Rebels in White Gloves (37 page)

A week after my first meeting with Kathy, I received a letter from her. “At the risk of seeming defensive,” she wrote, “I am sending you this résumé so you can see what I did while I ‘wasn’t working.’ ” The résumé detailed her years of volunteer activities in the church and schools. “I would urge you not to make the common mistake of assuming that a woman who chooses to stay home with her children is doing nothing.” Soon after the profile in
U.S. News
appeared, we spoke again. “I can’t say it’s not true, everything you wrote. But it sounds so awful, like I’m a subjugated woman and Roger’s an ogre who drags me around by the hair. It made a friend of mine—the woman who had encouraged me to go to Wellesley—extremely angry. She said you were using me. And Roger and I joked that I should go to my twenty-fifth reunion barefoot and pregnant with him following me around with a whip.”

Such a performance, she believes, would only have confirmed her
classmates’ disdain, though as Kathy speaks of her classmates, she seems not to hear the echoes of her mother’s warnings thirty years earlier about “those people with their fancy ideas who think they’re better” than everybody else. “It took me fifteen years after Wellesley to recover my confidence that I was smart,” says Kathy. “I felt like a nothing there. I haven’t come through life with my classmates’ sense of entitlement—that I was born to achieve greatness and be better than other people. At the reunion there was still so much posturing. At the class meeting we discussed what messages we should give our daughters. They were all still talking about modeling the fact that women can do anything. I wish I’d had the nerve to say: ‘What we need to do is give them unconditional love.’ They don’t see that what matters most is your relationship with people. They come across as: ‘Here I am, world; I’m so wonderful, and who are you and why should I talk to you?’ People looked right through me, though now I don’t care. Now I trust my own opinions. I’m more willing to do what makes sense for me, regardless of what people at Wellesley value, and I certainly don’t think they value who I am, or ever will.”

In 1977, living gloomily in Washington, Nancy Wanderer, ’69, wrote to the Wellesley alumnae magazine: “I feel motherhood in the first years is an extremely important and time-consuming profession, one that merits a higher status. It also can be extremely rewarding. I just wish more women of ability and talent would consider it a worthwhile profession.” In 1984, Susan Fowler Bryant, ’69, wrote “of the difficult discovery that I don’t need traditional titles to feel a sense of accomplishment. I had felt self-conscious and dull that I was careerless, and discovered this was a myth.” In 1989, Karen Cheses Sanders, ’69, wrote of having her Ph.D. framed alongside her M.S. and her Wellesley B.A., “all of which makes me an educated person with a career in family administration.” “What’s really important,” class secretary Shaunagh Guinness Robbins asked in 1986, “a successful law practice or the local PTA?” Time and again, one finds the women in the class who have stayed home with their children defending and burnishing their choice for their peers. Nancy’s sister-in-law, Katherine Harding Wanderer, calls herself a “home executive.”
Others object to the phrase
working mother
, insisting the proper distinction is between an
employed mother
and a
career mother
, the latter being a woman “who, having the choice, chooses to commit herself to raising her children.”

An occasional note of defensiveness is heard from other women in the class as well: Betty Demy, ’69, a divorced, employed, single mom, was not alone in being angry at Kathy Smith Ruckman’s fervent advocacy of her brand of motherhood. “I don’t like her setting herself up as some kind of paradigm. Those who made a good marriage and could stay in it are lucky. I would have chosen the same. It’s best to have two parents. But it’s not the only way to raise a healthy kid.”

Of all the women in Hillary Clinton’s class, however, it is the stay-at-home moms who seem most to feel the need to defend their lives. Two or three decades ago, that made sense. Feminism’s furious rejection of the feminine mystique did for a time sabotage the movement’s deeper aim of expanding the range of women’s choices. As Jan Piercy says, “Its short-run outcome was to substitute one set of options for another, so that we shifted from an environment in which women who worked outside the home were censured to one in which women who didn’t work were regarded as not fully using their talents. It was a natural pendulum swing.”

