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Attack of the Slummy MummyA new novel praises the barely competent mom.

By Katie Roiphe
Posted Tuesday, July 31, 2007, at 4:18 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

This same babysitter is—ah the wild liberties and freedom of youth!—reading a book. This causes Lucy to reflect:

"I think about Polly doing her essay. Where has all the information gone that I retained during that intensive period from school to university, I wonder. Is it lost forever? For sure the decline began in the child-bearing years, when whole new areas of specialist interest opened up. Strollers, for example. A few years ago, I could have written a long essay on strollers. Securing our first took longer than buying a car. It required more viewings than buying our house…we sat down in a meeting room with various catalogs, hoping that between us we had collated and analyzed enough information to come to some conclusions. But after half an hour, we were still involved in hefty debate over the issues such as weight, forward-folding designs versus collapsible options, sporty or rural."

And here perhaps is the problem with this mommy literature, and perhaps at certain times with this way of life: Why is the overintelligent woman applying herself to strollers? Anyone who has had a small child knows this feeling of training her intellect on very minor material choices, and yet isn't it something to fight against? Isn't it something to worry about, rather than a cute or endearing anecdote about family love? What is being celebrated here is the mindlessness of a certain type of child-rearing, a mindlessness we as a culture are currently infatuated with. Because this is a book in which everything is spelled out. Lucy puts it this way: "Feminism might have come a long way, but women are still the ones who make the difficult decisions." But in fact one comes out of deep immersion in Lucy's daily life thinking this: It's not actually so hard to be her, and it is certainly not that interesting.

We as a culture have a tendency to romanticize the stay-at-home mother, to simultaneously ignore and revere her, and it seems to me that books like this are complicit in this tendency. Of course the intimate decision to stay at home with one's children is a fine and honorable one; but the moralism surrounding this choice, the secret, enveloping narcissism, the inability to imagine anything outside, is what is unsettling here.

One emerges from this book wondering: Would it be so bad if the slummy mummies put on some lipstick, or better yet took out a battered old paperback copy of Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique and started to read?

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Katie Roiphe is the author of Still She Haunts Me.
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