Behind the mummy wars

The "mummy wars" are raging again in the US and Australia, with a raft of books dissecting the battle lines. Some say it's a 1950s-style return to the bosom of the family home for mothers who want to bring up their children in the warm glow of home-cooking and mummy cuddles.

Others interpret it differently, saying that women are being forced back into the home by inflexible jobs, poor quality childcare and husbands who are working longer hours with longer commutes, making it impossible for women to do the double shift of work and home duties.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Perhaps. But, there's a complex new twist to these so-called wars, in that mothers are pushing themselves even harder - both those working outside the home and the stay-at-home ones, in the effort to rear children for what's deemed to be a tougher world.

You can see it in Ireland, too. Sit and chat with mothers - both kinds - and you see their concerns are the same: attention span and concentration levels of their children in school, the distractions of computer games, television and mobile phones, and a seemingly endless pressure on families to keep up with the latest fashions in birthday parties, sports gear and the rest.

Judith Warner, author of Perfect Madness - motherhood in the age of anxiety (Vermilion), writes that working mothers are equally burdened by "a new set of life-draining pressures, a new kind of soul-draining perfectionism". She writes about the women she interviewed for the book: "They shared the same high-level at-home parenting ambitions as the non-working mums. But they held down out-of-home jobs too - and if this wasn't enough, they also had to shoulder the burden of Guilt , a media-fed drone that played in their ears every time they sat in traffic at dinnertime."

One of the core issues with this new mummy rat race is that we seem to leave ourselves open to criticism if we can't manage to keep up with it all. While carrying out the research for her book, Life After Birth (Viking), Kate Figgis said she was shocked by the level of condemnation that goes on without any understanding or tolerance of how people can do things different ways.

"The worst aspect of motherhood is the way we all judge each other - hugely and unnecessarily," says Figgis.

In her recent book, Maternal Desire (Virago), psychologist Daphne de Marneffe suggests that mothers "solve" their ambivalence by idealising an approach - this is the way to do it or I'm better because I do it this way.

The big question is how did we allow ourselves get into such a conundrum? The authors of Mommy Myth: the Idealisation of Motherhood and how it has Undermined All Women (Simon & Schuster), Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels suggest that behind the obsession with the "new momism" is the view that the only truly enlightened choice to make as a woman is to become a "mom" and to bring to child-rearing a combination of selflessness and professionalism (Irish mothers can't deny that there is a new businesslike zeal to organising birthday parties, end-of-term breakfast get-togethers and even family events).

The distortion in all of this is that whether a mother works outside the home or stays at home is deemed to be a choice, whereas for most women nowadays, it's their circumstances that force the decision. In Perfect Madness, Judith Warner suggests that this culture of choice has been imported from upper middle classes - the only place where there really is a choice to work or stay at home without financial repercussions.

The new bête noire of the liberal-thinking woman, Caitlin Flanagan, author of To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife (to be published this side of the Atlantic by Time Warner in October) - who incidentally has a team of staff including a full-time nanny - dismisses the notion of working out of financial necessity as a red herring.

Judith Warner provides a note of caution to Irish families from the US experience. She writes: "It is because of our over-identification with the upper middle class that so many of us came out of the boom years of the late 1990s so terribly in debt. It is also why so many of us turn ourselves inside out trying to parent to perfection, so that our children will be 'winners'."

It could also be argued that this over-identification with the upper middle classes fuels both consumerism and the need to work more to support higher levels of consumerism.

Warner writes: "The more women bought into the crazy competitiveness of our time, the more they tended to suffer as mothers. Those who, in one way or another, managed to step outside of the parenting pressure cooker tended to have a greater degree of peace of mind and to mother with a greater level of sanity. They did not push themselves or their children to be 'winners' - and so seemed to me to be winning out in terms of happiness and quality of life."

There is also a view that this generation of frustrated middle-class women think only of themselves. Some of the leading feminists of the 1970s came exactly from this group of women who - both educated and politically astute - forced change on women's rights issues.

Is some of this perfectionist (or neurotic?) mothering because women - feminists and non-feminists alike - have abandoned mothers to the political desert, leaving free-market economies to call the shots on how parents juggle home and work? And, leaving women to waste their time and energy debating who's better - the stay-at-home mom who is always at hand but sometimes angry and bored, or the office-based mom who is around less but is stressed by juggling work and housework?

Interestingly, an American sociologist, Suzanne Bianchi found that mothers today - whether or not they work - spend more time per child than did mothers in the "family-oriented 1960s" because they have shifted the load away from housework and other non-child-centred tasks.

Ruth Rosen, author of The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America (Viking), said recently: "The notion that we have a free choice masks the reality of the pain these women experience with these choices." Rosen points out that few women really have the luxury of deciding between work and home, and most are just "turning themselves into pretzels" trying to somehow balance the two.

Where are the unions and feminists to fight these new battles? Where are the fellow workers crying, shame on you employers for pushing women into these situations? And are these mummy wars simply a distraction from deeper problems within our society that is forcing families to live highly stressful lives? Are we condoning a model of child-rearing that will result in a new generation of uncompassionate, selfish individuals striving for their own personal success above all else? Where are fathers in all of this?

Judith Warner says that fathers and husbands are losing out too in this battle for the soul of American children. She writes, "men who cut their hours to spend more time with their children are routinely regarded as losers . . . As a result, many men are stuck in a life of working longer and longer hours to provide for a family whose needs (not to mention whose wants) can barely be met on their salaries."

The one big difference between men and women in all of this is that men have known all along that they can't do it all - and in the main, shouldn't even try. Yet, women struggle on. Warner writes: "We have developed a tendency as a generation to privatise our problems. To ferociously work at fixing and perfecting ourselves - instead of focusing on ways we might get society to fix itself. It is time to shift the focus of our political debates away from parochial notions of equality and concentrate more on working to guarantee us all - men, women and children alike - a decent quality of life."

Perhaps we have to admit something blatantly obvious yet somehow difficult tograsp: many parents - mothers and fathers alike - are working too hard. And the booming economies (we no longer call them societies) that have created this over-work culture is what's driving us to do so. Next time you're doing a bit of late shopping for your child's birthday party, pity the families in which the parents are working through the night. These are the families whose lives are suffering most from this so-called turbo-charged capitalism. The mummy wars are merely cosmetic in contrast.