Product Description

A lively and provocative look at the modern culture of motherhood and at the social, economic, and political forces that shaped current ideas about parenting.

What is wrong with this picture? That's the question Judith Warner asks after taking a good, hard look at the world of modern motherhood-at anxious women at work and at home and in bed with unhappy husbands.

When Warner had her first child, she was living in Paris, where parents routinely left their children home, with state-subsidized nannies, to join friends in the evening for dinner or to go on dates with their husbands. When she returned to the States, she was stunned by the cultural differences she found toward parenting-in particular, assumptions about motherhood. None of the mothers she met seemed happy: Instead, they worried about the possibility of not having the perfect child, panicking as each developmental benchmark approached.

Combining close readings of mainstream magazines, TV shows, and pop culture with a thorough command of dominant ideas in recent psychological, social, and economic theory, Perfect Madness addresses our cultural assumptions, and examines the forces that have shaped them.

Working in the tradition of classics like Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique and Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism, and with an awareness of a readership that turned recent hits like The Bitch in the House and Allison Pearson's I Don't Know How She Does It into bestsellers, Warner offers a context in which to understand the way we live, as well as ways of imagining alternatives-actual concrete changes-that might better our lives.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #795948 in Books
• Published on: 2005-02-17
• Format: Bargain Price
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 336 pages

Amazon.com Review
The old adage is especially true for Perfect Madness: don't judge this eminently readable book by its stern and academic-looking cover. Judith Warner's missive on the "Mommy Mystique" can be read in a weekend, if readers have the time. Of course--according to the book--many would-be readers will have to carve out the hours in between an endless sea of child-enriching activities, a soul-sucking swirl that leads many mothers into a well of despair. Warner's book seeks to answer the question, "Why are today's young mothers so stressed out?" Whether shuttling kids to "enriching" after-school activities or worrying about the quality of available child care, the women of Perfect Madness describe a life far out of balance. Warner spends most of the book explaining how things got to this point, and what can be done to restore some sanity to the parenting process.

Warner draws her research from a group of 20- to 40-year-old, upper-middle-class, college-educated women living in the East Coast corridor. In other words, mirror images of Warner herself. Her limited scope has caused controversy and criticism, as have some of her more sweeping statements. (For example, Warner blames second-wave feminism--rather than corporate culture--for the many limitations women still experience as they try to balance the work-family dynamic.) Other favorite targets include the mainstream media, detached fathers, and controlling, "hyperactive" mothers who create impossible standards for themselves, their children, and the community of other parents around them. Warner begins and ends the book with a compelling argument for the need for more societal support of mothers--quality-of-life government "entitlements" such as those found in France. It's these big-picture issues that will provide the solution, she says, even if most mothers don't want to discuss them because they consider the topic "tacky, strident-sounding, not the point." In these sections on governmental policy, and also when she steps back, encouraging women to be kinder to each other, the author's warmth comes across easily on the page. Pilloried by some readers and supported by others, Warner should at least be applauded for opening up the Pandora's Box of American motherhood for a new generation. And if readers are of two minds about the issues raised Perfect Madness, as Warner sometimes seems to be herself, it's a fitting reaction to a topic with few easy answers. --Jennifer Buckendorff END

From The New Yorker
In this polemic about contemporary motherhood, Warner argues that the gains of feminism are no match for the frenzied perfectionism of American parenting. In the absence of any meaningful health, child-care, or educational provisions, martyrdom appears to be the only feasible model for successful maternity—with destructive consequences for both mothers and children. Comparing this situation with her experiences of child-rearing in France, Warner finds American "hyper-parenting"—pre-school violin and Ritalin on demand—"just plain crazy." The trouble is a culture that, though it places enormous private value on children, neglects them in the arena of public policy. She is concerned less with sexual politics than with the more pervasive effects of the "winner takes all" mentality, and makes an urgent case for more socially integrated parenthood.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

From The Washington Post
When Judith Warner returned to Washington after several years of living in France, she felt she was a pretty good mother to her two young daughters.

A few months back in the States cured her of that. Suddenly, she was caught up in the modern American mommy rat race and wondering why on Earth what had been so easy in France was so hard back at home.

Friends and acquaintances all seemed fellow sufferers, despite outward appearances. "They had comfortable homes, two or three children, smiling, productive husbands, and a society around them saying they'd made the best possible choices for their lives," she writes, "yet many of them seemed miserable." Like hers, their unhappiness was "a choking cocktail of guilt and anxiety and resentment and regret," a mixture that is "poisoning motherhood for American women today."

