Gender: Judging Mothers Although Women

Gender: Judging Mothers

Although women may have 'come a long way' in terms of their incursions into the corridors of power, one trend that has existed for decades continues -- women tend to be judged more harshly for their parenting skills than males. Just as women still assume the bulk of household-related duties, women today remain 'judged' in terms of how their perceived behaviors affect their offspring -- more so than males. While once there were worries that women working outside the home would have a psychologically detrimental impact upon children, today the cultural language of 'mother blame' has expanded to include the health damage women can do to their offspring if they do not behave in the 'correct' fashion. Traditional biases and fears against working mothers remain, despite the sharp increase of women enrolled in elite academic institutions. More mothers are working than ever before yet also more young women are expressing concerns that they will be unable to balance work and family demands.

In 1964, Betty Friedan's landmark The Feminine Mystique condemned the idea that women's sole purpose lay in motherhood, and questioned the popular Freudian notion that bad mothering was the main cause of psychological problems in children. In a recent documentary on PBS, filmmaker J.J. Hanley stated that even today, when she brought her autistic son to the pediatrician, she was initially 'blamed' for his failure to develop normally: "My family's pediatrician told me that my three-year-old son's failure to speak and strange, self-isolating social behaviors were a reaction to what the doctor described as my over-anxious, over-bearing mothering. The doctor advised me to leave my son alone and that he would be just fine. Nine months later, my son was diagnosed with pervasive developmental disorder/autism" (Hanley 2002). Mothers have been blamed, over the years, for psychological ailments as diverse as schizophrenia and influencing their child's sexuality. The demonstrated role of heredity in determining a child's behavior has quashed some of these theories. Yet it been replaced with an equally vigilant demand that pregnant women monitor their behavior to protect their fetuses and that after the child is born mothers ensure that children get off to a 'right start,' doing everything from breast-feeding to playing Mozart for their children in the cradle.

Social judgment begins of mothers prenatally: while it is certainly beneficial for pregnant women not to smoke and drink, and to eat a healthy diet, the downside is that pregnant women are often judged for not acting in a manner that is considered perfectly healthy for their baby. Even in Italy, a recent graphic anti-drinking campaign for pregnant women was launched, warning them of the dangers of their behavior. The Italian Institute of Health estimated that 65 per cent of women in Italy consume alcohol during their pregnancy: "The new campaign shows the fetus in a curled up position in the bottom of the glass, beneath ice cubes and a slice of orange" (Italy launches, 2011, The Telegraph). However, these graphic campaigns do not always reflect commonly-prescribed medical advice. In the U.S., "many obstetricians around the country counsel their patients that it's OK to have a few glasses of wine per week. And some of their patients take that advice -- more than 12% of pregnant women are social drinkers, according to government studies" yet there has been vociferous criticism of all women who indulge in any drinking in the media, including condemnations of actresses seen drinking publically in their pregnancy (Baram 2006).

Pregnant women may experience judgment even from their physicians. According to one single mother, when her pregnancy test came back positive, her doctor said: "So, have you thought about your options? Do you want to go forward with this pregnancy?'...I couldn't help but wonder if he would ask a married woman that same question. He proceeded to give me a prescription for prenatal vitamins, and I asked if I could have a detailed breakdown of the vitamin's ingredients. He told me he didn't have that information, and implied that I should simply trust that it included what was best for my baby" (Whebbe 2011).

After birth, women who choose not to breast-feed or who are unable to likewise face considerable cultural and social pressures for making such a choice. After a literature review of existing studies on the subject, "we have clear indications that breast-feeding helps prevent an extra incident of gastrointestinal illness in some kids -- an unpleasant few days of diarrhea or vomiting, but rarely life-threatening in developed countries" noted Hana Rosin in a controversial article in The Atlantic (Rosin 2009). Despite graphic public advertisements that link breast-feeding with putting a child at great medical risk, the evidence is less certain than one might assume. Although breast-feeding has been credited with everything from improving babies' IQs to preventing obesity, the ability to prevent these conditions with breast-feeding remains uncertain, particularly when women's economic status is taken into consideration when evaluating the studies (Rosin 2009).

Cultural biases against trusting a woman to actively make choices about how they will be mothers may have more to do with the censure of women who choose to discount so-called common wisdom and scientific advice -- spanning from decisions to seek out a midwife rather than an obstetrician to the decision to return to work. In response to this idealization of motherhood two trends have emerged. Many scholars have reported a return to 'traditional motherhood' even in the attitudes of elite young women: "At the height of the women's movement and shortly thereafter, women were much more firm in their expectation that they could somehow combine full-time work with child rearing" but more and more women in Ivy League universities say that they intend to leave work after the birth of their first child (Storey 2005). On the other hand, particularly after the recession, many women became the sole providers for their family after their husband was 'laid off' from work, given the fact that traditionally male employment fields of finance and construction were the hardest-hit by the recession.