What many mothers need is a “Superdad, or a Superpartner,” Ms. “Let’s demystify parenting and talk about these gender inequalities and how they harm the possibility for a democratic family.” “This is a moment for us to put gender back in our conversation,” Dr. Vandenberg-Daves, if we make it the focus of our economic recovery and redraw the boundaries of family life, retiring the imposing, impossible figure of the supermom. Greater gender equality in the home and in business could be a silver lining of the pandemic, said Dr. After years of leaning in, some women tumbled into the abyss.Īs devastating as the pandemic has been to mothers, it may also be the moment many have been waiting for, say some academics and experts, as stories of harried mothers fill the news and the Biden administration explores policies that better support them. Then along came the coronavirus pandemic, which not only exposed the inequities between men and women, but intensified them, too. Men don’t do very much.’” (Meanwhile, plenty of women have been doing it all for eons.) “My definition of a supermom is a single mother,” Ms. “Supermom is just another way of saying, ‘Women do it all. magazine and author of 12 books, including “Getting Yours: How to Make the System Work for the Working Woman” (1975). “Feminists have been bashing and trashing the whole idea of the superwoman, the supermom, from the beginning,” said Letty Cottin Pogrebin, a founding editor of Ms. “In fact, they’re doing more unpaid work.” “Mothers are doing a bunch more paid work and they don’t seem to be doing any less unpaid work,” Michael Madowitz, an economist at the Center for American Progress, said of moms in the past decade. Some studies have found the do-it-all expectation is particularly trying for Black women and contributes to health disparities.īy the early 2010s, Momfluencers and C-suite women began advising mothers to “ lean in” - as if it were not too much to sew Halloween costumes and cook beautiful meals while also presiding over an economic empire. But “emotionally and personally, they were a mess.” The problem was that they were trying to “do it all” perfectly, and that simply wasn’t sustainable, she said. “I found that, professionally, some women were at the top of their field,” Ms. That existence was so taxing that in 1984 the writer Marjorie Hansen Shaevitz coined the term Superwoman Syndrome. And it helped create that sense that no matter what you’re doing as a mother, it’s not enough.” “All those things crop up right at the moment when women are also more involved professionally. Intensive mothering meant “constantly watching out for too much junk food, or making sure kids are getting their sunblock, or being careful about what they’re watching on TV, or ‘stranger-danger,’” Dr. Ironically, as women’s paid work hours increased around the 1980s, so did the supermom practice of “intensive mothering,” said Jodi Vandenberg-Daves, author of “Modern Motherhood: An American History,” and professor and chair of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. But for many entering the work force for the first time, working didn’t turn out to be liberation as much as a second set of responsibilities added to women’s already full plates, as many feminists, economists and journalists have noted. Plenty of wives and mothers were already doing everything. Many Gen-X women, some the daughters of feminist activists of the 1970s who fought for the right to work outside the home (and be paid equally for it), grew up believing that was precisely what was expected of them: that they should work full-time while also overseeing everything in the domestic sphere, with very little support in the form of legislation that might facilitate this zeitgeist shift, like subsidized child care or paid family leave.
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