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Scary rise of the 'sanctimommy'

By Cheryl Miller | Sunday, June 8, 2008

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HAVING A CHILD WITHOUT LOSING YOURSELF

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $15, 316 pages

REVIEWED BY CHERYL MILLER

Welcome to the Land of the Park Slope Stroller Mom, where every compliment is a veiled insult, and every choice no matter how mundane or personal - home birth vs. hospital, disposable vs. cloth diapers - is taken as a declaration of your progressive bona fides (or lack thereof). If you're not run down by a passing Bugaboo stroller, you'll likely soon be by the nonstop passive-aggressive sniping of the other mothers. "You let Baby Bjorn have non-organic carrot sticks? What kind of monster are you?"

With each day that passes comes yet another report from the front of the"Mommy Wars," a civil war so intractable that only the United Nations - or at the very least, Oprah - can put an end to it. Our latest correspondent is Amy Richards, a long-time feminist activist and, as a 30-something mother of two, a battle-hardened veteran. Ms. Richards was moved to join the fight by a now infamous New York Times article about Ivy League-educated women "opting out" of the workplace to stay at home with the kids. What, she wondered, about all the women today who had "opted in" for both motherhood and work? Where is their story?

The result is her new book, "Opting In: Having a Child Without Losing Yourself," an attempt to bridge the divide between stay-at-home and working mothers. Most women, Ms. Richards writes, do not fit easily into one category, but find themselves somewhere in the middle - maybe working part-time or taking a break from work until the kids are older.

The Mommy Wars, she argues, do not reflect their experience, and serve only to distract from the real progress feminism has made. Just glancing at the headlines, "it's easy to forget that in this generation it's possible for women to have their babies and then their careers." The stories of these women are meant as "a living rebuttal" to the media hype.

Thus, Ms. Richards sets out to prove that a "feminist mom" is not an oxymoron in terms. It helps that as a staunch "choice feminist," she defines the "feminist" part rather loosely. Ms. Richards has no patience for the more feminist-than-thou types like Linda Hirshman who recently declared that housewives are "leading lesser lives."