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Some Excerpted Reviews of When Mothers Work:
The New York Times, Jan. 4, 1998: As a culture, we tend to make conscience of duty. Child rearing has to be done, and mothers, our society assumes, are highly motivated to care for their children. Ergo, women should be the primary caregivers in the home. Peters, a journalist and novelist, says that this syllogism is wrong on all counts: a dangerous myth that damages children almost as much as it imprisons women. Not only does Peters suggest that mom-as-linchpin-of family "may be among the least sensible child-rearing arrangements civilization has come up with thus far," she also argues that mothers "should work outside the home. If they do not, they cannot preserve their identities or raise children" who are both independent and family-oriented. But, as Peters adds, "women can do so successfully only if men take half the responsibility for child care." Peters's insistence on the importance of mothers retaining full involvement in their lives outside the home is her most original contribution to the large, contradictory and tendentious literature of late-20th-century parenting. We "have created the kind of motherhood," Peters writes, "that threatens mothers and children alike and still leaves fathers out of the loop," The "austere maternal ideal," she observes, of the "ever-present, always responsive" mother - a phrase coined by the psychologist and child-rearing guru Penelope Leach, for whom Peters has considerable scorn - makes- us reluctant to examine "why we give up so much when we become mothers" or to ask why the most highly motivated, loving mothers often engage in a kind of zealous "overparenting" that actually "takes away from children's self-importance, from their ability to take responsibility for their own happiness." In our culture, Peters contends, "better our own families fail than the myth" of the superiority of mothering to parenting shared with fathers and "othermothers," her term for the constellation of relatives, friends and paid caregivers who can help parents raise their children. "When Mothers Work" doesn't just blame men for women's troubles. Change to a more equitable and satisfying system, Peters maintains, must start with mothers themselves. From this, she argues, will flow what our society really needs: more respect for parents, more flexible and family-friendly workplaces, and happier, healthier children. She offers a convincing argument for dethroning children from their regal position in the family and for giving everyone shared responsibility for the emotional and logistical economy of the home. In short, we should create family setups in which everyone participates and different parenting styles can overlap - not baffling children but enriching their awareness of the lovely variety of supportive and warm relationships that nurture and serve their parents as well as themselves. But no one, according to Peters, is more attached to the old way of doing things than the stressed-out, exhausted mother. "It is easier for men to take on the nurturing of children than for women to give up some of it," she says. "The greatest emotional challenge for women is to allow men to nurture children in their own manner, not simply as assistants to mothers." Why is it so hard for mothers to give up the role of the sole essential parent? Because, Peters argues, at every level of society--from women's own mothers to the courts-- cultural attitudes make it difficult for women to express any ambivalence toward parenting. "Telling the truth about mothering -- when it does not refer to the oneness and bliss - means breaking the rules." When children are unhappy,--pick fights with their classmates or have trouble learning to read, people tend to assume that mothers are at fault. They are the ones who invariably end up assuming responsibility for slapping together lunch sandwiches; they are the ones whom the school nurses call and who rush to the school; who typically get up at 2 A.M. to provide comfort to their children. Our knowledge that most mothers will get the job done no matter what has led society to believe that it's right that they do -- despite abundant evidence, cited by Peters, that fathers can nurture wonderfully, if differently from their wives, and that children thrive so long as they develop loving attachments to adults. Peters isn't suggesting that mothers should refuse to extend themselves for their children's well-being: parenthood has always required sacrifice. Time, sleep and peace of mind - not to mention dinners at restaurants and wants children to suffer. They don't have to: in Peters's practically delineated egalitarian society, everyone wins, provided that child rearing is truly shared. What's more, this new structure can "bolster the parts of the self that society and our families may not have supported," like "female independence and male nurturing." Although women can demand that business be more responsive to mothers' needs--by providing on-site child care or flexible working hours--more systematic change will occur, Peters says, once men "take on their fair share of domestic responsibility and therefore feel the same pressure that women do to find humane work." When 50-50 division of labor is agreed upon before there are children on the scene, and such a plan is adopted unreservedly, even fathers who feel unprepared for active parenting will rise to the occasion, Peters promises. As equal partners with their spouses, they'll give their lucky kids the benefit of two parents--as opposed to the "1 1/4 that most mother-reared children have." The first step toward this inviting future is enormous and scary: women have to accept men as equal parents. This may be the hardest task of all. When it comes to self-sacrifice, mothers from Dr. Leach to Mrs. Portnov believe that "not only do mothers gladly give up their lives for their children, but that their children's happiness requires that sacrifice." For a mother to examine that sacrifice closely and, perhaps, to decide not to make it, is a frightening but ultimately liberating prospect. Peters's own husband, she says, is a good parent partly because he's free of this terror: "He is not afraid of being a 'bad mother.'" Peters makes a point that is interesting and true--and that should have been self-evident eons ago: that responsible adults who are happy and fulfilled themselves make better parents than isolated, frustrated ones. Child rearing today, she writes, is an unsatisfying, unworkable system and serves the needs of no one. What she proposes in its place is brilliant and radical: a kind of unified field theory of successful parenting. Our children's happiness and wholeness, women's fulfillment and the creation of a more sensitive, supportive and dependable society and gvernment--all rely, in Peters's view, n fathers becoming equal partners with mothers in the parenting process. It's as simple--and as complicated- - as that. "We no longer have a problem that has no name," she declares. "Most women know exactly what the problem is: men have to do half the child care, and schools should be better, work more humane and child care subsidized.," But before any of these far-off developments can be realized, we have to learn, "how to be different parents." Peter’s book is an excellent place to start.---- Excerpt from review, entitled "The Parent trap," by Elizabeth Crow, editor in chief of Mademoiselle and the former editor in chief of Parents magazine.
