Ebook: Perfect madness: motherhood in the age of anxiety

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.;The mommy mystique -- "This mess" -- The new problem that has no name -- The motherhood religion -- The sacrificial mother -- Selfish mothers, forsaken children -- Millennial motherhood -- The motherhood religion -- Ourselves, as mothers -- A generation of control freaks -- Running scared -- Winner-take-all parenting -- Wonderful husbands -- For a politics of quality of life.