Proceedings, September 23, 24, 25, 1957

Book excerpt: What is wrong with this picture? That's the question Judith Warner asks after taking a good, hard look at the world of modern motherhood--at anxious women at work and at home and in bed with unhappy husbands. When Warner had her first child, she was living in Paris, where parents routinely left their children home with state-subsidized nannies. When she returned to the States, she was stunned by the cultural differences she found toward motherhood. None of the mothers she met seemed happy: Instead, they worried about the possibility of not having the perfect child, panicking as each developmental benchmark approached. Combining close readings of mainstream magazines, TV shows, and pop culture with a thorough command of dominant ideas in recent psychological, social, and economic theory, this book addresses our cultural assumptions, and examines the forces that have shaped them.