It made a lot of good points, especially about how mothers are portrayed in the news media (the topics of crack babies and child safety in particular), but I really didn't like their major beef with Attachment Parenting. I don't see anything anti-feminist about understanding that babies need the best, most compassionate care we can give them. ( )

This was definitely an interesting read for a women's studies major headed to college in about a month. It looked at media treatment of mother and motherhood over the past thirty years or so. It covered a variety of topics from celebrity moms, to the "mommy wars," to toy marketing. I found the chapter on toy marketing to be fascinating, as well as the sections on Susan Smith and Andrea Yates, It is quite interesting to compare their treatment by the media. Overall, a fascinating read. ( )

This is a nice introduction to the ways in which the motherhood mystique hurts women and children (and sells products). It's sort of Ann Crittendon's The Price of Motherhood lite. Crittendon is better, but this is not a bad place to start looking into the issue. ( )

This book did a wonderful job of getting my blood boiling. I wish it contained more suggestions on how to improve, things though. I still read parenting and women's magazines with a jaded eye (when I read them at all). I'd always wondered when the switch from "moms make their kids feel guilty" to "moms feel guilty about everything" happened, and Douglas helps analyze that. I need to reread this book when I have more time to concentrate on it, though-but I'm a mom, so that doesn't really happen. ( )

#43, 2004

Subtitled "The Idealization of Motherhood and How it Undermines Women." I found this to be an interesting and eye-opening book, although I did have a bit of trouble getting into it, and it took me a couple of months to finish. Mostly it's about how the media (advertising, commercial television and news media) and the government have "spun" things to manipulate women (mothers, primarily) into turning against the ideals of feminism, as they were originally put forth in the 60s. and how this has allowed American society to maintain a system with fewer (and less attractive) opportunities and resources for women (particularly working mothers). It discusses the ways that the media has created a seeming conflict between working mothers and stay-at-home-moms - plus lots of guilt-inducing stuff on both sides; about the dichotemy between celebrity moms showcased in magazine articles versus the much-maligned "welfare mother;" how advertising has changed its strategies towards adults *and* children. Day care and health care (or rather the lack thereof) are discussed, as is the way the media has taken a few exceptional incidents and turned them into full-blown societal scares.

One of the most shocking discussions (and yet still unsurprising, when I stopped to think about it) was the way the media manipulates (and in some cases entirely misrepresents) statistics to create more "sellable" stories (yes, even the news media is in the drama business). For example, statistically, a higher percentage of white women are on welfare, a fact which is rarely reported. And even when it is, almost all television news reports feature black women, or images of black women and children, when covering stories about welfare, creating the image in the minds of many Americans that all women on welfare are black.

The authors lost some points with me in their treatment of celebrity moms; while I agree that it is ludricrous for magazines to present multi-millionaire actresses and such as "regular" moms, whom the rest of us should try to emulate, in spite of the fact that these women are "doing it all" with the help of nannies, housekeeping staff, and personal assistants, I felt that the authors were very rude about some of the individual women they mentioned, and I thought this cheapened some of their arguments. The book uses a lot of statistics, some of which were very disturbing, and it's all very well documented (although the authors still said at the beginning that we shouldn't just take their word for it; we should check the validity of their data ourselves). Like I said, this was an interesting read, which points out a lot of the ways in which women in this country really aren't better off than "we" were back in the 1950s. I felt it was definitely worth the effort to read. ( )