Taking a page from Betty Friedan, Warner calls this situation "the Mommy Mystique." (Many of the 150 women Warner interviewed for this book call it merely "this mess.") It's a "culture of total motherhood," she writes, that demands the suppression of mothers' ambitions -- unless those ambitions were directed toward getting Jackson into the best preschool in town or helping Maya score a better grade on her social studies test. Stay-at-home mothers are made to feel inadequate if they want too much time away from their kids. Working mothers are giving up on careers, either because the cost of child care proves prohibitive or because they can't tune out the guilt. Many end up living a souped-up version of a June Cleaver lifestyle, complete with breadwinner dad and PTA-obsessed mother, all the while reassuring themselves that this was their choice. Their toned-down expectations and low-level resentment manifest themselves in sexless marriages and increased rates of depression.

How did this happen?

Warner believes the causes are many. Our culture's expectation of mothers has always seesawed between warning them to back off from their children (lest they foster wimps) and exhorting them to regard raising children as their life's work. We're currently in the clutches of the latter ideology, she says, thanks in large part to the prevalence of "attachment parenting" philosophies that lead mothers to believe they must respond instantly to a baby's every need or else doom him to suffer "abandonment issues" for the rest of his life. We've also bought too much into the therapy culture, Warner says, by intensely parenting our children as a way of curing ourselves of our own childhood wounds.

But the biggest culprit in the total-immersion mothering trap, Warner says, isn't the media or our own neuroses. It's the rise of a winner-take-all society that inordinately rewards the wealthy while throwing scraps to the rest of us. Today's middle-class parents live anxious lives, worried about job security, the affordability of health care and housing in good school districts, the prospect of paying for their kids' college educations and their own retirement. With families under such financial stress and little help from the government, it's no wonder mothers are over-focused on their children's success. After all, in a winner-take-all society, there's no place for the average kid who will become the average grown-up.

In other words, the mania for privatization that drove the Reagan '80s and continues today has finally trickled down to motherhood. Now, all problems you may have balancing work and family are yours alone. (Unless, of course, you're a single mother on welfare, Warner points out. Then the government is happy to meddle in your life.) If you choose to work, it's up to you to find quality day care. If you choose to forgo the second income and stay home, it's up to you to find a way to afford preschool or a morning out for yourself.

We've come to believe that this way of life is "necessary and natural," Warner writes. But it wasn't always thus: "Things used to be different in America," she says. "There used to be structures in place that gave families a certain base level of comfort and security. Things like dependable public education. Affordable housing. Job security. Reliable retirement benefits." In addition: tax codes that provided healthy exemptions to couples with children, low-interest educational loans -- even government-run and -subsidized day care for children whose mothers worked during World War II.

The only way out, Warner says, is for mothers to rejoin the political scene and to call for a new "politics of quality of life" that would create institutions to help us care for our children so that we don't have to do it all on our own. It wouldn't be cheap; Warner estimates that mimicking the French plan for child care and paid leave would increase government spending by $85 billion per year. (Though not so costly when you consider that Bush's recent tax cuts are costing more than $200 billion per year, she points out.)

Modern motherhood is exacting costs, too. Ann Crittenden's The Price of Motherhood showed how mothers become poor in old age. With Perfect Madness, Warner convincingly shows the psychological damages. What more do we need to learn before things change?

Reviewed by Stephanie Wilkinson
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

Defines the madness but offers little hope
Judith Warner's work illuminates several key issues about modern motherhood. I felt a quiver of recognition when reading her discussions about the ways that women who grew up in the era of 1970's feminism are shocked to see how quickly the constraints of traditional gender roles re-emerge once we have kids. She also puts forth the admirable goal of of ending the so-called "Mommy Wars" that keep stay-at-home-Moms and employed Moms bickering with one another instead of working toward mutually beneficial social and political reforms. If Warner's work can inspire a renewed sense of activism in the newest generation of mothers, she will have provided a real service.

After reading the Newsweek cover story featuring an excerpt of "Perfect Madness," I thought I'd really connect with the book. But in expanding Warner's argument from a half-dozen pages into an intensive, repetitive analysis, several problems arose with "Perfect Madness."

1. Warner has been consumed by the "learned helplessness" that she sees in other women. In her view, the situation mothers find themselves in today is so awful, hopeless, and socially enforced that there is little that any one woman can do to improve her life, and it is just "settling" or rationalizing if we think we can improve things on our own.

Even though she covers the recent history of motherhood that shows us that every generation of women has faced similar struggles in one form or another, Warner makes it seem like our generation suffers from a unique and insurmountable challenge. I believe that it's our turn to take up the challenge, using our the gifts of our education and talents, to claim our place on the public stage.

