A Mother in the Trenches

A Conversation with Sharon Lerner, Author of The War on Moms

Courtesy of Wiley

If you're an American woman who is even thinking of having a baby, someday, with someone, and you don't have dual citizenship in one of over 168 countries that offer paid maternity leave, listen up: Your mommy-friends aren't exaggerating about how hard it is. According to Sharon Lerner, author of the new book The War on Moms: On Life in a Family Unfriendly Nation (Wiley), American motherhood is brutal. Having a baby here plunges parents into a battle where the casualties are sleep deprivation (working mothers typically get less than 6 hours of sleep per night—1-2 hours less than recommended by the Centers for Disease Control), depression (1 in 5 working moms is depressed) and pitifully low levels of leisure time. Lerner points out that American mothers work way more than women in other developed nations. Yet we do it all without the institutional support that is taken for granted elsewhere—in contrast to 127 countries, the U.S. doesn't even have a legally-sanctioned vacation policy.

Of course, parenthood brings its own unquantifiable rewards, and the experience is, by almost all accounts, worth the sacrifices. But Lerner's point is that the sacrifices made by Americans are needlessly huge, and that our country demands that its citizens give up far more (more time—including time to savor the experience, energy, money, and emotional balance) than those in other rich nations in order to have and raise a child.

These sacrifices are taking their toll on American women. Lerner cites the work of David Cotter at Union College who, working with other sociologists, found that despite the massive gains women have made since the 1970s, their progress seems to be stalling. In a 2006 paper called "The End of the U.S. Gender Revolution," the researchers showed that while women are still crashing down doors in traditionally male-dominated professions, they're now doing so more slowly that they had been. The number of women in state legislatures, which had climbed steadily since 1970's, began to level off around 2000, which is also when the number of female state executives started to drop. Progress on the wage gap stopped around 2001, and a new gap started to open between men and women with children. Most importantly, the participation of women—especially moms—in the workforce decreased after 2000 (although it seems to have rebounded in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown).

Lerner makes the connection between these findings and the increasing difficulties in being a parent in the US. She spent more than three years analyzing our public policies (there was a big push for paid leave in 1919, but legislators figured it would be a part of the soon-to-be-passed universal health care plan, so why bother?), comparing them to the policies in other countries, and talking to parents in different parts of the U.S., at different income levels, about their struggles to balance work and family.

Families today need two incomes to get by, says Lerner, but holding on to that second job has become an almost Sisyphean challenge. Even our comparatively meager benefits are seen as "luxuries," as many middle- and low-income women either don't qualify for them or can't afford to take advantage of them. For example, only 42 percent of working women in the U.S. are able stay home for the first 12 weeks of their infants' lives (Lerner talked to one Arizona pharmacist who went back to her job four weeks after delivering her son—two weeks after the incision from her cesarean section had reopened), and half a million children are currently on waiting lists for subsidized child care.

Lerner says the overwhelmed moms she met at one of her book readings talked about a "conspiracy of silence." They said that they felt that they had been denied access to information about the reality of what they were about to face as mothers. "It's very difficult to explore the facts on your own and do thorough research into working motherhood when you're the midst of having a child. I wanted this book to give context to the experience of being a new mom," Lerner says.

There are some who will probably chastise these audience members, who were mostly working mothers who can still find time to attend literary gatherings, for complaining—especially after learning that these women can afford to raise their children in one of the most lovely, safe, upscale neighborhoods in New York City (where I live, for the record). And there are those who will claim that if women think it is so hard to raise children, they shouldn't get pregnant in the first place.

Lerner is ready for these criticisms. "Blaming women for the decisions they make after they have children—as well as for the choice to have children in the first place—doesn't only make women feel bad," she writes. "It also takes the attention—and thus, the onus for change—off the real external problems that are causing women's misery."

That's what this book is trying to do: rally mothers—and dads, and people, like me, without children—to advocate for changes like paid leave for caregivers, affordable, high-quality childcare, and flexible work schedules. Lerner took time off from promoting her book to speak with me about it.


You had two babies during the time you spent working on this book—despite being inundated with information about how hard it is to be a working mom.

Don't let this scare you! I don't want to bring down the fertility rate. We need to fix the system, not stop having children, of course.

That's not what I usually hear when I confess my terror about balancing work and kids. I feel like the prevailing attitude in the U.S. is that if a woman isn't prepared to suffer for her kids, then maybe she isn't cut out for motherhood.

But parenthood shouldn't come at that cost! There are lots of people who can love children and have the reward of raising children without making these terrible sacrifices, because their countries do things differently.

Part of your strategy with this book is to show readers how far behind the U.S. is in terms of how it treats parents and children. You write about the public, universal child-care programs that enroll 99 percent of three-to-five year olds of working parents in France and Belgium, and the policy that allows Dutch citizens to tailor any job to a less-than-full-time schedule. And these policies seem to pay off: One study of child benefits in 18 countries calculated that a 10 percent increase in child-benefit levels translated into a 25 percent increase in women's fertility (and, incidentally, Dutch women fare far better than Americans on happiness measures). The standard American argument is that the reason other countries have more family-friendly policies is that they're smaller, and that their fertility rates were dropping so alarmingly that their governments had to step in and do something. What needs to happen here?

I don't think we're going to hit a fertility crisis any time soon, but I do think we're going to hit a crisis of misery. I'm appealing to people on the grounds that the treatment of parents here is wrong, inhumane, and unjust. That's a hard case to make, so what we also need to talk about is the public role of women and how women function in our society. I think there is a clear case to be made that this is holding us back. If you're holding back women in the workforce and public sphere, you're holding back our country's economy.

What was the reaction of people in other countries when you talked to them about the plight of American mothers?

When I would explain to people in Holland that we don't have paid leave, they couldn't even conceive of it. The U.S. is the only industrialized country and one of only five nations—rich or poor—not to grant new mothers paid time off. Then I was explaining to them the results of the Pew survey that said that 60 percent of mothers who work full time [in the U.S.] said they would prefer to be working part-time. But because our health insurance is often tied to full-time employment, and because there aren't many decent part-time jobs, and because the jobs that women strive to get are usually inflexible, women end up working way more than they want to—or sometimes way less than they want to, because if they decide they can't keep up with children and full-time work, they quit. The Dutch were aghast.

Don't Miss