Now, however, such defensiveness seems an anachronism. Much is still made of the so-called mommy wars—with full-time moms scorning working mothers for their pallid commitment to their families (“Oh, you
bought
Johnny’s Halloween costume?”) and working mothers retaliating with condescension. But in none of my conversations with Kathy Ruckman’s working classmates did I find the disdain she perceives. Rather, most recognize an immense debt to the women who hold their neighborhoods together and volunteer in the churches and schools. “We are incredibly lucky to have a stay-at-home mom next door,” says Nan Decker, ’69, a mother of two who works a twenty-eight-hour week. “She is a big boon, a linchpin of the neighborhood. Today I heard all the kids out front singing, ‘I see London, I see France,’ and it warmed my heart.” World Bank executive Jan Piercy echoes Kathy’s words. “The pool of talent, largely women, who were able to commit themselves to work that wasn’t compensated, has been the backbone of much of the social progress in this country. Women who cared passionately about the quality
of education for their children, for instance, got engaged in the schools as volunteers in a very professional way, and it’s partly as that pool disappears with more women in the workforce that the problems of urban education are becoming more acute.”

Oddly, the greatest symbolic moment in the mommy wars—Hillary Clinton’s infamous remark “I suppose I could have stayed at home and baked cookies and had teas,” which presumably marked her as contemptuous of non-wage-earning moms—did not alienate many of her “traditional” classmates. Alison Campbell Swain “knew she wasn’t saying stay-at-home moms weren’t contributing but asking why she should waste her training, especially since she only has one kid.” In 1994, Kathy Ruckman wrote a letter to
The Washington Post
defending Hillary as one of the few public figures standing up for children. “I have been amazed by the criticism and vilification of such a good, intelligent woman. I see her as just another in a long line of capable, ambitious and frustrated women who are forced by society’s expectations, and their husbands’ powerful positions, to operate behind the scenes … forced into the background by outdated stereotypes of her ‘place in life.’ ”

The root question, of course, is: What is best for the children? Kathy’s answer—the full investment of their mother (even if with a mostly absent father)—is the answer implicit in most discussions of day care or nannies; even by those who use it, nonmaternal child care is generally begrudged as second best.

Yet while the superiority of maternal rearing is treated now as an eternal verity, the conception of what a child needs, and even of what a child is, has varied radically from one historic era and culture to the next. Puritan children needed most their father’s stern hand to drive the devil from their corrupted souls. Victorian children were also their fathers’ before all: The preservation of their innocence and obedience could not be entrusted to their emotionally inconstant mothers, but required tutors and governesses supervised by the man of the house; in the event of divorce, custody was automatically his. The early-twentieth-century enthusiasm for Taylorist efficiency (Frederick Taylor was the American engineer who invented time-and-motion studies) bolstered the idea that men, especially expert men, ought to supervise child rearing, applying the principles of scientific management. Mothers were instructed to rear
their children by the clock, as picking them up when they cried would only create moral laxity and unwholesome dependence. The influence of Freud reversed those verities but preserved the place of the male expert, who now warned mothers that repression, especially in toilet training, would scar children for life. Mary McCarthy mocked the women who bowed to such fickle and bullying experts:
The Group’s
cowed Priss Crockett, “married to a pediatrician of the six, ten, two, six, ten, two school of scheduled feeding, who trained her never to pick up their son between feedings except to change his diaper,” meets in Central Park Norinne Schmittlapp, who fancies herself “advanced” because she lets her Ichabod run naked and feed on demand; she “predicts he’ll give up his anal pleasures under peer pressure at nursery school.”

