Lynn Harris on Salon.com: Contempt for Moms

Journalist Lynn Harris has an interesting article on Salon.com called Everybody Hates Mommy: We're "stroller Nazis." We're whiny "breeders." Why is there so much contempt for mothers these days?

"When I heard about Maclaren's recent recall
of one kabillion strollers, I assumed Gawker.com was playing an
elaborate prank on Brooklyn's Park Slope neighborhood. After all, the
online snarkosphere has made urban blood sport
of mocking the Slope's (exaggerated) reputation as New York's — if not
the planet's — epicenter of über-coddled children with
aggro-attachment parents plowing their pricey, bulky baby buggies along
the sidewalks like tricked-out cattle prods.

"Thing is,
that derision is not only about Park Slope, and it's not only about
strollers, which have somehow become synecdoche for the perceived ills
of indulgent parenting everywhere. And it's not only about "parenting,"
either. No, I am telling you, it's about mothers. (White mothers,
generally, and usually urban ones — if in part because they're out and
about on sidewalks and subways, not cloistered in carpools and
playrooms.) You know them, or at least their epithets: "Stroller moms,"
the "stroller mafia," the particularly objectionable "stroller Nazis"
— and while we're at it, the "helicopter moms" and "sanctimommies."
Along with the area blogs, the New York Times got in on the Maclaren
fun with a silly shark-bait story
on the allegedly "palpable sense of anxiety" the recall had wrought on
the "hyper-conscientious" Slope. Standard online comment: "If the
typical 'Slope Mummy' was not so hell-bent to get to her pilates
classes, yoga classes, or whole foods market to pick up her 'fair
trade, organic food items,' perhaps she would not be so careless as to
fold 'Johnny's finger tips' into the hinge mechanism and amputate them.""

–Lynn Harris