. That mind-set--the one that
promotes individual responsibility over community and societal
obligations--justifies letting poor women and their children fend for
themselves until mom makes the right lifestyle choices.
These
stories suggest that we, too, can make it to the summit if we just get
up earlier, laugh more, and buy the right products. These stories are
about leaving others behind, down below. Phony images of joyful,
ever-nurturing celebrity moms sitting side-by-side in the newsstands
next to humorless, scowling welfare mothers naturalize a pecking order
in which some kids deserve to eat well, have access to a doctor, or go
to Disney World, and others do not. Under the glossy veneer of maternal
joy, generosity, and love lurks the worst sort of narcissism that
insists it's every woman for herself. Paying lip service to a
collagen-injected feminism, celebrity momism trivializes the struggles
and hopes of real women, and kisses off sisterhood as hopelessly out of
style.
Susan
Douglas teaches communication studies at the University of Michigan and
is the author of "Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass
Media" (Times Books). Meredith Michaels teaches philosophy at Smith
College. Her most recent book (with Lynn Marie Morgan) is "Fetal
Subjects, Feminist Positions" (University of Pennsylvania Press).
Douglas and Michaels are working on a book about media representations
of motherhood.
From
Ms. Magazine Online - msmagazine.com
