I think a lot about happiness, especially within the modern American heterosexual family. Within this institution more than any other, women and men spend valuable emotional energy trying to fit into unrealistic roles handed down from past generations. Sociologists have described emotional energy as a natural human source for enthusiasm, personal strength, social-connectedness, and willingness to initiate interaction. As parents and providers we are building and maintaining our children’s emotional energy. At the same time we are exchanging emotional energy with everyone we come into substantial contact with. Whether we gain or lose emotional energy depends on our past experiences, our ability to cope with stress, and the character of our interactions.
Individual biographies play a large role in determining the amount of emotional energy a person will have. People come to understand which interactions are going to build or corrode their emotional energy. According to Randall Collins’s interaction ritual theory, people in positions of power have more opportunities to gain emotional energy at the expense of those less powerful. In our patriarchal society, men have an unfair advantage over women in all social aspects, parenthood included. Through social rituals, textbooks, academic curricula, government, and laws, men’s needs and successes have been placed over those of women’s. These experiences create a gap in the levels of emotional energy men and women acquire and retain.
Mothers enter parenthood with less power, less privilege, and less emotional energy than men. From this lowered platform they must try to conform to an idealistic role of motherhood prescribed by society. Their level of emotional energy will rise and fall according to how easily they adapt to the role of mother. If a mother chooses to resist maternal prescriptions, she faces extreme discontent from family, friends, and, most likely, her partner as well. If she chooses to embrace these prescriptions, she faces extreme loss of independence and agency. Either way, a mother stands to lose.
As a mother, the pressure to fit into the role of the ideal mother is so overwhelming that it is one of the main reasons I decided not to have any more children. As a new and young mother the constant scrutiny from others, especially other mothers, was unbearable. My every action and decision was judged, no matter how small or private. Choosing personal freedom over breastfeeding, a seasoned family practitioner rather than a pediatrician, and potty training earlier than the “experts” recommended were all some of the decisions that were harshly questioned and debated. I felt the constraints of a social structure larger than the structure of the family my husband and I were trying to create together, and it left me exhausted and defensive.
Trying to make our mothers fit into the role of the idealized mother is a largely unattainable goal, one that is more linked to preserving the status quo and less about reality or accuracy. Ideologies further privilege the already privileged, and in the case of motherhood, the privileged people are fathers. Regardless of how much they do and how involved they are, fathers already come to the table with more privilege than mothers. They seldom if at all have to defend their roles as fathers. Only when they choose or slip into the areas reserved for mothers do they have to defend their every move. The pressure for my husband to be Superdad is far less great, and, if it were up to him, we would have 10 more children.
While adapting to the role of mother and trying to do so cheerfully, many women find themselves in unanticipated circumstances. They experience what sociologists have termed self rationalization; this refers to how a person caught up in an overarching system comes to regulate her own aspirations, life ways, and thoughts in conformity with the terms of that system. Women commonly bend and reshape their actions, tastes, and desires so as to accommodate the ideals of the good mother. It is commonly expected that women, especially mothers, will sacrifice their own needs for others. I have never been very good at fitting myself into a marked box. Being the youngest of five children, I have never been good at sacrificing my own needs for others—I have never had to. Yet even I cannot escape the ideal of motherhood. It is so embedded in our culture that it appears natural.
I now know it is the separate-spheres ideology that casts women as naturally suited to serve men, as in some way naturally built to perform unpaid labor for men and children. This ideal of separate spheres also allows men to enter into almost every life endeavor with more emotional energy than their female counterparts. For the most part, women do not grow up with the privileged assumption that their households will be maintained by anyone but themselves. When women do enter the workforce, they take their home lives with them. They bring to work the stresses, responsibilities, and concerns that cannot be taken care of on the weekends or during the few hours before and after out-of-the-house work.
Men can enter the workforce under the assumption that they will have a mediator between the messiness of everyday life and the structured world of their chosen career. They have been trained and prepared for a career life that is separate from their home life. They will be able to focus entirely for eight or more hours a day on their job because of a female mediator. Whether it is his wife, girlfriend, hired maid, mom, or teenage daughter, a man enters adulthood with the expectation that eventually the everyday needs of his household will be met by a woman. It is this knowledge of women’s necessary role as mediator that led a male peer to tell Hillary Rodham Clinton that she could not be a trial lawyer because she did not have a wife at home.
I am my husband’s mediator between the messiness of everyday life and his work responsibilities. This allows for him to get ready for his out-of-the-house work by himself. To leave for the job site with no consideration of children’s bumpy hair, bunching socks, and misplaced homework. To leave the house knowing that the children will be taken to school but not knowing the details of that journey. To leave on time or late, depending only on his own will and needs, knowing that he can focus eight hours of his day solely on his work obligations. To leave knowing that a woman will meet with the teachers, apply the bandages, and mend the bruised egos.
