While it’s hard to argue with divorced fathers wanting larger roles in their children’s lives, that wasn’t always the driving motive. Legal experts at the time called many of these cases something else. They said that fathers who didn’t want to pay child support would often sue for custody to avoid payment. Or they sued when they stood to profit—for instance, when their wives earned more than they did, as was the case with Marcia and Gordon Clark.
Some commentators and Clark herself saw her ex-husband’s custody case as a grab for the cash she was sure to earn post-trial. Gordon Clark accused Marcia of spending frivolously, on new clothes, shoes, and hairstyles. “She needed more money to improve her Hollywood glitzy image,” he said. In an exclusive interview he gave to Newsweek, Gordon painted Marcia as not only a negligent mother, but an unfeeling miser. “She’s saying, ‘Not only can you not be with your kids, but I’m going to hire babysitters and you have to pay for them,’” Gordon said. “It made me feel like she wanted me to be a bank and not a father.”
Even now, Clark bristles at all of this. “There’s no such thing as a pleasant custody battle, but it was a hideous thing to be going through at the time. To be attacked because I’m busy in trial, which is a finite thing. It’s going to end. I’m home to put them to bed. I’m home for dinner. And then I go back to work at the house.” Plenty of women related to this dynamic in the 90s, as they would now.
NANNYGATE
As Marcia Clark learned, a mother with a powerful job is an easy target. But it wasn’t just professional women’s achievements that rankled the masses in the 90s; it was also that they were seen as sauntering off to successful, glamorous careers while paying other women to watch their kids, thereby dodging their primary responsibility of motherhood. Public anger at professional women who left their kids with caregivers was undoubtedly fueled by class resentment at the six-figure lawyers and politicians who could pay for private childcare while their low-wage and hourly counterparts could not. Condemning successful women for their childcare decisions was tantamount to saying they didn’t belong in the workforce at all. Rather than take aim at the country’s childcare crisis, the societal narrative pitted mothers against each other.
Zoë Baird would have been the first woman attorney general, and the reason why she wasn’t is a well-known cautionary tale. The Connecticut attorney probably never thought that her career would be derailed by a childcare decision, or that her name would be associated with words like “failure” and “setback.” Baird had long been a corporate lawyer, holding big jobs at General Electric and Aetna before President Bill Clinton nominated her to his cabinet.
The announcement took place on Christmas Eve 1992. A couple of weeks later, the story was leaked to the press that Baird and her husband had employed undocumented immigrants—“illegal aliens,” as they were commonly called at the time—in their home. Baird had revealed this detail to the Clinton transition team when they vetted her and was told it was no biggie. She had paid a fine for the violation and back taxes for the employees before her nomination. But vocal resentment still brewed.
Critics speedily attacked Baird for being rich and aloof—a robo-yuppie, according to Rolling Stone. Numerous reports printed her salary as an Aetna attorney to prove her out-of-touch social status; her earnings topped $500,000 per year, eclipsing the salary of her husband—a Yale Law School professor—fivefold. Their New Haven house was said to look “a little like Monticello,” and critics sneered at what they called her employment of “servants” to maintain a household of three. Baird’s law career, salary, and childcare choices were presented as failed feminism. Rather than laud the accomplishment of female attorneys like Baird, her detractors claimed that the movement had promoted “the equal right of women to become yuppie power-lawyers alongside men,” observed Robert Kuttner in the Washington Post.
In the early 1990s, it was commonly thought that hiring childcare was akin to outsourcing motherhood, and people balked that someone as wealthy as Baird would do it on the cheap. This revelation sparked a faux mommy war. Pitting different kinds of mothers against one another was the only way for many to understand the Baird conundrum. The cultural debate about motherhood did not allow for the role to be hard for both rich mothers and poor ones.
“Widespread anger” at Baird was reported among working mothers who earned less than her, and among mothers without careers who worked at home caring for kids. Baird was a pariah because she was perceived to have the resources to make childcare easy for her family (never mind that, as any working mother will tell you, leaving your infant with a stranger is anything but). Unfortunately, Baird’s story did not spur a needed discussion about the real villains of Nannygate: broken immigration laws and the country’s childcare crisis, which was intensifying as more women joined the workforce and tacked on additional office hours. Instead, activists, politicians, and the media faulted Baird’s success and blamed her for the difficult decision that made it possible for her to have a thriving career in the first place.
Baird told her side of the story and apologized at a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee in January 1993. She was forced to defend the decisions she had made for her child, and her motherhood, while a panel of mostly old, white men scolded her. Inarguably, Baird violated the law by not paying taxes and hiring illegal immigrants. But the emotional intensity of the discussion suggested that much more was at stake, that this controversy was really about what makes a good mother.
Baird revealed that she had been searching for childcare for almost two months so that she could return to work, and admitted she had acted more like a mother than an attorney general. To which committee chair Joe Biden replied, “It is amazing, the ability of the human condition to rationalize, to justify what you know is not right.”