In just the span of the lives of the class of ’69, the experts have swung from a spare-the-rod advocacy of dunce-cap humiliation and corporal punishment to a Spockean condemnation of “toxic parents,” who criticize or punish too harshly. The idea of family as a democracy—which has shaped most of the ’69ers’ approach to child rearing and informed Hillary Clinton’s legal advocacy of children’s rights in decisions about their own abortions, schooling, and employment—now coexists with a kind of counterreformation, demanding a return to clear lines of authority and harsh discipline. Breast-feeding has been in, then out in favor of “scientific artificial feeding,” then in again. The warnings in the fifties about overinvolved “viper” mothers have resurfaced in mockeries of yuppies competing to get their progeny into Ivy League-prep nursery schools, or neo-Taylorist moms creating “child development oversight systems,” with week-by-week development flow charts, educational toys, and Gymboree; such complaints coexist with those against careerist and underinvolved moms. Expert studies prove that working mothers are happier mothers, or unhappier; that men and women with multiple roles and complex lives have more stable, or more fragile, marriages; that kids fare better, or worse, with stay-at-home moms; that kids in day care learn to compete aggressively for attention, or are better socialized and have more self-control and independence. From evolutionary psychology comes the argument that the “public nature” of ape and cavewoman child rearing suggests a biological basis for working motherhood: “It is unnatural for a mother to hand her child over to someone she barely knows and head off for ten hours of work, but not as unnatural
as her staying home alone with a child,” writes Robert Wright.

“Women naturally have a vocational as well as maternal calling.… The notion that infants are better off at home gives short shrift to the innately social nature of infants and mothers.”

Feminists have mostly been what might be called old-fashioned in their views of child rearing: Though they are attacked by neoconservatives for deeming men superfluous, they have in fact been the most consistent agitators for paternal care. Feminist psychologists like Nancy Chodorow were arguing for more fathering long before antifeminists like David Blankenhorn (author of
Fatherless America
) began to do so: Only with fathers involved more than the few hours a week most spend with their kids, wrote Chodorow, would children grow up to be more nurturing and less emotionally distanced. More recently, in
Motherguilt
, sociologist Diane Eyer has revisited the influential studies by John Bowlby and such successors as T. Berry Brazelton on infant attachment and bonding, noting that their conclusions that neglect by
mothers
damages children were based on studies of infants deprived of
any
consistent, loving relationships. Eyer challenges the experts’ indifference to the value of paternal attachment; she also challenges the damning premises these experts begin with: that a “well-bonded” mother is defined as one who doesn’t leave the house or feels guilty if she does. Several members of the class of ’69 have been professional advocates of paternal responsibility. Connie Hoenk Shapiro published a book on preventing teen pregnancy that explored the usually ignored role of the adolescent male. Hillary Rodham represented a father in a child-custody fight.

Though nearly all the mothers in the Wellesley class of ’69 have struggled to get their husbands more engaged in their children’s lives, only a third report having achieved equality in caring for their children and nearly all have failed to persuade their husbands to share housecleaning, grocery shopping, and cooking; the division of household labor in their class is only marginally different from that of classes their mothers’ age. “My husband, Jock, loves being at home,” says Johanna Branson. “But it never occurs to him to do dishes or laundry unless he’s asked.” She worries that for her daughters it will be worse still. “My feminist friends haven’t raised sons who will be that different to be married to than our husbands,” she says, but
have
raised daughters who expect to share domestic responsibilities and pursue aspirations in the wider world. “I
worry we’ve set our daughters up—that there’s now a two-generation lag in expectations between women and men. I don’t want my daughters to have to be suspicious and angry to achieve some fairness.” That the “new man” does far less cleaning and cooking than he does child rearing would seem to contradict the familiar argument that women do more at home because of their biological endowments. Surely breast milk and a nurturing nature are not assets in washing floors.

Alison Campbell had been resident among the Celtic wood sprites and elves of Findhorn for more than a year when she met Bruce Swain, a journalist and teacher who had joined the community after visiting it to write a newspaper story. The two fell quickly in love, and in 1977 returned to America.

Alison’s marriage to Bruce, sweet of temper but unremarkable of lineage, saw her banished from the Social Register, though her father still occasionally sends her an application to get back in. She has spent most of her adulthood as a thrifty midwestern wife, tending her garden, vacuuming furiously in anticipation of a visitor, meeting her youngest child as he tumbles off the yellow school bus telling her excitedly of learning how to pump his legs on the swing. In manner and voice, she has remained the debutante, though she is no longer slender and her blond hair has gone brown; she crops it short and prefers snowflake sweaters and blue jeans to her mother’s knit suits and pearls. Rather than ripen into her mother’s elegance, she has stayed girlish—gushing and slightly awkward, with a breathy, piping voice.