Stereotypes and archetypes.

• Author: Siegel, Deborah
• Position: Book Review

The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined Women By Susan J. Douglas and Meredith W. Michaels Free Press. 352 pages. $26.00.

Bitches, Bimbos and Ballbreakers: The Guerrilla Girls' Illustrated Guide to Female Stereotypes By the Guerrilla Girls Penguin Books. 96 pages. $20.00.

American popular culture has long cast women--and in particular, mothers--according to rigid scripts. Two new books take on the age-old myths that have shaped our ideals of womanhood. Both books craft feminist history with the tools of irony and humor.

Arriving in the wake of Lisa Belkin's October 2003 New York Times Magazine cover story on women who "opt out" of fast-track careers in order to stay home with their kids, books questioning media-generated images of motherhood couldn't be more timely. In The Mommy Myth, authors Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels harness the anger of Cathi Hanauer's The Bitch in the House and the critical prowess of Ann Crittenden's The Price of Motherhood in a witty look behind popular images of motherhood.

Surfacing at a time when manifestos are out of style and mass market fiction featuring the antics of the working morn, such as Allison Pearson's I Don't Know How She Does It, is decidedly in, The Mommy Myth is a wise-cracking indictment of what the authors call "the new momism": a set of ideals that daily assault and guilt-trip women by tacitly insisting that, to be fulfilled, they must have children and be their primary caretakers.

The authors reclaim "momism" from the journalist Philip Wylie, who coined it in his 1942 bestseller, Generation of Vipers. Wylie used the term to attack the mothers of America for smothering their sons and turning them into mama's boys unable to fight for their country. Douglas and Michaels adapt it here to refer to a highly romanticized view of motherhood in which the standards for success are impossible to meet.

Speaking as two sardonic mamas and savvy media consumers, the authors lead us on a whirlwind romp through the magazines, movies, television shows, and political debates about motherhood over the past thirty years. They sneak in terms like Jeremy Bentham's "panopticon" (from his design of a round prison with a central columnar guard tower) to describe how motherhood has become, in their view, "a psychological police state." From the fawning coverage of the celebrity mom to the staging of the "mommy wars," media messages about mothers, the authors maintain, have been...