Rebels in White Gloves

by Miriam Horn

  “My biggest fans have felt that though I wasn’t get paid or getting public recognition, as a mother I was doing a full-time job requiring the same kind of dedication and energy and intellect. I always researched the best way to go about this or that. I don’t want dabblers. We’re committed to excellence. And I have kept my kids so busy they haven’t had time for hanging out in malls. Music has brought discipline and a spiritual dimension to their lives.”

  Articulate and well mannered, all four of Kathy’s children speak their minds with confidence and strong echoes of their mother’s worldview. The youngest, Jonathan, born in 1981, wants kids, but not four: “My mom seems stressed-out having to deal with all of us. I wouldn’t want my wife to work that hard, and I wouldn’t want a job like my dad’s, where he’s barely here. Sometimes my mom’s way overprotective; I don’t like having friends over, ’cause she’ll hang around. But I wouldn’t want to have parents like my friends’ parents, who are super-rich, with huge jobs, and give their kids everything but are never home.” Stephen, born in 1979, doesn’t want to get married. “This family has been an enormous help to me in knowing where to stand and what to value. But there are many aspects of family I couldn’t commit to. I feel I’d have to be a breadwinner, but I’d want time with my kids. And I don’t think I could accept kids, or a wife, warts and all.”

  Karen, born in 1974, who since her early illness has struggled with learning disabilities and after high school enrolled at Lawrence Conservatory of Music, “almost had a breakdown in high school, wondering, Am I doing music for myself or for my mother? I do think we’re living her dream. But I can live with that. At times I feel sorry for my dad; I know he doesn’t feel as close to us. There’s not much he could have done, but I wish he’d been here more. If I raise a family, I want to be with my kids. I don’t think it’s right to go off. I don’t know what I’d do without my mom. She’s been there behind me my whole life.” Like each of her three brothers in turn, Karen makes sure I know that, while at Wellesley, her mother was a presidential scholar.

  The eldest, Rob, born in 1973, a graduate of Williams College, wants to be a househusband. “It’s hard to say if my mom is happy. I guess she’s happy with her marriage. They have incredibly happy moments together. If love exists, I do feel they’ve come close to it. I would like to emulate that, and to believe that love would transcend all differences. But their marriage is not a model of the marriage I want to have. So much of their interaction is so frustrating to watch. They hardly ever seem in sync. There’s always underlying tension. I think it’s because they’re such opposite people. My mother is emotional. My dad hides every emotion; he has, like me, a strong aversion to conflict. He can’t stand fights, because they’re not rational. He clams up, and then for my mom it snowballs.

  “I also push my mom away: I get uncomfortable when she gets too involved in my life. I look down on her for being so irrational, and then I look down on my dad for being so unemotional. I can’t really figure out what is an acceptable way for me to be. I see elements of both my parents in me, and I’m trying to figure out which I want to kill and which to grow. My dad feels guilty because he knows so little about music, and she places so much value on it. It’s who she is, so she makes it out to be incredibly important. I’m always in conflict: Should I be practicing tennis for my dad’s sake, or violin for my mom?

  “What my mom really resents is that my dad didn’t make time to be with his kids. He threw himself into his work; that’s what he’s best at. But by the time he comes home, he’s given all he has. He has no patience with us. He’s not really a kid person, even though he’s a pediatrician. My mom felt burdened. She literally does everything here. My dad did nothing. We’ve started doing dishes, but only recently. I think she resented that we just took her for granted. That’s the central problem my mother faces, in all spheres. She was apprehensive going to her twenty-fifth reunion at Wellesley. Even though she’s of equal quality as those women, she hasn’t done as much according to what society thinks is something.

  “The only goal I have in life is to be a father, a househusband. I love kids—that rubbed off from my mom. I’d like to be seriously part of children’s lives; that’s why I was leaning toward going into pediatrics. At the playground I see all these kids with nannies. The nannies have their own families but have to be parents to kids whose own parents won’t make time. I do think I’d have some of the same difficulties as my mom with staying at home, in terms of feeling unappreciated. Though I’ve already accepted my mediocrity. Not that being a househusband would be a mediocre thing to do. I would love to be a world-famous pediatrician, but if I was a father for a living, that would be equally hard, but not something I could, or would, run away from. My mother hasn’t run away from anything. She’s made her decisions and stuck with them. Whether they’ve made her happy is another question.

  “There must be a self-defeating gene in our family. I think in fact my mom’s not terribly happy that she just stayed home with the kids; so many times she felt she could have done more. She’ll go to a party, encounter women who’ve done all kinds of things, and feel she’s not treated as an equal. There’s a tendency in this kind of neighborhood to devalue people who take care of kids. And what’s unfortunate with me and my mom is that we place a lot of stock in what society thinks; we too often compare ourselves with society’s idea of what’s best. I have a friend with the perfect Leave It to Beaver mom, and my mom doesn’t like to be thrown in the same pot with her. My friend’s mom spends her time keeping her house totally spotless and hosting parties and keeping up the appearance of a perfect family. My mother sees herself as a Hillary Clinton-type person, who has just chosen the field of raising children.

  “When our quartet plays a concert, my mom gets in a complete frenzy, upset and yelling at us till we get there. Then we give the performance and she’s the happiest person in the world, overflowing with love for us. At those moments she’s genuinely happy with her decision to raise kids. I don’t think my mom gave up at all. She made the decision she thought best. Where for me to choose househusbanding, well, there’s the baggage that I didn’t have what it takes to do something else. At Williams, I had to change my major because I failed a class. That was rough. I wanted to just leave. My parents thought I could do anything, but discovered I wasn’t so good at a lot of things. So child rearing is not the only thing I wanted to do but the only thing I can do. In an ideal world, being a father would be just as important. But a pediatrician does seem a higher calling.

  “As a kid I hated playing violin; I felt I was just living out my mom’s dreams and it felt like a burden. But more often I felt like I was a burden to her. I would see how hectic her life was, how often she would get upset with me if I didn’t take out the trash or something. I felt I was screwing up her life. I blamed myself for her unhappiness. I did see a lot of unhappiness, more than happiness. I always felt like she was trying to prove herself. She is what she acts, but she tries real hard to create an impression of satisfaction. She loves kids and definitely wanted to raise them, but I question whether she truly believes it’s as valuable as the alternatives. She seems to have to try real hard to prove to herself that it’s okay to be who she is.”

  “We have a better marriage than the kids think we do,” says Kathy. “Kids are always an interference in a marriage. They take away opportunities for intimacy; they demand energy. Roger is not demonstrative, so our close time is not visible to them; more often they’ve seen ships passing in the night. But our cement is the love between us; Roger has provided unceasing love and is unbelievably supportive of me. Which is not to say we couldn’t have a better marriage. I would hope for them that their marriages are warmer than ours.”

  In raising a family, Kathy has also found, like many in her class, a large measure of understanding and forgiveness for her own parents. “It’s not very complicated why the life at home with children that made my mother so miserable could make me happy. I loved kids and actively chose
what was right for me. My mother had no choice; she didn’t love being a mother, but she wasn’t ever allowed to express who she truly was. She was much more confident and happy when she went back to work as a secretary, which became possible only because the world had changed around her. By the time she died, I understood that she had done the best she could and she understood that I had been right in my choices. I’d never heard her tell me she loved me until she was sick and dying, but I did get to hear it finally. I felt sad she had suffered so much. But I certainly don’t blame her. She was a victim of her times: I would never advocate going back to the demeaning role of women in the fifties.”

  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.”

  Dismissed and Defensive

  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.