The New York Times, Business Section, Oct. 4, 1997: A FAUX CHOICE "When Mothers Work: Losing Our Children Without Sacrificing Our Selves," by Joan K. Peters (Addison Wesley, $24) is a smart, tough-minded approach to the balancing act of working women: satisfying their children and themselves. The author says women should refuse to choose between "cold careerism" and "devoted mother," Indeed, she sees such a false choice as part of a backlash against feminism. "like the standards of female beauty," she says, "the norms of traditional motherhood" are being used to unsettle and manipulate women. There is no dithering here: Ms. Peters--a writer and a mother—believes that mothers should work outside the home. Even work that isn’t in career class is likely to bring self-esteem for both mother and child, she argues, citing studies. There Is also the matter of sharing the income burden. Our world isn’t exactly set up for working mothers, the author says, "our failure to modernize motherhood," to restructure family and society, is one of the country’s greatest problems. Some of her solutions are political: Women and men have to organize to force business to provide flex-time and paternity leave as a matter of course. She stresses that men will join this campaign only if they are pressured by responsibility at home. Communities, meanwhile, must do more to take the pressure off parents by providing high-quality public education and day care. But with salaries hovering below hamburger flipping levels, day care is "a national disgrace," she says. Women, she says, should consider pulling back from what she sees as "overparenting" which overscrutinizes children. And, yes, fathers have to "replenish the store of attention and affection depleted by the mother’s work,* she says. They must have the courage too, to ask for paternity leave if it’s available. In this regard, Ms. Peters opens her own Life a bit for inspection. (She is married to Peter Passell, a writer for The New York Times who is thanked in the authors acknowledgments for editing help.) The author also says child-rearing help from grandparents, friends and paid caretakers, is not second best when used judiciously. Children thrive on multiple parenting, she argues, citing studies that correlate it with academic and social success. To cheat neither her offspring nor herself, she says, a woman should think about having fewer children—and having them later in life, when work and family finances are more in order.---review by Deborah Stead.
Business Week, Sept. 15, 1997: Joan K. Peters also sees women struggling to balance work and family. In When Mothers Work: Loving Our Children without Sacrificing Ourselves, she portrays women experiencing guilt for leaving children at home at home at the same time as they feel they are shortchanging their families, employers, and themselves. But Peters' book is predicated on the idea that women should work; that they can garner huge satisfaction on the job while raising happy, well-adjusted children.Peters cites research showing that work is as key to self-esteem and intellectual satisfaction as it is to paying the bills. Moreover, women who find it impossible to balance career and family are not always benefiting their children by staying home, she says. Rather, kids profit intellectually from exposure to many people, she argues, and maternal employment creates an opportunity for [them] to form other close connections," at day care and with other relatives. The torrent of guilt that surrounds the working mother, writes Peters, results from trying to meet an unrealistic goal. When conservative politicians and pundits point to a lapse in family values, they are quick to point the finger at working mothers. Even Penelope Leach, author of many popular books on childrearing, says that giving birth "makes it impossible for women to seek self-fulfillment that is separate from fulfillment of [the baby's] perceived needs and wishes." Peters argues that such attitudes represent dangerous attempts to turn back the hands of time.----Science Editor Naomi Freundlich
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