“There are . . . millions of Americans out there who have trouble taking care of their children . . . with one-fiftieth the income that you and your husband have—and they do not violate the law,” he chided. His colleague, Wyoming Republican Alan Simpson, highlighted that women felt they lacked Baird’s life “advantage.” As Baird sat opposite the committee members, one couldn’t help but recall Anita Hill being interrogated by many of the same senators in the same grand hall a little more than a year earlier. And several media accounts did note the similarities between Baird’s and Hill’s congressional testimonies at the time. The committee treaded far more lightly with Baird after being lashed for how they treated Hill. But together, Baird and Hill symbolized the threats that working women in the 90s faced: sexual harassment and discrimination, even at the highest career levels, and the many challenges and attendant judgments that come with being a working woman. In both cases, instead of blaming insufficient laws, wrongheaded politicians, and broken systems, individual women were held responsible for national problems.
Women’s groups were outraged that Baird was the only cabinet candidate queried about her babysitter, while none of the men had been. They claimed she was being held to a double standard: Baird’s life and choices were being inspected with utmost scrutiny, far more than those of men who had already been confirmed. NOW president Patricia Ireland hit the White House hard on the double-standard point, reminding them that Secretary of State Warren Christopher claimed he didn’t know the military had spied on antiwar protestors during Vietnam, despite government documents that proved he did, and yet he was speedily confirmed. Baird’s childcare arrangement was a trifle compared to far more serious accusations. Some in the media agreed. “The reaction to Baird’s admission, including calls for her to withdraw . . . far exceeded the response to inconsistencies in the records of other nominees,” explained the Boston Globe.
NOW’s six hundred affiliates launched a campaign to demand that confirmed cabinet members volunteer their own domestic employment records, since they hadn’t been asked to do so by the administration. NOW clarified that not doing so would mean Baird was being held to a different standard as a woman appointee, and that not appointing a woma
n to attorney general would render Clinton as unprogressive as his Republican predecessors. Surprisingly, one cabinet official admitted he’d unknowingly done just what Baird had. Commerce Secretary and longtime Clinton confidant Ronald Brown revealed on Meet the Press that he had neglected to pay his house cleaner’s Social Security tax. The White House stayed silent and “declined to even rebuke a male cabinet member,” Newsday reported. Already confirmed, Brown kept his job. When Labor Secretary Robert Reich was asked about his own domestic employees, he sniffed, “I’m not here to talk about babysitters.”
Public pressure mounted for Baird to withdraw. Clinton apologized and said he had rushed things. But this was not the case for the next proposed appointee, New York judge Kimba Wood, who was asked by Clinton himself during her vetting if she “had a Zoë Baird problem.” After reviewing her financial records, the White House found that she had also employed an undocumented caregiver. Wood maintained that she had followed the law and paid all the proper taxes. It had all been aboveboard, but the administration feared recriminations after the Baird debacle. It was the whiff of a nanny problem that put the kibosh on Wood’s prospects. Aides leaked that Wood had trained as a Playboy Bunny while studying at the London School of Economics, even though she’d quit after five days and didn’t earn a paycheck. Nobody minded that part of her record, Newsday assured readers. And there wasn’t a backup contender immediately available. By compelling Baird and Wood (who was never nominated) to withdraw from consideration, Clinton sent the message that mothers were not welcome in top White House jobs. Critics charged sexism. Many blamed Hillary Clinton, stating that her posturing to get a woman in the job had caused the mess in the first place. “There’s no doubt that Wood—and Baird—were propelled forward by Hillary’s network,” Newsweek concluded.
WORKING-CLASS WOMEN
What fans loved about the sitcom Roseanne was that it drove an awl through the domestic-goddess trope. The show centered on the Conner family and its matriarch, who spit and cursed while she cooked and cleaned. Roseanne was both mom and housewife, while mocking the roles and their niggling humiliations. The concept for the show was based on the stand-up routine that comedian Roseanne Barr had performed on the road for eight years, featuring a self-proclaimed “fierce working-class domestic goddess” who was part lioness, part nudnik. Writing in New York magazine, Barr called the show “television’s first feminist and working-class-family sitcom (and also its last).” She was such an oddity and curiosity that, in 1989, she broke a record for appearing on the most magazine covers.
The sitcom pointedly slammed the degradations of motherhood while capturing many of the role’s essential truths. Viewers were relieved to see a more ribald, honest depiction of home life than typically shown on television. This was especially true a year after the debut of Full House, which sympathizes with a parent caught between work and the minutiae of raising a family, except that, in a departure from the norm, the parent at the center of the action in Full House wasn’t a woman but a man. Iconic sitcom mothers would never have gotten away with Roseanne’s caustic one-liners like, “If the kids are still alive when my husband gets home, I’ve done my job.” Asked by one of her children why she’s so nasty, she replies, “Because I hate kids and I’m not your real mom.” When her daughter offers to jump off a cliff, Roseanne asks, “Why don’t you take your brother and sister?” On the show, her girls were confronted with the troubles plaguing actual 90s girls like low self-esteem and teen pregnancy.