2. Throughout "Perfect Madness," Warner continuously switches back and forth between discussions of serious economic and social pressures that affect women and their families, and the narcissistic, 24/7 "Total-reality Motherhood" that many well-off women have bought into, bringing untold stress into our lives. She intermingles stories of rich Moms stressing out about throwing the "perfect" birthday party with the justifiable panic of women who find that their earning power is not enough to pay for quality day-care, putting them in an economic double-bind.

I reject the connection Warner attempts to make between these two phenomena. Rich women are not going to fall into poverty because they refuse to throw an elaborate birthday party, and it is insulting to poor women to conflate these two "lacks of choice."

3. "Perfect Madness" leaves out all that is fun about motherhood. In my experience, motherhood has been a challenge in many of the ways that Warner describes, but I have also experienced tons of joy and a positive sense of self-reinvention, which are utterly missing from "Perfect Madness." A childless woman reading Warner's book would wonder why anyone would ever choose to ruin her life by having kids. Warner makes it all sound so depressing--a passionless, resentful relationship with your husband, no prospects of creating a satisfying career, and kids who are smothered until they don't even want you around.

On the very last pages of the book, Warner does profess that "I still believe in that dream of American womanhood: the sense of limitless possibility, that unique potential for unbounded self-creation." This glimmer of optimism is cold comfort after reading the pessimistic 281 pages that precede it.

I can see why the core concept of "Perfect Madness" has resonated with women and propelled the book to the top of the bestseller list, but I predict that when they sit down to read it, many busy Moms will lose patience with Warner's dim view of motherhood long before they reach her faint declaration of hope.

French mom: French system is not as great as Judith says
I am a French mom, I lived in France as a working mom and as an 'at home mom' and I really like it more being a mom in Colorado! Judith was very lucky to have all these advantages in France, I wasn't able to find a place in the over crowded government day cares for my son. I struggled to leave my job at 6:30pm every evening, to find the babysitter sleeping in the couch! I had to fight with the millions of people in the supermarket on Saturday morning, since all the stores are closed evenings and Sundays. I didn't have one minute for myself! And as an 'at home mom', in France, I felt very isolated, I didn't have the support group she is talking about, the pediatrician made me feel inapropriate, and I had a dreadull experience in giving birth in a French public hospital. Plus children are unwelcome wherever you go!
I delivered my second daughter in Salt Lake City, and my third daughter in Colorado and I had a great experience. Here I really have a support group of Moms, doctors and nurses. And I can have some time for myself! Plus I am waiting to have the work permit to start working again. In some ways, as Judith says I find that children have too many activities and I try to avoid this for my kids, but I don't want people to think that in Europe it is much better, and to be decieved if they go there. There are certainly some advantages, like long parental leaves, but it is not night and day!

Slow down before we meltdown
As an older mom in a partially empty nest, I found this book interesting and important -- albeit, a very long and difficult read. Difficult, because it is painful to read and rehash how the current generation of mothers takes parenting to the painful point of obsession. Social critics suggest that feminist mothers of my own generation -- baby boomers -- invested more time and energy in building careers as opposed to nurturing our families....So perhaps it shouldn't surprise us to discover that our 'domestic neglect' inspired an over-parenting backlash?

I've often wondered whether competitive parenting, such as Warner described in her book, is an outgrowth of social or personal guilt. Whatever the cause, I am amazed at the sheer aggression with which today's younger parents approach soccer games, birthday parties, playgroups, and other things that are supposed be recreational. Are we having fun yet? Watching younger families in my neighborhood, I can't say that anyone's really thriving in such an over-booked and frantic climate. (A couple of these young moms are always out of breath. Seriously.) As another reviewer pointed out earlier, you have to wonder if any of the mothers Warner writers about are even remotely enjoying their children. At the risk of waxing sentimental, motherhood CAN have sweet, enjoyable moments. (Ironically, they are usually un-complicated, un-orchestrated moments.)

It will be very interesting to see how today's new mothers deal with the empty nest a few years down the road. Will they be competing for the most interesting midlife crisis while over-managing their kids' college careers? More importantly, what impact will all this over-managing and over-parenting have on the kids when they are out there in the world, on their own?

At this point, it's hard to pinpoint which is worse -- under-parenting or over-parenting. So, I think it's great that writers are tackling this topic and getting us to talk about it. Hopefully, books like "Perfect Madess" will force us all (women AND men), no matter what stage we are in our parenting lives, to take a long look at what we are doing or not doing for our kids -- and help us return to sanity and balance.