MOTHERS Day Book Bag Feature - Mommy Wars

In light of CEASEFIRE DAY, MOTHERS chose Leslie Morgan Steiner's Mommy Wars: Stay-at-Home and Career Moms Face Off on Their Choices, Their Lives, Their Families as the featured book for MOTHERS Day 2006.

In the year since Newsweek - and MOTHERS Book Bag - featured Judith Warner’s book, Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety in their The Myth of the Perfect Mother cover story, all’s been quiet on the mommy war front. That is until Good Morning America ran a series on the Mommy Wars in March 2006 (How to Raise Kids: Stay Home or Go to Work? and 'Mommy Wars': To Work or Stay at Home?).

The show prompted an outpouring of response on the ABC News message board (over 4,300 comments and counting) and a letter from NOW President Kim Gandy to Diane Sawyer and ABC.

Yet the release of books and media articles on the Mommy Wars goes on and on as evidenced by the recent release of Mommy Wars. As she told Lauren Young of BusinessWeek Online in "The Extended Mommy Wars Q&A":

I thought the battle was between stay-at-home and working moms. But women don’t fall into these neat categories. Most women see it as a continuum.

There is no way that there is one answer that’s right for every mom. Ultimately, we are all trying to be the best possible mothers we can all be.

Yet when asked by Helaine Olen at Salon.com if our culture feeds on the so-called mommy wars, Steiner replied:

Definitely. It's good material. Politicians like to play women off each other. When they're campaigning, they appeal to a certain group and we're all susceptible to the message when it's us vs. them, or good vs. bad, so politicians try to appeal to good moms and bad moms, depending on what your definition is. Advertising executives do the same thing. They tell us, "You have a problem, you're not a good enough mom, and I have a product that will make you feel like a good mom." We hear that a thousand times a day.

It's time to spread the word that MOTHERS aren't buying what they're selling anymore!

The truth behind the "Mommy Wars" is that it is a media-hyped fiction used to generate ratings. Stay-at-home moms and full-time working moms share the same concerns. So do the legions of moms who are somewhere in between — working part-time; working from home; job sharing; splitting shifts with partners to allow one parent to always be available for child care. The "choices" for all moms are inadequate because the systems are not in place to make it possible to earn a decent living while taking care of children or elderly parents.