Mommy Wars: Stay-at-Home and Career Moms Face Off on Their Choices, Their Lives, Their Families [Hardcover]

Leslie Morgan Steiner (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 7, 2006

With motherhood comes one of the toughest decisions of a woman’s life: Stay at home or pursue a career? The dilemma not only divides mothers into hostile, defensive camps but pits individual mothers against themselves. Leslie Morgan Steiner has been there. As an executive at The Washington Post, a writer, and mother of three, she has lived and breathed every side of the “mommy wars.” Rather than just watch the battles rage, Steiner decided to do something about it. She commissioned twenty-six outspoken mothers to write about their lives, their families, and the choices that have worked for them. The result is a frank, surprising, and utterly refreshing look at American motherhood.

Ranging in age from twenty-five to seventy-two and scattered across the country from New Hampshire to California, these mothers reflect the full spectrum of lifestyle choices. Women who have been home with the kids from day one, moms who shuttle from full-time office jobs to part-time at-home work, hard-driving executives who put in seventy-hour-plus weeks: they all get a turn. The one thing these women have in common, aside from having kids, is that they’re all terrific writers.

Pulitzer Prize winner Jane Smiley vividly recounts how her generation stormed the American workplace–only to take refuge at home when the workplace drove them out. Lizzie McGuire creator Terri Minsky describes what it felt like to hear her kids scream “I hope you never come back!” when she flew to L.A. to launch the show that made her career. Susan Cheever, novelist, biographer, and New York Newsday columnist, reports on the furious battles between the stroller pushers and the briefcase bearers on the streets of Manhattan. Lois R. Shea traded the journalistic fast track for a house in the country where she could raise her daughter in peace. Ann Misiaszek Sarnoff, chief operating officer of the Women’s National Basketball Association, argues fiercely that you can combine ambition and motherhood–and have a blast in the process.

Candid, engaging, by turns unflinchingly honest and painfully funny, the essays collected here offer an astonishingly intimate portrait of the state of motherhood today. Mommy Wars is a book by and for and about the real experts on motherhood and hard work: the women at home, in the office, on the job every day of their lives.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Most of the women here, famous and otherwise, express a familiar guilt along with pride at how they make peace with their choices juggling motherhood and career. Some, like Harvard MBA Ann Misiaszek Sarnoff, have pursued a high-octane job while raising two kids; others have scaled back work or work at home in order to be with their kids all day. These mommies (most are upper-middle-class white mothers who've made careers out of writing in some form) almost without exception have solid, provider husbands, and nannies or full-time babysitters. Moms in similar situations stand to gain the most from the collection and will relish such gems as novelist Jane Smiley's "Feminism Meets the Free Market," where she notes, "Home was the refuge when the workplace drove us out," and PW editor-in-chief Sara Nelson's revelation, in "Working Mother, Not Guilty," that her career gives her 10-year-old "a sense that there's a whole world outside of our little family." Washington Post advertising director Steiner offers a valuable opportunity for discussing women's "inner catfight." In lieu of mud-slinging, she presents a reasonable and low-key forum for mutual understanding and respect. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Steiner has set out to resolve the "cat fight" between women who stay at home to raise children and women who pursue careers while raising children. She addresses the infighting that goes on between women who often have no real idea what life is like for those on the other side of what has been called the Mommy Wars. This collection of essays by 26 writers--both stay-at-home and working moms--explores how and why women make their choices between family and career. Steiner precedes each essay with a short biography of the contributor and how she came to make her choice. Contributors include Terri Minsky, creator of Lizzie McGuire; Susan Cheever, New York Newsday columnist; and Pulitzer Prize winner Jane Smiley. Steiner maintains that working moms should appreciate the efforts that stay-at-home moms put into volunteerism, which helps all children, and stay-at-home moms should appreciate the fact that working moms continue to expand opportunities for all women. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1st Printing edition (March 7, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400064155
• ISBN-13: 978-1400064151
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (48 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #239,363 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