Most women are so successful at this mediating that their significant others do not consider these tasks work at all. This in turn allows for those tasks to basically go unnoticed by anyone other than she who is performing them, which allows for the false impression that men’s work is more important than women’s work, especially the work of mothering. This unawareness of the emotional and physical energy required for these tasks is a luxury most fathers have and most mothers do not. Allan Johnson explains the ease of not being aware of privilege as an aspect of privilege itself, the luxury of obliviousness. Being unaware of the middle ground of everyday life allows men to hold on to precious emotional energy while women feel theirs drained away throughout the day.
Women are taught these mediating skills throughout their lives in such a way that they begin to feel as if these skills are naturally inherent to women. This false sense of nature versus socialization helps perpetuate patriarchy’s permanence and the ideology of separate spheres. It is what sociologists know as the social construction of reality. The social world gets constructed through habits and practices of individuals. Once these practices and habits are passed down to the next generation, they are thought to be the natural world because that generation has known of nothing else. This is how institutions such as heterosexuality, patriarchy, and motherhood come to be thought of as natural and how the ideologies that go along with them remain so durable.
When my husband and I begin what sociologists call the “competition ritual,” he does not take into consideration the hours I spend on tasks to which he is oblivious. The things I inadvertently keep from him drain me of my emotional energy the most. These are the things I was trained to keep from him, from the time I received my first baby doll. With an out-of-the-house job, two children, homework, a dog, a cat, a husband, family, friends, and community involvement, I do not solely own my time. On any given day, my cat with a bladder-control problem may be lying in a bed as I am headed out the door with the two children, schoolwork, drinks, lunches, notes for teachers, jackets, backpacks, and various other items in our hands. Getting them all packed into the car and then remembering the cat on the bed does not get shouted out in the heat of the competition ritual. When the lights get turned off for lack of payment or when the clothes pile up in the hamper, the competition ritual begins and it is an all-out marathon to see who can spew out the most activities in a 24-hour period. Concrete tasks like paying the bills or cleaning the kitchen, doing the laundry or mowing the grass, hold more weight than dirty faces at the bus stop and tummy aches five minutes before school. These are the things that do not get listed; they are not deemed important enough for me to win the battle. Yet cumulatively they are as tiring as any paid labor.
Our understanding of motherhood and our handling of the separation between home and work life is crucial in our relationships with one another. The relationships between stay-at-home moms and career moms would benefit greatly from an understanding that neither option lets us escape from the “perfect mother” ideology. Regardless of whether or not a mom chooses or has no choice to stay at home, whether she gets paid from an employer, is a student, starts her own home-based business, or has a nanny and a gym-membership, she cannot escape the scrutiny of others based on their sentiment and attachment to the role of Supermom. That image of the smiling white mother in an apron, baking an apple pie, is feel-good propaganda and one that is not easily forgotten.
Johnson believes in the necessity and ability to change our current social structure. He encourages us to create and choose alternatives to paths of least resistance. He explains how we can fight systems of oppression every day by choosing different paths from those easiest to choose. Simply by not laughing at a joke that offends us, we can break the silence that confirms the acceptability of such behavior. Though exhausting and uncomfortable, it is in society’s best interest for mothers to choose the path less followed. Women need to choose the harder path of trying to expose and explain how the institution of motherhood has become yet another form of disprivilege for women. Finding our voice and not cowering down or becoming defensive when asked, “so what did you do today?” is one step. Another is to stop forming our opinions of each other based on whether or not we have children, and if we do have children, on how well we resemble June Cleaver.
I have a great partnership with my husband. We have created an environment that we are comfortable living in, where we are equal entities, where we each are tired, frustrated, and happy. We sacrifice worldly goods for priceless moments of serenity among our children, friends, and family. Yet we engage in the competition ritual, we bicker over who is more tired, more stressed, and ultimately more important. We know that our rituals are habitual and that our frustrations are mainly brought on by constantly swimming up stream in a society that imposes impossible ideals on us.
In our society we need awareness of how we unconsciously practice our gender-specific roles every day. For the most part these practices go unnoticed, and their effects show up in the unequal levels of emotional energy between genders, ultimately contributing to the perpetuation of women’s subordination. Too often women enter into motherhood believing that their situation is unique. To begin dismantling these inequalities takes voice and agency. Those of us who can, need to help build and maintain other women’s emotional energy, ensuring that they are equipped with the emotional ability necessary to understand the competition for what it truly is, a social construct in need of change.
Works Cited
Johnson, Allan. Privileges, Power, and Difference. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company, 2001.
