“Now, here's the real beauty of this contorting contradiction. Both working mothers and stay-at-home mothers get to be failures. The ethos of intensive mothering has lower status in our culture ("stay-at-home mothers are boring"), but occupies a higher moral ground… — Susan J. Douglas Copy Share Image
“At the very same time that we witnessed the explosion of white celebrity moms, and the outpouring of advice to a surveillance of middle-class mothers, the welfare mother, trapped in a "cycle of dependency," became ubiquitous in our media landscape, and she came to represent everything wrong with America. She appeared not in the glossy pages of the women's magazines… — Susan J. Douglas Copy Share
“After all, the media have been and are the major dispenser of the ideals and norms surrounding motherhood: Millions of us have gone to the media for nuts-and-bolts child-rearing advice. Many of us, in fact, preferred media advice to the advice our mothers gave us. We didn't want to be like our mothers and many of us didn't want to… — Susan J. Douglas Copy Share
“Because the media always serve up heroes and villians, there had to be the terrible mothers, the anti-Madonnas, the hideous counterexamples good mothers were meant to revile. We regret to report that nearly all of these women were African American and were disproportionately featured as failed mothers in news stories about "crack babies," single, teen mothers, and welfare mothers.” — Susan J. Douglas Copy Share
..."Fun?" you ask. "Weren't feminists these grim-faced, humorless, antifamily, karate-chopping ninjas who were bitter because they couldn't get a man?" Well, in fact the… — Susan J. Douglas Copy Share Image
“The frenzied hypernatalism of the women's magazines alone (and that includes People, Us, and InStyle), with their endless parade of perfect, "sexy" celebrity moms… — Susan J. Douglas Copy Share Image
Here's the progression. Feminism won; you can have it all; of course you want children; mothers are better at raising children than fathers; of… — Susan J. Douglas Copy Share Image
If you're like us -mothers with an attitude problem- you may be getting increasingly irritable about this chasm between the ridiculous, honey-hued ideals of… — Susan J. Douglas Copy Share Image
“It's 5:22pm you're in the grocery checkout line. Your three-year-old is writhing on the floor, screaming, because you have refused to buy her a… — Susan J. Douglas Copy Share Image
We need to make fun of and ridicule the media images that seek to keep us down, divide us against each other by age,… — Susan J. Douglas Copy Share Image
“To review briefly, in the late 1960s, men got paid more than women (usually double) for doing the exact same job. Women could get… — Susan J. Douglas Copy Share Image
“...There were the studies, beginning in 2007, which found that the suicide rate among women who had received breast implants were twice the suicide… — Susan J. Douglas Copy Share Image
“Most people don’t get (or want) to look at old news footage, but we looked at thirty years of stories relating to motherhood. In… — Susan J. Douglas Copy Share Image
