I remember, at age eight or nine, making a batch of brownies. As I waited for the oven timer to buzz, I brushed some flour across my cheek. I was imitating a commercial that I’d recently seen: a mother dawdles in the kitchen, reading a romance novel, while, from the next room, her kid asks if the Rice Krispies treats are ready yet. “I’m still working on it,” she lies. She finally puts down her book, tosses flour onto her face, splashes some water from the fish bowl into her eyes, and carries the treats to her family. “They taste so good, your family will think you slaved over them all afternoon,” a voice intones.
My baptism by flour reflected an overly literal reading of the ad—a child’s naïve assumption that women actually mark themselves with baking supplies to prove that they’ve earned their keep in the kitchen. But in that misunderstanding was a germ of truth: we expect mothers to suffer.
A recent viral (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HB3xM93rXbY), produced for American Greetings’ online greeting-card shop, Cardstore.com, also contemplates maternal suffering. The ad, titled “World’s Toughest Job,” purports to present footage of interviews with applicants for a job called Director of Operations. The requirements are onerous: unlimited hours of work, no sitting, no breaks, possession of degrees in “medicine, finance, and the culinary arts,” no pay. Then, the big reveal: billions of people already have this crazy job—moms.
The video has been viewed nearly eighteen million times on YouTube; many see it as a heartwarming reminder of all the hard work that mothers do. Others aren’t so impressed. “I don’t appreciate messages that seem to build women up while essentially telling them that nothing they can achieve in life matters more than having babies,” Mary Elizabeth Williams wrote at Salon.
There is nothing new about advertisers exploiting the myth of the Ideal Mother, although the myth itself, while remaining focussed on white, middle-class women, has evolved. During the Colonial period, women were viewed more as wives than as mothers, and economic activity and household responsibilities overlapped, the historian Stephanie Coontz told me. (You might sell the extra eggs laid by your chickens and send your children to apprentice with other families.) But, during the nineteenth century, middle-class Americans came to see the home as its own sphere, where women reigned, separate from the professional world of men. Mothers were expected to form intense emotional bonds with their children and to oversee their physical and moral development.
Around the time that advertising started reaching mass audiences, in the late nineteenth century, the language of motherhood became increasingly scientific: advice manuals and women’s magazines proffered expert opinions about how children should eat, sleep, and dress. Ads reflected concerns about mothering correctly. An ad from around 1889 promises that Lactacted Food will provide “that nourishment which is often wanting in mother’s milk.” Still, mothers were portrayed as having special emotional skills. An ad for Sweet Home Soap has three panels: in the first two, “the maiden aunt” and “the dude uncle,” respectively, wrestle with sobbing baby twins; in the third, the babies rest peacefully in the arms of “the mother.”
By the nineteen-twenties, attitudes toward mothers had begun to shift. Some psychologists and other experts warned against over-mothering, and commentators blamed mothers for the nation’s ills. A 1923 ad for IZAL Disinfectant tells the sad tale of “The Mother Who Loved Too Well.” “In her mistaken zeal,” a young mother yielded too much to her baby’s demands, leaving “no spoken or implied wish ungratified.” Weakened by her excessive attention, the baby died. (Abbott Laboratories, which sold the disinfectant, encouraged people instead to visit the doctor regularly, as part of a national campaign “to check the spread of disease.”)
Anti-mother sentiment peaked in the forties and fifties; in his best-selling 1942 book “Generation of Vipers,” Philip Wylie blamed the emasculation of American men on the influence of mothers, which he termed “momism.” (Among other things, he likened “mom” to Hitler.) Still, sentimental ideas about motherhood persisted, and the home remained the perceived sphere of female responsibility and satisfaction. By the middle of the century, some ads prefigured elements of today’s supermom ideal. “This Is Your Wife,” declares a 1957 Bell Telephone ad, above a picture of a woman literally wearing each of her different hats: chef, nurse, chauffeur, maid, and “the pretty girl you married.”
During the women’s movement of the seventies and eighties, some ads depicted the Ideal Mother as a powerful multitasker, endlessly capable of balancing work and home. In a 1980 television commercial for Enjoli perfume, a woman transforms from career gal to mother to seductress, over the lyrics: “ ’Cause I’m a woman, I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and never let you forget you’re a man.”
All of these ads share two qualities with “World’s Toughest Job”: first, they present child-rearing as primarily the responsibility of mothers, and second, they reflect and reinforce contemporary assumptions about what motherhood entails. Our current parenting culture of taxing schedules, organic snacks, and profound emotional involvement—motherhood as a contact sport—pressures women to perform to impossible standards. Of course “World’s Toughest Job” went viral: these are challenging times for parents, and its message of praise for mothers seems, on the surface, to acknowledge these challenges. But the particular ideal of motherhood the ad presents—mom as superhuman, capable of physically impossible feats, all “with a happy disposition”—isn’t actually helpful to women (another feature that the video shares with ads that have used moms to sell things throughout history).
In this case, the ad condescends to mothers: the apparent praise, delivered by a smarmy middle-management type, exaggerates the work of motherhood to the point of caricature, ringing insincere. (I’m reminded of the boss who publicly praises his assistant, saying, “She does all the real work!” Then why don’t you pay her the real money?) It also devalues women’s achievements outside the home, suggesting that the proper and natural route to female satisfaction runs through motherhood. Like many ads, it dismisses fathers, whether single fathers, gay fathers, or fathers sharing equally with female partners in childrearing.
This depiction of motherhood isn’t merely annoying. It offers cultural cover for attitudes that do real damage to women, men, and families, reinforcing baseless perceptions of women as less reliable in the workplace, low expectations for fathers at home. (If these are skills specific to moms, dads are necessarily secondary parents; despite some progress, fathers, on average, still spend less time on housework and child care, and more time at leisure, than mothers.) It also obscures the more profound challenges faced by parents outside the privileged audience that it addresses. Most parents lack paid maternity or paternity leave, and many struggle to afford high-quality day care. For some parents, especially low-wage workers, taking time off to care for a sick kid or attend a parent-teacher conference means risking their jobs. If we were serious about honoring mothers, viral videos casting their lives as impossibly difficult wouldn’t warm our hearts; they would impel us to action.
Photograph courtesy of the Print Collector/Getty.
[#image: /photos/59096aaaebe912338a3762c6] More Mother’s Day posts from The New Yorker.