48 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wide range of essays - and a suggestion, March 6, 2006

By 

K. Corn "reviewer" (midwest, United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Mommy Wars: Stay-at-Home and Career Moms Face Off on Their Choices, Their Lives, Their Families (Hardcover)

These 27 essays provide a wealth of opinions about the range of emotions, controversy and ambivalence that can fill the minds and hearts of mothers. Even those who think they know their values before giving birth may have a profound change of heart. Some decide to stay home. Others go stir crazy and go back to work. Then there are the women who face life-threatening conditions (cancer or something else), have children with disabilities or don't yet have children but are exploring the dilemnas that may face them.

The most wrenching essay for me to read featured a woman who'd already made it through some very, very tough years as a single mom to two young children (her husband deserted the family), struggling with the indignities of welfare and making do as best she could. After she starts to become more successful, meets a decent man and has another child, she learns she may die within "8 months"....that is the grim prognosis...and that fact radically changes her life...forever. I won't go into more detail about that section because I don't want to spoil the suspense of you, the reader, discovering what happens next...but believe me, you won't be able to predict it.

Very few of these women seem to be totally at peace with their decision, at least not without a period of angst and guilt (is this the universal norm for mothers?). Ambivalence and even guilt seemed to be the order of the day, something I could really relate to.

I'd strongly suggest reading this with A Perfect Madness (another exploration of Motherhood) as it goes into greater depth when it comes to researching the challenges facing mothers today. Taken together, the two books provide a wealth of information. Both are honest and insightful.

In Mommy Wars, you'll get a host of viewpoints, some full of ambivalence, some full of guilt and some fully comfortable with their choice -whether it is working or not working outside the home. You'll feel affirmed with some pieces, challenged by others and perhaps alienated by yet others.


No matter the viewpoint, reading this book made me feel more connected to other women, since I've had both guilt about working and affirmation at well. My personal choice was to focus on parenting, primarily because my work schedule was not family friendly.

Reading this book made me realize yet again (since this isn't the first book of its kind to appear) that I was not alone. Parenting is hard. Working can be hard, too. Juggling the two can be...well....very tricky. Sometimes it isn't workable at all. Other times you make it by the seat of your pants. But connecting with other women, whether on the pages of a book or at the park or over lunch..can serve as inspiration and support. It doesn't hurt to have some more of that.

What ISN'T fully explored in this book (beyond what is implied in the personal essays) are the economic realities of work versus staying home. I wish there'd been a bit more detail about that. The reality is that women who bring in under $10.00 an hour may actually lose money by working (and create a higher tax bill, actually reducing income even more). Even so, the payoff may be worth it, since working may satisfy a need to be with other adults, build skills,etc. In time, as the kids grow older and day care isn't necessary, the income may build again.

For other mothers, work isn't worth the sacrifice, no matter how hefty the salary. In the years since I've been a parent, I've known several lawyers, accountants and others who've left work when their children started having trouble at school. The teenage years seemed particularly rough and dropouts from the work force seemed higher in my circle of friends at those times.

But I'm speaking only personally. Read this book and you'll get a wider range of viewpoints about the emotional and financial and spiritual benefits and costs of working. I confess that I'm one of those moms who don't want to miss the time I have with my children, not for work. But I am lucky enough not to have to make that choice - yet.

42 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Well-intentioned, but falls flat, March 7, 2006

By 

Jody Wright - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mommy Wars: Stay-at-Home and Career Moms Face Off on Their Choices, Their Lives, Their Families (Hardcover)

This anthology, as well-intentioned as it is, has one very significant short-coming: the amount of mothers this anthology missed equals the majority of mothers they are trying to market this book to in the first place. These are all professional writers, either formerly or currently or on the side. As with the similar anthology, "Bitch in the House" (Harper, 2003), these essays contain mostly professional women of middle and upper-middle-class families with dreams of success in their chosen field of writing and a husband who doesn't seem to exist.

