The first time was an utter shock. I was like, are you talking to me? I wasn't looking for it--with the kids and the house, who has time to even think of that? But after years of being treated like nothing more than a cookie-cutter extension of my husband, I admit it, the attention was flattering. I flirted up a storm right up till the moment I had to make a decision.
Next time out, there was some talk, oh she didn't put out, she didn't come through for us, she didn't deliver. Bullshit. What happened was, I started to get worried. Safety. Security. I was a little older, things felt less giddy. Of course I was still hot and, yes, swinging right up till the end. But when the curtains were closed, I went with the sure bet. Because at the end of the day, I'm a mother. You want to play on my field, you've got to remember that.
Now--surprise, surprise--the whole thing's feeling a little tired. For both of us. I've got a NASCAR Dad on the couch and stuff on my mind: health care, a living wage, education, elder care, the environment, the economy, this endless war. The candidates, they still talk pretty, but the whole time they're looking over my shoulder at the next cute thing: Hispanics, hipster twenty-somethings, or the new smoking hot demo--Single Anxious Females. Hello! I don't mean to sound bitter, but please, spare me. You want to talk anxiety? Pull up a highchair.
Yet, after all the water under the bridge, I admit I still get a little sashay in my walk when I think of what's gone between us. I'll be pushing my double-wide Peg Perego past the commuter rail station some morning with the young working women all checking their cell phones and straightening their pencil skirts, and I'll hear one of them say under her breath to the others, "Look, there she goes. Remember Soccer Mom?"
Of course we remember Soccer Mom. How can we forget someone who won't go away? SM's so busy these days with her second career--standing in as a prototype for everything from Disney sitcom moms to the squirt-happy lady in the Clorox commercials--that it's almost possible to forget she started out life entirely as a creature of politics.
White, married, post-feminist, middle-class or above, sub- or exurban, at home or working part time at most, Soccer Mom came into her own sometime around 1992 (thank you Wikipedia) as a desirable political demographic--a moderate, uncommitted swing voter who was open to persuasion from either side of the aisle.
Conventional wisdom holds that she helped elect Bill Clinton twice, but, disgusted by his infidelity, leaned Republican starting with the midterm elections of 1994, eventually morphing after 9/11 into Security Mom.
As it turns out, from the pollsters' point of view at least, Soccer Mom never did behave as a single, predictable constituency capable of delivering a solid block of votes to any one candidate or party. But Security Mom--she actually played a statistically significant role in re-electing George Bush to office. Confounded by the Iraq war and fueled by the threat of further terrorism at home, married women in 2004 defied the decades-long "gender gap" in politics (in which women tend more than men to vote Democratic) to pull the lever for Bush in the voting booth.
Now it's time for the '08 election. If nothing else, American voters seem unified on how well their last electoral decision went down; at press time, Bush's approval numbers were twenty-six percent, right where Richard Nixon's were during the Watergate hearings.
And what's on Soccer Mom's mind? Or, because Soccer Mom was never anything more than a blank slate onto which politicians could draw their view of the world, perhaps it's more precise to ask the question the other way around: What messages will politicians and political parties use to try to turn Soccer Mom's head in '08?
Joking aside, is it good news or bad when mothers--especially a tiny, pretty much fictitious subset of mothers--wind up in the political crosshairs? Of course it's flattering when a politician delivers a message customized just for you; but is it also condescending?
Digging deeper, is there even a set of issues capable of uniting the majority of mothers across geographic, ethnic, educational, religious, and economic lines--topics that would equally engage a Vermonter home-schooling off the grid with, say, a nanny-hiring New York City working mom or a Texas woman who's left her babies with their grandmother while she's deployed overseas? And finally, any chance--any chance at all--that these unifying issues might get some serious attention during the upcoming campaign?
With one mother running for president and a few other political mothers already bubbling up in news stories (Elizabeth Edwards tells Ann Coulter to shut up; Michelle Obama quits her executive job to help her husband campaign and hears an earful about it, pro and con; Fred Thompson throws his hat into the ring and his wife, Jeri Kehn Thompson, twenty-four years his junior, is immediately labeled a "trophy wife"), 2008 promises to be an interesting year for mothers out on the campaign trail and in the voting booth. And, of course, on the sidelines of suburban soccer fields the nation over.
