Could politics end the mommy wars?

What mommy wars, you ask? One short answer is: the ones that make for awkward silences at cocktail parties when a woman is asked what she does and she responds that she raises her children. The feminist revolution would have us believe that’s undignified.

With the increased media presence of women of all political stripes, especially in politics — as candidates, as tea-party players and participants — that lie is being exposed in a whole new mainstream way, crowding out the delusion of the lamestream (to borrow one woman’s word). Exposing that lie in a reasoned, well-researched, sober way was the goal of a panel presented by the Susan B. Anthony List in Manhattan on the 90th anniversary of the enactment of the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted women the constitutional right to vote.

At the heart of the reasonableness of it all was, as moderator Helen Alvaré of George Mason University put it, “women’s lived experience.” You can only mess with reality — and the natural law — for so long before your feminist fantasy is revealed to be misery.

The event, billed as “A Conversation on Pro-Life Feminism,” was both a primer on its existence and an attempt to replace the conventional approach to so-called women’s issues. Women are not and never have been a monolith, period, never mind a monolithic voting bloc.

And it was a real conversation. One aiming for real answers about real life, embracing just that. Not life as Ms. and academy radicals portray it.

W. Bradford Wilcox of the University of Virginia got to the heart of this mythological mommy war pitting stay-at-home moms against so-called working moms (I say so-called because they are all actually working), continuing the discussion with me after: “Many in the media and academy think working women are one way, and that stay-at-home wives and mothers are another way. This overlooks the fact that many women who work outside the home would like to work less or not at all. That is, they are working because they feel they have to, not because they want to.

“This is particularly true for women who self-identify as gender traditionalists — who believe men and women are fundamentally different, and that men should focus more on breadwinning and women should focus more on homemaking — or maternalists — who believe that infants and toddlers do best when they are cared for by their mother. It is also more likely to be true for women who have children currently in the home.” 

Where is he getting this alternative to the conventional media/political/cultural understanding of the world? Wilcox bases his analysis on the 2000 National Survey of Marriage and Family Life, which, he explains, “indicates that, among married mothers with children in the home under 18, only 18 percent of married mothers would prefer to work full-time; by contrast, 46 percent would prefer to work part-time, and 36 percent would prefer to stay at home. Clearly, the most popular option for married mothers is part-time work, whereas only about one-fifth of these mothers would prefer to work full time.”

If it becomes tolerable, even in supposedly sophisticated circles, to admit the obvious — that men and women are fundamentally different — those numbers may even increase.

Feminists claim to be all about choice, yet many women in our feminist paradise seem to be doing what they really wouldn’t choose to do, given other options. Most working women would like to work fewer hours and be home with their kids. According to Wilcox, “74 percent of married mothers who are working full-time would prefer to work fewer hours or not at all.”