When Judith Shulevitz reviewed “Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety” by Judith Warner as the cover title in the New York Times Review of Books, she made this “Feminine Mystique” for the mocha-latte mom an official phenomenon. However, this reviewer isn’t sure Shulevitz read the same “Perfect Madness” as he did.
The Sunday Review of Books often automatically positions chatter in a certain voice and it’s unfortunate in this case because Shulevitz’s review overly politicizes Warner’s argument and completely misses the whole point. Yes, she has reached into Friedan’s feminine mystique. But Warner is simply not just bemoaning how America’s “Religion of Motherhood” devalues women but how it has diminished our family values.
Warner has done nothing less important than taken Friedan’s argument and recapitulated her “New Problem that has No Name,” not as a discussion about feminism, but as a frame for thinking about the ruptured American family.
Yes, in comparing her child-rearing in Washington, D.C. to her time in France, she discusses the robust social programs and generous maternity leaves offered to women in the European country. But “Madness” isn’t arguing for direct replication. Warner heavily emphasizes that, in French culture, these programs were complemented by a child-rearing community, higher male domestic participation and more boundaries between mother and child, allowing women to maintain a sense of adult space.
Like people who think watching the thin, didactic “Supersize Me” is the same as taking in the robust arguments in “Fast Food Nation,” the drift between the complex messages contained in books like Warner’s “Perfect Madness” and the popular public chatter that emerges from the phenomenon are two different species of ideas.
It’s easy to mistake the discussion as one that is strictly about upper-middle-class women when it’s about upper-middle-class families that have emerged as a “generation of control freaks” and the way the rest of American culture emulates this lifestyle. Warner’s central argument is that by women and men buying into this control-freak culture, we have lost a balanced life. Instead, everything is done in excess — excess management of children’s time, excess dedication to perfection — so much excess it fatigues women to the point of desexualizing them and places husbands in an alien world.
Because Warner is writing as a personal testimony and speaks with deep pain, things become very lyrical. One can’t help but reflect on how her themes reverberate throughout current touchstones of middlebrow American pop culture. Warner’s superwomen turned into supermoms are the “Desperate Housewives” and the result of the stilted stay-at-home environment she describes, the Bluth family on Fox’s “Arrested Development.”
People we know from these shows are ever present in “Perfect Madness,” products of what Warner views as a combination of the “choice myth” — a pursuit of privileges without understanding tradeoffs — and the uniquely American, personalized icon of the “sacrificial mother,” an idea that needs no explaining.
Readers are forced into a space where they must think about their own agency in the constructs of family. She does, in a sense, what the family-values set has been trying to do but instead, imbuing the argument with religion and no sense of kinetic reality, have alienated affluent “influencers” whose practices set the tone. Warner makes us realize that — without directive diatribe of the religious right — the task of fixing family as the cornerstone of society is beyond the scope of policy.
While teaching ESL in Essex County, N.J., my students, Central and South Americans who had for the most part finished some college, would drift into discussions about how surprised they were over the imbalance of responsibility in American childrearing. Several shared that one spouse worked a different shift than they did so children could always have a participatory parent. One woman chided that in the supermarket, she could always tell a Hispanic man who grew up in the United States because he would sit on the side while his wife managed the children and chose cereal.
Warner presents the discussion of gender equity in this context, using France as a comparison because, as a culture, it sits in between the low-context, “just business” culture of the United States and the high-context “sit down, relax, enjoy” manner of other romance-language cultures.
Warner is careful not to create unrealistic portraits of a renewed Norman Rockwell dinner table with a heavy-set Italian mama serving a big plate of mostaccioli.
Some might argue that the book falls short in not addressing this struggle for working-class or pink-collar women. For those people consider there are residual stories that are affected. Receptionists, day-care workers, even au pairs — many who come to the United States with education in mind or at least English — all become affected by this cycle down the line.
Even though Warner takes every political and cultural position to task, including arguing that the feminist movement has over-focused efforts on Roe v. Wade (read the book before getting up in arms), the unfortunate reality is, in these shrill, sharply divided atmospheres, “Perfect Madness” will become a politicized book.
This reviewer was provoked, angered, saddened and shaken to the bone. The 2004 presidential election was not the most important juncture for this country. Warner’s placement of the crossroads where women, men and the whole necessary mechanism called family has, indeed, realized that most important juncture.
Grade: A
