Over the weekend I came across this post from Morra Aarons-Mele at Moms Rising about the archetype of the frazzled, stressed out working mother. Aarons-Mele makes two important points:
- First, the “second shift mentality” that has mothers working a full day, then tending to the home with little help from their partners, has become an expectation for many working women; an expectation that we accept as the norm with little resistance.
- Second, while this archetype is useful for selling us magazines that claim to offer tips to a better life, or products like the MomAgenda, it doesn’t really do much to improve working mothers’ lives.
We are constantly facing articles and images that suggest that having a successful career and children is impossibly stressful. (Aarons-Mele lists just a few in her post.) And it is difficult at times, especially in the early years. But there’s also no question that many women are doing it very effectively, and we are less likely to hear about them unless they are Michelle Obama or a top, top executive.
The frazzled supermom archetype is insidious because it suggests to women that they need to consider at least partially opting out of the workforce to maintain their sanity. Instead of advocating for corporate changes that better support working women and their families, mothers get the message that they can’t possibly manage work and home at the same time. That’s particularly worrying because the women most likely to leave their jobs are frequently the ones most qualified to reach executive levels where they could truly impact workplace family policies.
The fact is that many women — myself included — have a host of “home” jobs that we like doing. I enjoy taking care of Baby Bee in the evenings, putting him to bed and playing; I enjoy cooking dinner each night; and I enjoyed breastfeeding during that period of our lives. The responsibilities haven’t been entirely equally distributed between myself and Papa Bee, but that has been my choice. (For the record, Papa does do most of the cleaning, since I’m fairly incompetent in that area.)
Do I feel overwhelmed at times? Of course, but so does Papa Bee. Having a family really can be very stressful. But that would be the case whether I worked or didn’t — there are plenty of the stay-at-home mothers I know who are equally stressed out. So let’s stop letting the media tell us that we’re going to be frazzled until our kids go to college, and start finding real solutions in the workplace that make our lives better today.
Related links:
- This Brazen Careerist interview with Amber Shah offers a “Gen Y” perspective on having it all. I couldn’t disagree more with her assessment — but I think this indicates the kind of messages we’re sending to women in the workplace. This post from The Office Newb also gives insight into the message we’re sending young women in our workplaces.
- Freelance Mum rants about a recent BBC program entitled The Trouble With Working Women and explores what it means to “have it all.”
- Madeleine Holman writes about The Myth of Balance and offers substantive ideas for managing work and life.
3 Comments
May 18, 2009 at 3:55 pm
[...] liked this post from The Mama Bee, which references a post I wrote on the MomsRising [...]
May 27, 2009 at 2:14 pm
A related statistic: people think being a working mom means inevitably being sleep deprived, a stat working moms tend to give credence to with survey responses. According to the National Sleep Foundation, full-time working moms claim to spend less than 6 hours in bed per weeknight. Which turns out to be a complete and total lie. According to the American Time Use Survey, married moms who work full time still get more than 8 hours of sleep per night. If you run the numbers, this can’t just be made up on weekends — in order to average 56 hours per week, with only 6 on weekdays, you’d have to sleep 13 hours per night on weekends, which almost no one does! Misleading numbers like this feed the impression of being frazzled
May 27, 2009 at 2:24 pm
I love this stat! Thanks so much, Laura.