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Are moms the target of unfair derision?

November 23rd, 2009, 2:46 pm · 2 Comments · posted by Theresa Walker, Editor

Award-winning journalist and New York mom of two Lynn Harris has an article at Salon.com titled “Everybody hates mommy.”

Harris contends that today’s moms are held in contempt far more so than moms  seemed to be in the past.uma-thurman-motherhood_ap

Here’s what she says in part:

Maybe people were nicer to our moms, maybe people weren’t. In one way or another, our culture has always been weird about mothers. Love/hate, Jocasta/Joan Crawford, supermom/”evil” stepmom, you name it. But right now, in some circles, it seems we’re leaning toward hate. Yes, even when you control for the anonymous online jerkwad factor. And yes, even — perhaps especially? — as more and more blogs, books, sitcoms and movies, successful or not, explore with unprecedented candor the experience of being a (white, middle-class) mother.

Here at The Mom Blog we’ve also noticed some derisive comments to some of our posts that seem to be more about insulting moms and women in general than adding to the conversation about the topic or issue at hand.

So moms, do you get the feeling when you are out with your kids, or writing your blogs, that someone is just waiting to bash you? Maybe they aren’t even hesitating at all?

Or do you figure Lynn is just being over-sensitive?

If you’ve got time, give Lynn’s article a read. You’ll find it interesting whether you agree with her or not.

(Uma Thurman photo is from The Associated Press)

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 2 Comments

  • Marla Jo Fisher, Staff Writer says:
    November 23, 2009 at 10:11 pm

    I don’t know like many Salon articles this one purports to be talking on a national scale but is really only talking about New York, a world where space is in very short supply and people may actually resent having to steer around designer baby buggies. Here in Southern California, few places are that crowded and we don’t have to worry about whether any rotten men give up their seats to us on the subway, because most of us have our own cars. I guess I would put this in the category of East Coast-centric “all about me” articles with a lot of big words in them that tend to come out in these sorts of journals. I do recall being in Las Vegas 10 years ago with my friends, a couple from Europe who were a university professor and an architecture critic and we tried to enter the then-new Bellagio hotel-casino but were turned away by a security guard because we were so gauche as to have a stroller with us. Ironically Ute wanted to go into Bellagio to review it for her newspaper in Switzerland, near the location of the REAL Bellagio, but they were too turned off by her baby stroller to let her in. I think there is a lot of anti-stroller sentiment out there.

  • Martha says:
    November 24, 2009 at 10:27 am

    My experience online is that people will say anything without the consequences they would have IRL. Online criticism is the result of more exposure and greater access. In “the old days” if we read an article in the newspaper, the only way to disagree was to write a letter to the editor and IF it was a good letter it might be printed in a section no one really read anyway. Blogs provide the opportunity to give immediate feedback, positive or negative.

    IRL I have not gotten any criticism really, even when my child was screaming her head off at Target. In one instance I was given praise by another parent for how I dealt with a tantrum. I haven’t been to many other places with my daughter than Orange County, so I can’t speak to other areas, but here I’ve had generally good experiences.