Perfect mom image impossible to attain.

PositionMass Media - The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined Women - Book Review

Women should not allow the media to define what the "perfect mom" is because they will suffer from guilt and low self-esteem trying to achieve an impossible goal, asserts Susan Douglas, a communications studies professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and co-author of The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined Women. In fact, women should not be pigeonholed by the "new momism," a trend in American culture that causes women to feel that only through the perfection of motherhood can they find true contentment.

"The perfect morn is not attainable," Douglas contends. "The first thing [women] should do is take the blinders off. This vision of motherhood is highly romanticized and yet its standards for success remain forever out of reach, no matter how hard women may try to have it all."

Douglas and co-author Meridith Michaels, a research associate in the philosophy department at Smith College, Northampton, Mass., analyzed the past 30 years of media images about mothers: the superficial achievements of the celebrity mom, staging of the "mommy wars" between working mothers and stay-at-home morns, and the onslaught of values-based marketing that raises mothering standards to impossible levels.

In concert with this message, the authors note, is a conservative backwater of talking heads propagating the myth of the modern mom. The assessment of motherhood has been shaped by out-of-date mores. It is not about whether women should have children or whether mothers should work or stay at home; it is about how no matter what they do or how hard they try, women never will achieve the promised nirvana of idealized mothering. "Whatever mothers are doing for their kids, it is never enough ... mothers believe they must keep doing more, more, and more, and never make a mistake," says Douglas, who also authored Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media.

The TV character June Cleaver of "Leave It to Beaver" fame is the classic example of the 1950s mother who stayed at home and served her family. Yet, the level of detail a woman is expected...

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