Soccer Mom can trace her ancestry back to 1968, says Annelise Orleck, associate professor of history at Dartmouth College. That was the year that a worker with Richard Nixon's campaign created a pamphlet laying out a new prototype of target voter: a forty-seven-year-old machinist's wife from Akron, Ohio, who was worried about crime and drugs.
From the get-go, there was an ugly underside to this woman voter, explains Orleck, editor of The Politics of Motherhood: Activist Voices from Left to Right, a 1997 collection of essays and interviews debunking the myth that women are apolitical, isolated, or self-absorbed once they begin raising children. The year 1986 was a time of unprecedented urban unrest and uncertainty; in that context, "Akron, Ohio" was understood to mean "middle-class and white." In that context, "worried about crime and drugs" was a stand-in for "worried about black urban violence."
Since then, in one way or another, Orleck says, campaigns have worked to tweak and update the vision of the married woman voter--much the way Aunt Jemima or Betty Crocker gets a new look every decade or so--till we arrived as a nation with Soccer Mom.
Like the machinist's wife, SM too comes with her own set of cultural cues to unpack and decode. She's there "cheering on her kids at every practice?" Decoded, this means she doesn't have to work, therefore she's upper middle class or above. She drives an SUV or a minivan or a Volvo station wagon? Decoded: she lives in the suburbs.
And she's white, white, white. "It's not 'basketball moms,' is it?" asks Boston University journalism professor Caryl Rivers, author of a new book, Selling Anxiety: How the News Media Scare Women. "Soccer says 'white, affluent suburb.'" In the past, candidates worked hard to capture the hearts of the big cities of the nation, says Rivers. No more. "Soccer Mom is one signal the demographic has shifted. The suburban vote is the one that's desirable to all sorts of politicians."
Soccer Mom is more of a media hook than a true political voting bloc, a shorthand way for candidates and journalists to talk about a segment of the population that is in a particular bracket for gender, age, geography, income, education, and electoral behavior, explains Karl Agne, a veteran Democratic pollster, now a principal at Gerstein Agne Strategic Communications in Washington.
(Similarly, NASCAR Dad, who arrived on the scene in 2004, is pollster shorthand for many things Soccer Mom is not--male, non-college educated, rural, socially and economically conservative.)
Soccer Mom is an easy way for politicians to appear to address a specific constituency without actually saying too much, says Stephanie Coontz, director of Research and Public Education at The Council on Contemporary Families in Washington. "It's useful to politicians who don't want to talk to people's specific concerns. It's a way to reduce a rich kind of concern to a sound-bite level."
When it comes to political discourse, Coontz says, in her experience "the American public is way out ahead of the politicians. When I give a speech or lead a discussion group, I see a much higher level of sophistication than what politicians give us."
Problem is, the longer Soccer Mom hangs around the public arena, the worse for wear she's starting to look. Her political ace in the hole may once have been her neutrality, but now there is a distinctly negative taint to the term. Soccer Moms, the current thinking goes, are sheltered, selfish, out of touch with working class America, obsessive, and controlling parents, maniacal homemakers, fitness freaks, and compulsive shoppers, a sort of mashup of Kelly Ripa, Real Simple, Whole Foods, Pottery Barn, and Bikram Choudhury, with a few injections of Botox tossed in for good measure.
Phew.
Caryl Rivers isn't surprised to hear that Soccer Mom has turned into such a shrew. That's what happens to nearly all women, fictitious and otherwise, in the public eye. "Many of the images in the media that become iconic images of women tend to be unfavorable," says Rivers, whose book explores the ways stories about women become distorted in the media.
"The Soccer Mom started off as a presentation of a suburban woman voter. Now we hear that she's overindulging her kids or that she should be out working." This negativity is part of a recurring trend where the media plays to the insecurities of affluent women, Rivers says. "Look at the images of working mothers and stay-at-home mothers. Neither one can win. If you're at work, you're neglecting your children. If you're at home, you're selfish and obsessive."
Hmm, let's see: once-revered-if-always-somewhat-plastic female icon pulled suddenly from her pedestal? If this is America, we must be due for rehab.
