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To
distract yourself, and to avoid the glares of other
shoppers who have already deemed you the worst mother
in America, you leaf through People magazine. Inside,
Uma Thurman gushes, "Motherhood is sexy." Moving on
to Good Housekeeping, Vanna White says of her child,
"When I hear his cry at 6:30 in the morning, I have
a smile on my face, and I'm not an early riser." Brought
back to reality by stereophonic wailing, you feel about
as sexy and euphoric as Rush Limbaugh in a thong.
Meanwhile,
Newsweek, also at the check-out line, offers a different
view of motherhood. In one of the many stories about
welfare mothers that proliferated until "welfare reform"
was passed in 1996, you meet Valerie, 27, and "the three
children she has by different absentee fathers." She
used to live with her mother, "who, at 42, has six grandchildren."
But now Valerie resides with other families, all of
whom "live side-by-side in open trash-filled apartments."
Hey, maybe you're not such a failure after all.
Motherhood
has been one of the biggest media fixations of the past
two decades. And this is what so many of us have been
pulled between when we see accounts of motherhood in
the media: celebrity moms who are perfect, most of them
white, always rich, happy, and in control, the role
models we should emulate, versus welfare mothers who
are irresponsible, unmarried, usually black or Latina--as
if there were no white single mothers on the dole--poor,
miserable, and out of control, the bad examples we should
scorn.
Beginning
in the late 1970s, with the founding of People and Us,
and exploding with a vengeance in the '90s with InStyle,
the celebrity-mom profile has spread like head lice
through popular magazines, especially women's. "For
me, happiness is having a baby," gushed Marie Osmond
on a 1983 cover of Good Housekeeping, and Linda Evans
added in Ladies' Home Journal, "All I want is a husband
and baby." These celeb biographies, increasingly presented
as instruction manuals for how the rest of us should
live our lives, began to proliferate just as there was
a dramatic rise in the number of women who worked outside
the home while raising small children. Pulled between
established wisdom--if you worked outside the home before
your child entered kindergarten you were bound to raise
an ax murderer--and the economic and psychic need to
work, many of these mothers were searching for guidance.
And celebrity mom magazine articles seemed to provide
it.
Celebrity
moms were perfect for the times. They epitomized two
ideals that sat in uneasy but fruitful alliance. On
the one hand, they exemplified the unbridled materialism
and elitism the Reagan era had spawned. On the other,
they represented the feminist dream of women being able
to have a family and a job outside the home without
being branded traitors to true womanhood. Magazine editors
apparently figured they could use stars to sell magazines
and to serve as role models.
But
now, in the year 2000, things have gotten out of control.
Celebrity moms are everywhere, beaming from the comfy
serenity and perfection of their lives as they give
multiple interviews about their "miracle babies," what
an unadulterated joy motherhood is, and all the things
they do with their kids to ensure they will be perfectly
normal Nobel laureates by the age of 12. These stories
are hardly reassuring. They make the rest of us feel
that our own lives are, as the great seventeenth century
philosopher Thomas Hobbes put it, nasty, brutish, and
short. So why should we care about something so banal
as the celebrity mom juggernaut? One answer is that
it bulldozed through so much of American popular culture
just when working mothers, single mothers, and welfare
mothers were identified, especially by conservative
male pundits, as the cause of everything bad, from the
epidemic of drug use to the national debt to rising
crime rates. Remember all the hand-wringing by George
Will, William Bennett, and Allan Bloom about America's
"moral decay"? The biggest culprit, of course, was the
single welfare mother. These guys attacked celebrity
single mothers now and then, but the mud never stuck--not
even, heaven help us, on that fictional celebrity single
mother Murphy Brown.
As
the push "to end welfare as we know it" gained momentum
and reached its climax in the welfare reform of 1996,
the canonized celebrity mom and the demonized welfare
mother became ever more potent symbols, working in powerful
opposition to each other. We rarely saw these very different
mothers in the same publication, or even considered
them in the same breath. Celebrity moms graced the covers
of magazines designed for self-realization and escape;
welfare mothers were the object of endless stories in
newspapers and newsmagazines and on the nightly news
that focused on public policy and its relation to the
tenuous state of morality in America. CLICK
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