Because of this, "Mommy Wars" exposes only one very thin layer of the entire picture. If the editor wanted to end the invisible cat fight that she claims all mothers engage in, why didn't she flag down those twenty-six minivans?

In fact, the message this book sent to me was that the "war" only exists between mothers of past, present or future success, in writing or other competitive, professional writing-related fields. To the mothers in this essay, everyone is out to get them, out to compete, because of the cutthroat business they are a part of. Perfectionism, to them, is synonymous with feminism, with motherhood. Success is that mark of a good mother. Success in her children, well, that's even better. That's perfect.

On a more positive note, a handful of mothers had very unique experiences (unique in terms of the content of this anthology). The only essay I truly felt moved by was the first, "Neither Here nor There" by Sally Hingston. This essay left a very poignant message: the mother admitted that she was a bad mom after years of thinking she was perfect. She was brave enough to write that she called her sick teenage daughter a "whack-job" in front of the therapist, who scolded her after her daughter said it was fine; her mother says that sort of stuff all the time.

To me, the mark of a good mother is not that goal of mutual success in herself and her children and the awards won by both, but the mother who can admit that she has failed. One who can admit, honestly, that being a mother does not make her infallible. That her hopes and dreams may not suit her offspring.

The other essay that stood out was a hardened look at two-generations of postpartum depression and how it wasn't a choice to stay home that caused the mother so much pain-it was something beyond her control. Something that had already been in her life, yet she was unaware of it. Here is a real internal conflict; one that is impossible to escape without help. One that any mother could experience, regardless of her career.

Unfortunately, many of the essays blended together in a boring shade of, "Who cares?" The tiresome repeats consisted of: mother has writing job of some sort, mother gives it up for children, mother attempts to go back to work or thinks about going back, mother does or does not, mother angsts over decision and sees her faults in other people, husband is pointless, there is no conclusion. I stopped after stuffing myself frustrated with a majority of them, then declined to do more than skim the rest.

Take the advice of reviewers of "Bitch in the House", and doubtless this anthology too, and find more variety. If the professional writing mom continues to be evaluated as the representatives of the rest of the women in the world, I won't listen anymore.

24 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Repetative Stories from a Small Circle of Women, June 11, 2006

By 

Anony-mom (Ulster, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mommy Wars: Stay-at-Home and Career Moms Face Off on Their Choices, Their Lives, Their Families (Hardcover)

My main complaint is with the editor, Leslie Morgan Steiner, for choosing such similar women to contribute. Most are from the Upper East Side or West Side of Manhattan (no one from below 42nd St, muchless the midwest!), most are affiliated with the publishing world (editors, journalists, columnists, etc.), most are the type of person to specify that she went to "Harvard" or "an ivy league college" even when this specificity has little to do with the essay. They had "Type A" personalities (few spoke about having messy homes); they wrote with that contemporary columnist tone of "aren't I so cute and current?"; more than half a dozen of them shared the EXACT SAME ANECDOTE of being unpopular at cocktail parties because now they were "just moms." (I personally haven't been to a cocktail party in years--I associate them with the pretentious phase I went through and outgrew after college). There is so much more to say and learn about motherhood than the string of essays I've read about one's cocktail party cache going down the drain.

To be fair, several essays were very lovely, vulnerable, and honest. One wrote of post-partum depression, another about the legacy or her mother's suicide, another about the dilemma of helping the daughter of an abusive mom. These and several other essays had, in my opinion, that special quality one reads in great literature. They transcend the ego of the writer and touch upon that soft and mysterious part of the reader, and linger.

But for the most part, I was very annoyed that the part-time editor, who changes into her yoga pants after 2:00 pm every day, had cast such a small net of contributors. Part of me wants to go through the essays and pull quotes that struck me in terms of narcissism and self-entitlement, but I'll refrain.