Enter Nicole Teed, who co-founded The Soccer Mom Vote (thesoccermomvote.com), a blog featuring the observations of mothers from everywhere on the ideological spectrum (with maybe just a little bit of an emphasis on center to left). "The name is a little bit tongue-in-cheek," Teed acknowledges. "But at the same time, we wanted to take back the name 'Soccer Mom.'"
"We want to demonstrate that we aren't all women with ponytails in yoga pants shuttling our kids from activity to activity all day long. We have minds of our own and beliefs of our own, and we're not easily swayed by charming politicians.
"It can be empowering if we use that label to say, yes, there are some things that are on our agenda that we'd like to be part of the national debate as well," continues Teed. "Something like eighty percent of women will become mothers in their lifetime. The mothers' movement is the third wave, and that's exciting. If you want to call me a Soccer Mom in that context, that's fine."
Soccer Mom may indeed be exciting, but it's not all sweetness and light under that perky baseball cap. Soccer Mom is actually bad for you, for all mothers with political consciousness, say sociologists and other experts, because she perpetrates some particularly virulent myths:
Mothers are apolitical. Mothers are indeed political, says pollster Agne. They just tend to follow--and therefore have more of an effect on--local elections rather than on national contests. Dartmouth's Orleck published an entire book documenting how motherhood makes women not less political but more. "Quite contrary to the idea that mothers become depoliticized by their motherhood, we found women motivated to a wide variety of political actions because of their motherhood," says Orleck, who observes that mothers worldwide are more likely than childless women to become activists for peace, the environment, subsistence wages, and unions, among many other causes.
Finally, if mothers ever did, they don't now necessarily vote as their husbands vote. "Nothing makes me madder than when people say, oh, you vote like your husband does," says the Soccer Mom Vote's Teed. "When we go into that voting booth, we do not always agree, with him or other mothers. To say we're not paying attention to national issues or that we can be charmed by some guy with a charming accent, that's insulting."
All mothers are like me, Soccer Mom! Perhaps scariest of all Soccer Mom's attributes is how narrow she is (and we're not talking waist size). The mythologized demographic leaves out a wide swath of mothers, including unattached mothers ("unattached" being the new, judgment-neutral term for divorced, separated, and never-married women), urban mothers, poor and working-class mothers, gay mothers, working mothers, mothers of color, and the mother subgroup that should perhaps have the loudest voice in the next election: military mothers (which includes both women whose sons and daughters are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, and those who are married to or have children with soldiers).
"Unmarried single moms are the rising voting population," charges an admittedly not-unbiased Sharon Grossed, executive director of the Democratic National Committee's Women's Leadership Forum and a former state senator from Maryland. "Unmarried mothers under thirty years of age who make less than thirty thousand dollars a year, they tend to feel most disenfranchised. They are all coming together because over these last six years they've really been ignored by the Republican administration. The political arena has not addressed their issues."
Problem is, when anyone--pollsters, the media, the DNC--pigeonholes people into such narrow confines, be it Soccer Mom or unattached low-income mom, the narrative nearly always devolves into woman v. woman, says Boston University's Rivers.
"It's probably helpful to politicians to get a handle on various subgroups of the electorate, but when you get these fragments, the media winds up pitting them against each other," Rivers says. And the cumulative effect of those stories is not good. "All these negative message about women isolate them, they don't encourage women to organize and make political change at the ballot box. The result is women are divided, not united."
Mothers are all about protecting their own. Soccer Mom was courted in part because, the thinking went, if you told her what she wanted to hear on specific key issues--homeland security, say, or taxes, or protecting the sanctity of marriage--she could be relied upon not to furrow her flawless brow about matters outside her ken, like immigration or the minimum wage or universal health care.
Not so, say activists in touch with modern women. Even if you are a Soccer Mom--even, God forbid, the shrewish, harridan-y selfish bad kind of SM--it's in your bigger-picture best interest to care about more than what happens in your own well-manicured back yard.
"Even if you have enough money to shield yourself from the ups and downs of this very volatile economy, you should still worry," says the Council on Contemporary Families' Stephanie Coontz. "You can try to completely insulate yourself, but that mentality is associated with an erosion of social trust."
