This article, Everybody hates mommy by Lynn Harris is essential reading as it says pretty much everything there is to say about the animosity running hot right now towards mothers, well the middle-class ones anyway*.
They’re usually unfairly stereotyped, but sometimes they’re also in our restaurants. I mean, I get it. I remember silently, uncharitably judging the absent mother (yes, I assumed mother) of the feral gender-vague child roaming Park Slope’s Tea Lounge (the place Sohn calls the “Teat Lounge”) who grabbed my then-baby daughter’s toy out of her hand.
“Hey, you can’t just take stuff from people,” I chided.
He/she fixed me with a steely toddler gaze. “Why?”
Oh, God. Just last week, at the playground, I saw a mother beaming at her son on the slide. Every time he went down, she said, “Thank you, Cooper!” No lie. So really, I get that everyone’s cranky and tired and laid-off and just wants to keep walking — or, depending, keep sitting. I get that people may have had supremely annoying encounters with “entitled” mothers making obnoxious demands and “SUV-size” strollers parked next to barstools. Even my most respected, most feminist, most ready-to-leap-to-the-defense-of-women friends and associates have such stories of their own.
But I still say that when it comes to mother bashing, there’s more going on. Something deeper, more venomous, even more timeless. The level of vitriol is so high, its target so clear and consistent.
*There is a whole other wave of hate reserved for the mothers identified by the Judgey McJudgeys as not being suitably middle class enough for their tastes, like those who are young mothers, those who are single mothers or those who are queer mothers, which I have written a little about previously too.
(Thanks Michelle of Canada).
blue milk 
That link to the interesting article made me recall Germaine Greer’s comment that women have no idea how much men hate them. And generally male agendas are still predominating, and even more artificial notions of sexual desirability and ‘hotness’ abound. Must be very aggravating on some levels that sex leads to reproduction and then to the rearing of offspring. Mothers generally love their babies and try to bring them up as loving beings, so why then is there so much hostility to women?
Reading the article I’m not quite sure that the taking up space resentment and economic comparisons are quite all of it – although as she says, it could quite equally be resentment to the daddies as the mummies on those fronts. It’s often the daddy who insists on buying large things for ‘safety’ and so on. I have myself felt pretty irritable with other families and their behaviours of entitlement in some of the wealthier areas I’ve lived in (in the cheapest rental housing available so as to be close to work, she adds defensively). So I can’t say I’m purer than the driven snow in this particular position.
I suspect that the comment about not being able to ‘jerk off’ to Uma has quite a bit to do with the hatred as well, especially when you consider the vitriol some women face about breastfeeding. Women and their babies in public space are doing something that isn’t just about pleasing men, and (some) men feel well ripped off about it. Babies have become so much part of the domain that belongs only to women that men don’t even see them as separate from women. Women in public space (as someone said recently in debate about the hijab) are supposed to be for the pleasure and consumption of men and should not be putting the needs of themselves and their children at the front of the entitlement queue. It’s the same with so many issues – domestic violence when pregnant, for example, or having to look hawt as soon as the sprog is popped and so on. Not sure how this plays into the vitriol other women spout, but it’s not making me calm and happy thinking about those particular gender issues either, or my own role in them.
I’m confused, don’t I live in a capitalistic society? When so many are choosing not to have kids, shouldn’t there be some kind of reward/intensive/social appreciation for producing more consumers? Or am I hated because I got my tubes tied after only two? (But now you would only know that because I’m saying it, where as children are rather obvious.)
Again, damned if I do, damned if I don’t…..Why can’t people just mind their own business and not pass judgment? Do you really have the entire story just by looking at me and my children? If I can put up with my screaming 18 month old while I wait at the pharmacy for meds for my sick seven year old, so can anyone else in this world…..
Yes, I’m entitled! Entitled to some Inherent Worth and Dignity!
Liz
[…] interesting. There is a whole lot of hating going on in them and I get the distinct impression that the hatred is not all reserved just for fictional mothers played by Uma Thurman. Thurman plays Eliza Welch, the harried sort of woman who doesn’t realize […]
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