playing the mom card

Postfeminist wisdom would have us believe that the feminist movement is a thing of the past. Women fought for their rights and they won and now women can do anything they want to do, from being a homemaker with three children to running for the Presidency. Not only that, but we’re told that any struggles contemporary women may face on account of their sex/gender—harassment, discrimination, domestic violence, body dysphoria, etc.—are individual issues, not due to endemic socio-cultural conventions. Putting aside for a moment that these above statements are rather ludicrous (American women by-and-large may have more choices these days about the paths their lives will take, but they’re still hemmed in by gendered cultural norms and expectations), I want to spend some time today thinking about the postfeminist (tele)visual heroines of the late 1990s and 2000s.

Actually there are at least two types: first, the career-oriented, hyper-femme thirty-something who has spent her life playing the field and/or working her way up and suddenly finds herself at a loss when she realizes she wants a husband and a family (think HBO’s astoundingly popular Sex and the City (1998-2004), with a film coming out this May marking its continued appeal). Even shows that don’t explicitly have that Sex and the City feel (i.e. the never-ending romantic comedy approach) often employ this character-trope. For example, 30 Rock’s Liz Lemon (NBC, 2006-present) spends as much of her time stumbling over her mess of a love life as she does dealing with the shenanigans of her boss (Alec Baldwin) and a hilarious ensemble cast. In one particularly telling episode, Liz (played by the brilliant Tina Fey) unintentionally steals a baby from a coworker when her biological clock begins to tick too loudly (again, this baby-envy theme has a filmic version, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler’s comedy Baby Mama, coming out in April).

This obsession with family, husband and/or babies leads me to the second type, my actual focus today: Moms. Shows like Desperate Housewives (ABC, 2004-present) showcase the current televisual mother-fetish, and more recent incarnations such as Cashmere Mafia (ABC>, 2008) and Lipstick Jungle (NBC, 2008-present) try to combine the career-oriented, swinging single girl type with the mom/wife character with mixed results. NBC’s Medium (2005-present), a crime show with more serious subject matter than the above lifestyle shows, considers how Allison Dubois, a psychic mother-of-three, balances her paranormal career with her family. Even reality shows are weighing in, with offerings like Your Momma Don’t Dance (Lifetime, 2008-present)—not to be confused with its unofficial companion-show My Dad Is Better Than Your Dad (NBC, 2008-present)—and The Secret Life of a Soccer Mom (TLC, 2008-present).

Compellingly, The Secret Life takes the career-first-than-scrambling- to-find-love theme of Sex and the City and turns it on its head. Only two episodes have aired so far, but the central premise promises to stay the same if we believe TLC’s promotional materials and the show’s website: each week, a woman who has found a wonderful husband and had several beautiful children is given the chance to go back to the career she chose to leave behind when she had kids. It’s important to note that these women aren’t/weren’t necessarily homemakers by profession—meaning that they (or at least the first two women, a former fashion design and a former chef) had successful careers before they became wives and/or mothers. The Secret Life allows them to take a break from their full-time jobs as moms and go back out into the working world for a week while their husband takes care of the kids and manages the house, all the while believing his wife is at a spa as part of a nonexistent reality show that rewards stay-at-home mothers.

The tagline for The Secret Life, which shimmers on the screen at the start of each episode, reads, “For anyone who has put their dreams on hold…your time has come,” and the show seems intent on showing mothers what they’re missing in their long-abandoned careers. It’s a curious premise. Ostensibly, it gives women a chance to see what they left behind—the path not taken—but the two women so far have been offered jobs after their week-long, secretive trial run and have had to make tearful decisions about whether to go back to work or stay home with their kids. This once in a lifetime opportunity to reclaim the past is fraught with problems—sometimes it’s just not that simple to reinvent yourself and your family. For example, tonight’s mother, Katie, would have loved to go back to work as a chef in one of LA’s top restaurants; however, even though her husband and toddlers encouraged her to go for it, she ultimately decided to stay home because she didn’t feel the family could bear the financial burden of putting two boys in daycare full-time. Tearfully, Katie lamented that if the timing had been better…things might have been different.

This “choice” is a very sharp double-edged sword, and television developers seem to find more and more inventive ways of manipulating the dichotomy already faced by women between what they want and what’s expected of them in and by society. I wanted to conclude this post with a discussion of Fox’s new show—still on the fence, I think, concerning its renewal for next season—Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (2008-present). However, I think the title character’s dystopic rendering of the American mother as a violent, stoic, gun-totting protectress will have to wait until next week. This show begs the questions: What if motherhood is no longer a choice but an inevitability, and your facility as a mother is the only thing that stands between humanity and an apocalypse? Where do we stand on the career versus family debate then?

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(NEXT WEEK: “This American Life.” A meditation on television families—those we choose and those we are born into.)