"What's happening in America right now is that we've got a 1950s support structure underneath a modern economy," says Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, executive director of MomsRising, the online activist organization committed to championing more family-friendly social and economic policies. "We need to catch up our policies and programs. Right now you need two parents working five hundred more hours a year just to keep up with a 1979 economy."
Failing as a society to invest in programs that support children and their parents winds up hurting everyone, whether they're a parent or not, Rowe-Finkbeiner argues. "We may be saving money in the very short term, like the next fiscal quarter, but we wind up seeing a higher rate of high school dropouts, an overloaded juvenile justice system, and older people stressing our antiquated social systems."
Soccer moms can and should care about the issues of working-class and poor Americans, as should all mothers, as should, actually, all people who've had a mother, Rowe-Finkbeiner says. "If you have a belly button, it's the right thing to do."
So, what exactly are those issues? Mom's Rising has grouped its core list into a conveniently remembered (if sometimes oblique) acronym, MOTHER--that is, Maternity & paternity leave; Open flexible work; TV and after-school programs; Health care for all kids; Excellent child care; Realistic & fair wages. (Okay, the TV thing might be a stretch, but what else were they going to put there, Tuna noodle casserole?)
The DNC Women's Leadership Forum's Grosfeld seconds that list and adds more. Hurricane Katrina, she says, was a pivotal moment for our nation. It brought the issue of poverty back to the front burner, a topic that goes hand-in-hand with both health care and the minimum wage. "Nobody can live on $5.15 an hour. The wealthy and middle class recognize that. In ballot initiative after initiative, we've seen states voting to raise minimums well above what the federal government has supported," Grosfeld reports. Those initiatives brought out women "by the droves" because minimum and low wages affect women primarily, she says.
Another A-list concern of mothers and women in general, Grosfeld says, is getting out of Iraq. "Our polls show that this is a top priority for both unmarried women and for mothers. The troops are our children and our neighbors' children. We want everything good for them, and we realize that being in a civil war is no longer good for them or for the country."
If that all sounds like the standard liberal party line (for years right-wing pundits have referred to the Democratic Party derisively as the "mommy party") it's surprisingly not too far away from the opinion of Republican blogger mom Melissa Clouthier, a physician who writes the oft-linked-to conservative Dr. Melissa blog (drmelissaclouthier.blogspot.com).
While she's not afraid to take a right-of-center stance on a wide variety of social issues--blaming Michigan's troubles on the teachers' union, for example, or mocking vegans by calling the men "soft" and the women "unfeminine"--when it comes to mothers' concerns, Clouthier (mother of three) isn't too far out of step from her avowedly liberal counterparts.
Her list of mother's issues? National security. Education. The generational squeeze that's forcing women to work and care for both children and elderly parents. And, perhaps surprisingly, the environment.
"Big families can't drive in a Prius, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't drive an efficient SUV," Clouthier said in an e-mail exchange. "The key is performance and efficiency. The free market is starting to answer some of these concerns with technological innovation, and the government can help with tax breaks for energy-efficient living, something they already do, but could do more."
Not Perky, Not Cute, Not You |
Whichever way Soccer Mom's political crisis resolves itself in the next twelve months, there's a good chance it won't play out in the glare of the spotlight--not this time. That's because she's being shoved aside by a woman even finickier, swingier, and harder to define than SM: Single Anxious Females.
As chronicled in May in New York magazine (and elsewhere), SAFs are the new darling demographic among micro-targeting politicians, the pollsters who feed their habits, and the media who disseminates it all. Single Anxious Females, the article explains, tend to be young (between eighteen and forty-four), white, unanchored (thirty-six percent move every two years), unaffluent (earning thirty thousand dollars or less a year), and relatively uneducated (only fourteen percent are college grads).
All those "un"s might be a turnoff to politicians looking for an influential demographic to target, but there's one thing this subgroup is doing more than it ever has before: voting.
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"Single women are slowly starting to turn out," the magazine observes. "In the 2000 general election, the number of unmarried women voting was nineteen percent. In 2004, that number jumped to 22.4 percent, and it's expected to vault higher in 2008."
A segment of the population that's starting to vote when they previously hadn't? That's like catnip to the candidates. So is it buh-bye Soccer Mom?