Her wife aptitude was also questionable. “I think women should be more violent, kill more of their husbands,” Barr told the New Yorker. In the 90s, the idea of childhood innocence was still treated like fragile crystal, and many sanctimonious critics expressed disgust with Barr’s jokes. They called her an “evil TV mom” and worried that the show was contributing to the dissolution of family values. “Her raucous antics . . . are calculated affronts to middle-class propriety,” observed the New York Times. The National Review described her as “a cunning marketeer who has figured out how to parlay a form of vulgar reverse sexism into stardom.” But plenty of viewers, parents, and families related to Roseanne’s dark humor and sarcasm. These tools were also potent devices to a generation of 90s kids ever skeptical of trying too hard and being told what to do.
While white mothers who worked—like Roseanne, Clark, and Baird—were pilloried for appearing to shirk domestic and motherhood duties, unemployed or underemployed black mothers were shamed for failing to work and staying home with their kids. In the 90s, politicians and the press furthered a derogation of black women: the “welfare queen,” who they alleged birthed scads of babies, scooped up government checks, and skipped work to chug champagne in her Cadillac. The archetype of the welfare queen was inspired by the racist notion that black women were lascivious, uneducated, and lazy. This disparagement, and the image it created of undeserving mothers riding a government gravy train, inspired laws that censured women’s home lives.
Ronald Reagan demonized the welfare queen in the 70s, and by the 90s, she had become what social psychologists dub a “narrative script,” a story told not only to explain ingrained behavior but also to predict it. “She is portrayed as being content to sit around and collect welfare, shunning work and passing on her bad values to her offspring,” wrote Patricia Hill Collins, author of Black Feminist Thought. “The welfare mother represents a woman of low morals and uncontrolled sexuality.” This stereotype pinned to poor black women convinced many that these women would connive and manipulate the system to get federal assistance they did not deserve.
The news media in the 90s mostly depicted African Americans unsympathetically, according to Yale political scientist Martin Gilens, who studied welfare stories in print and television news from the 1960s to the early 1990s. Gilens found that 62 percent of stories about poverty in major newsmagazines featured African Americans, and 65 percent of television reports about welfare did the same. Such portrayals stoked America’s belief that the bulk of welfare recipients were black women, even though they only comprised about 10 percent of them in 1998. The majority of welfare recipients were actually children. This racist assumption echoed the Jezebel and Sapphire tropes used to disparage Anita Hill and Living Single’s powerful working women. Sapphires and Jezebels connived and manipulated in the office and bedroom respectively, while the welfare queen did so from her living room sofa.
The welfare queen was a potent motif that fueled the media narrative around supporting the welfare overhaul of 1996. The law itself promised to “reduce non marital births and encourage marriage,” with financial incentives to states that accomplished these goals without raising abortion rates. Tying government assistance to a moral framework is part of the law’s legacy. And that didacticism was predicated on reducing black women to idle childbearers.
FAMILY VALUES
The fictional Murphy Brown’s choice to become an unwed mother sparked a national debate. Many fans wanted Murphy to remain childless and to terminate her unplanned pregnancy to affirm that motherhood wasn’t all women’s holy grail. Murphy’s decision to become a mother kicked off “one of the most bitter chapters in the 1990s culture wars.” She gave birth to her son in the finale of the 1991–1992 season, which drew thirty-eight million viewers—more than baseball’s World Series final that year.
Her choice became a referendum for feminists. Plenty were dismayed to see Murphy defect to motherhood after rejecting it, and accusations that Murphy had failed women mounted. In a moment thick with meaning, Murphy sings softly, “You make me feel like a natural woman,” to her newborn, tears springing from her eyes, “implying that she had been unnatural before,” wrote author Susan Douglas. “Natural Woman” was Murphy Brown’s theme song, according to the show’s creator, Diane English, mocking the idea that motherhood could make a woman “natural” and softening Murphy’s hard image all at once.
In May 1992, Vice President Dan Quayle made a campaign stop in California at the Commonwealth Club of San
Francisco. There, in a moment of moralizing about the country’s dearth of family values, he blamed the fictional Murphy Brown and chided her for having a child without a husband.
“Bearing babies irresponsibly is wrong,” he began. “It doesn’t help matters when primetime TV has Murphy Brown, a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid professional woman, mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice . . . Some things are good and other things are wrong.” And with that, Murphy went from “lovable bitch” to aberration.
These words from the vice president—who hadn’t even seen the show, it turned out—set America aflame. His supporters and traditionalist family groups savaged Murphy and the single motherhood she glorified. “Out-of-wedlock birth”—the term itself pejorative—was “deviant behavior” that was wretchedly being “normalized” by the culture, moralists argued. They were also talking in racist code about the illusive welfare queens, of course. The show was celebrating the disintegration of the American family and was contributing to a national campaign to accommodate deviant behavior.
As Quayle noted with indignation, Murphy Brown was also blunting the role of fathers and ignoring studies and social indicators that favored two-parent households. The Catholic League argued for a “restoration of family values” that Murphy had trampled with her decision. Fatherlessness was “devastating . . . as even Murphy Brown would admit if she were as good a reporter as her TV show depicts her,” wrote one detractor in the Chicago Tribune. The country would hear echoes of this logic in the fathers’ rights movement that, soon after, would fault Marcia Clark for trying to maintain custody of her children while going to work.
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