Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power by Sady Doyle

Author:Sady Doyle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2019-08-12T23:00:00+00:00

For a mother to do anything outside of child-rearing and domestic chores is borderline negligent, particularly if it involves the baby crying for more than a second or two without maternal comforting—on his website, William Sears writes that the “cry-it-out approach,” popularly used to train babies to sleep in their cribs through the night, may have “harmful neurologic effects that may have permanent implications on the development of sections of their brains.”10 (Meanwhile, actual scientists insist that Sears is wildly misconstruing several studies, most of them relating to nonhuman animals or babies that have experienced severe abuse and neglect.) In a 2012 TIME magazine profile, Martha Sears claims that a relative who was a “colicky, fussy baby,” and who was allowed to cry in her crib, developed lifelong mental illness as a result: “That almost is like Exhibit A for the cry-it-out approach,” she insists.11

Both Searses are devout evangelical Christians, and have written in the past that allowing mothers to work violates God’s plan: “Babies in our culture are not being cared for in the way God designed, and we as a nation are paying the price,” they wrote in their 1997 book The Complete Book of Christian Parenting and Child Care.12 Though they’ve reportedly softened that assessment in recent years, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that they’ve created a theory of parenting that tells mothers they are committing child abuse if they have to work.

Yet attachment parenting is massively popular. I had two copies of The Baby Book by my second trimester; it is, as Judith Warner writes in her 2005 book Perfect Madness, “the practice that dominates, in watered-down form, among the middle and upper middle class today.”13 Followed faithfully, the theory leads to families like “Joanne and Daniel,” whose child-rearing practices resemble a cult where members are forbidden to communicate with the outside world. Not only can’t Joanne work, she can’t spend unaccompanied time with other adults, including her husband, under any circumstances: “There are no date nights,” the profile informs us. “Joanne doesn’t get away for afternoons to have lunch with her girlfriends. In fact, the only time Joanne has ever left either of her children in anyone else’s care was when she was in labor with her second child.”14

It’s easy to roll your eyes at the attachment-minded moms of the world, particularly since that Newsweek cover appears to show one of them breastfeeding a first grader. (The kid was three years old, supposedly. He looked big enough to play for the Knicks.) Yet the attachment norm also creates wrenching guilt in mothers who can’t or don’t follow it: “An hour given to writing was an hour stolen from my child’s future happiness,” Abel writes. “To even desire such an hour signified my detachment from her.”15

Women are taught not just that mothers are not really people, but that when they become mothers, they will not want to be people anymore. A good mother, a true mother, is someone who gives up all claim on her

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