We don't mean to harsh on Anxiety Girl--we all deserve our turn in the political spotlight--but what's happening here looks like nothing more than exchanging one pigeonhole for another. Soccer Moms fall, SAFs rise; the only constant, we fear, is the season of the sound bite. "We have such a long election cycle," sums up Boston University journalism professor Caryl Riversf with a sigh. "The media have to keep inventing stories and phony trends." |
Like a lot of other watchers of the American political scene, Clouthier believes mothers across the political spectrum have many issues in common, they just disagree on how best to tackle them. For example, conservative mothers--and, Clouthier maintains, minority mothers--want to use school vouchers rather than more government dollars to fix broken schools. In a similar vein, Clouthier would ease the economic squeeze of lower- and middle-class families with tax breaks rather than a hike in the minimum wage or state-subsidized day care. "There are many issues that unite across these classifications of women," Clouthier says. "It's the solutions that cause division."
What's needed, says Dartmouth's Orleck, is broadcasting rather than narrowcasting. Soccer Mom, or NASCAR Dad, or even an idealized liberal or conservative voter, are too narrow a demographic to gain consensus on big, society-altering issues. "When politicians talk about issues that concern mothers, they need to say 'I want for all children what you want for your child,' " she says, be it health care, child care, good schools, or security. "We need to look for the issues that are broad enough to link us. That's how Social Security was passed. Lyndon Johnson found a way to transcend race and class lines."
Big-picture, broad-brush issues like health care and family leave have the potential to erase not just political divisions but gender divisions and even generational divisions among parents as well. In the age of two working parents, hands-on fathering, and sandwich-generation care giving, "mothers' issues" are really family issues, and it's a multigenerational family at that, says Nicole Teed of The Soccer Mom Vote.
"Some of these issues, like education, are owned by parents, not just mothers but fathers, and others cross generations," she says. Moms trying to care for both young children and aging parents, either from home or working in an office, inadvertently wade into a morass of political issues simply by trying to cope. "We may not be in the work force, but we're doing the work. We're making decisions on where we will live, where our children will go to school, where and how our parents will get their medical care," Teed says. "Those are all uniter issues, and I believe they should be on the national agenda."
So, rehabbed Soccer Mom: looking at last beyond the brim of her own baseball cap, erasing socioeconomic, gender, and generational barriers as she tries to do what's best for both her kids and all kids. Here's a woman who's finally ready to rule in the voting booth, yes?
Ah, no. There's just one tiny problem left to conquer. Soccer Moms--indeed, all women--behave like ditzes when it's time to pull the lever. Or so says Linda Hirshman, retired professor of women's studies and author of the controversial 2006 book Get To Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World.
"In every election, there's a chance that women will be the decisive force that will elect someone who embraces their views. Yet they never seem to do so," Hirshman wrote in a widely circulated article in the Washington Post last January. "My own theory is that women don't decide elections because they … don't back the candidates who will move society in the direction they want it to go. Instead, they vote in impulse and on elusive factors such as personality."
Hirshman backs up her theories by combining her twenty years of studying women and elections with an impromptu survey of the "key demographic" of white, married women (hello, Soccer Mom).
Her conclusions: women are both less interested in politics and less politically well read than their husbands (it's People vs. Time). And the reason Soccer Mom is often a swing voter is because she votes not on political agenda, policy, or program, but on character, an assessment that can be swayed right up until election day. "Elections that turn on the female electorate bear an unfortunate resemblance to a popularity contest," Hirshman concludes. "When it comes to women who vote, the political is the personal."
On the face of it--hell, even underneath the surface--none of that would appear to be good news. Except, except maybe Soccer Mom, with her under-read, gut-feeling kind of political decision-making, is on to something.
If Republicans are the opposite of the Democratic "mommy party," then eight years of "daddy party" rule have left a pretty large swath of Americans feeling undernurtured. What would happen if the front-runners from either party used Bush's historically low approval ratings as an incentive to speak this time around to the whole nation, rather than chopped up demographic demi-bites? Kind of like making sure every kid at the party had a piece of cake?
I admit it, one reason Soccer Mom makes me so nervous is that I've seen the enemy and let's just say she's a close, close neighbor. I ain't got no baseball cap, and I ain't got no ponytail, but if Soccer Mom wants to make sure we all leave the Election '08 party with a goodie bag? Then she is me. Bring it on, girl.
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