Why Does the Motherhood Debate Turn Into a Caricature-Building Exercise?

[rodeodance]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/16/AR2006051601366.html

Cartoon Warfare
Why Does the Motherhood Debate Turn Into a Caricature-Building Exercise?

By Anne Applebaum
Wednesday, May 17, 2006; Page A23

Speaking as one who usually tries to stay out of these things, it is with extreme caution that I even dip my toe into the roiling waters of the current debate, if that is what it can be called, over motherhood, children and work. For years now I've ignored this national conversation, sitting out the agonizing over "why we are all overscheduled," ignoring the various books and polls purporting to show that housewives are happier, or that children in day care are more aggressive, or that children emerge better educated from preschool.

What finally draws me into the argument is not the substance, which never changes, but the equally difficult question of why the subject engenders so much public passion. After all, anyone who lives a real life in the real world knows that most women make choices about working and not working on a non-ideological basis. Many with children work because they have to -- but some stay home because they have to. Many work and wish they didn't -- but some don't work and wish they did. A lot juggle, or work part time, or do one thing and then another. In my experience, rarely do any of these decisions have much to do with politics. I know Republican women who work, Democrats who don't and vice versa. Most such choices are determined by more mundane factors, such as money.


But that's private life, in the real world. In public life -- in books, in magazines, on television, online -- it seems no one can talk about any of this stuff without turning it into fodder for the great war between the blue states and the red states. Judith Warner, the author of a book on "why we are all overscheduled," couldn't resist turning her portrait of real-life women wringing their hands over Mackenzie's class party and Joey's soccer team into a plea for "progressive tax policies that would transfer our nation's wealth back to the middle class." The writer Caitlin Flanagan, once better known as the author of funny essays on weddings and sexless marriages, couldn't resist using her 15 minutes in the national spotlight last week to write an essay in Time magazine accusing the Democratic Party of abandoning "traditional" housewives such as herself ("I have made a lifestyle choice that they can't stand, and I'm not cowering in the closet because of it.").

Never mind that Flanagan, a professional writer with (by her own admission) multiple household staffers, isn't a traditional housewife: In this debate, the temptation to make oneself fit into a caricature and make one's "critics" fit into a caricature must be overwhelming, since those who enter it almost always do. In one corner, the "feminists," with their hatred of men and their baby-free careers; in the other, the "traditional wives" with their ironing boards and their Sunday meatloaf. But do such women exist, except in television commercials for detergent or on the pages of Ms. magazine?.......

[Demeter]

1. Catapulting the Propaganda--That's All

The Right lives in daily fear of effective solidarity among women sucking "their own" women (or rather, owned, as in enslaved) into feminism and out of the Groupthink that is their idea of the American way.

Feminism is antithecal to Fascism. Therefore,it is the enemy of the GOP, which has taken fascism as its guiding principle and ultimate goal. And the GOP, totally bankrupt and opposed when it comes to plans to reach the goals of feminism, resorts to ad gynemum attacks on women's choices and compromises, preferring to rule in hell than serve in heaven. The Right will attack women at home by destroying their economic base and blame it all on feminism. The Right will attack women at work by destroying public schools and other institutions that nurture and protect children, and then lay a guilt trip on mothers who work for a living.