Hiding Behind Motherhood

For all too long, women were permitted only to have babies. After the advent of the women's liberation movement, women were permitted only to have careers. Now they are struggling to combine the two, with questions like: Can I continue to work? Who raises the baby—me, us, or hired help? Can I do it all?

Although some women with families refuse promotions, work fewer hours, or choose not to go into very demanding positions, others interrupt their careers for child rearing. Some of them shift their energies and interests from outside activities to the home and family. These women continue to grow but in a different domain. After all, they say, the children a mother raises will have only one childhood and she will have only one opportunity to shape their loving attachments. Some of them even drop out of the workplace altogether. A 1993 study of Harvard masters of business administration (MBAs) found that 25% of those who are mothers had stopped working completely.

Inspired, at least in part, by the feminist analysis that mothers wanted to enslave their daughters in patriarchal family oppression, the most recent wave of bad press for mothers appears to have peaked. Feminists, who themselves became mothers, moved from a rebellious daughter position, coming to terms with the maternal role. As seems inevitable, the pendulum has swung the other way and mother love seems to have achieved the status of a moral imperative, so much so that I am now hearing a lot about what may be called parental performance anxiety. In fact, a patient of mine, a married professional woman in her mid-30's, said to me, “I really want to have a baby but it's such a responsibility that I don't dare.” And I hear similar anxieties from male patients who express excessive concern about society, drugs, and violence; they seem to be phobic about parenting.

Ideas about motherhood are culturally determined and our