Editors' Soapbox

A Total Eclipse of the Woman

Not long ago, just down the interstate from our offices at Brain, Child, a minor national brouhaha broke out. In September, the Roanoke Times published an article on a roadworks project taking place in a busy section of town. The article centered on area residents' reactions to the resulting construction noise and traffic disruption--a pretty run-of-the-mill story. But the accompanying photo created quite a stir.

The picture shows a heavily pregnant woman holding a cigarette while gazing at the construction from her front yard. The caption explained that Mellisa, the woman pictured, "worries about the effect on her unborn child from the sound of jackhammers."

The Roanoke Times received scores of phone calls and e-mails from readers slamming the woman for smoking while pregnant and criticizing the paper for "glamorizing" her actions. Within a day, the photo with caption was picked up and tossed around the Internet, usually with a comment attached, like "Yeah, the noise is what the baby needs to fear," and "Mellisa is also doing her part to fight childhood obesity by making sure the baby has a low birth weight!" A syndicated talk radio host picked on Mellisa; so did Jay Leno on The Tonight Show. One egregious (but by no means the worst) web comment: "Take a close look at this. You tell me why someone should smack the shit out of this woman."

I'm not defending the practice of smoking while pregnant. And I'm not immune to the dark humor of a woman worrying about noise pollution while willfully inhaling a harmful substance. But what strikes me most about this story is how quickly women who are mothers go from being people with opinions to mere symbols. It's as if the sight of a bulging belly renders people deaf to anything the owner of the belly might have to say or blind to any action not related to her motherhood.

It reminds me of the time my friend Susan stumbled upon an anti-abortion/pro-choice rally face-off in her upstate New York town. She was out for a walk with her baby in a backpack carrier. When she reached the downtown corner where the two sides were having at it, a woman rushed up to her. "Here. You'll want to wear this," she said, handing her an anti-abortion button. Susan was dumbfounded. "It was like she just assumed that because I was carrying a baby, I must be on her side," she said. "She assumed she knew what I thought."

After five years of working on this magazine and reading thousands of essays by mothers of all persuasions, I can say this: Assuming anything about a woman based on the fact that she's a mother is a mistake. Yet it seems to happen all the time. Women are reduced to icons of good or bad motherhood by people who assume that all proper mothers not only act, but also think, the same way. But Jennifer and I could never predict the range of opinions we see every day. We don't always agree with them--even those held by the writers we choose to print. (Hell, we don't always agree with each other.) So when we're asked who our readers are, it's a tough question. Sure, we have the demographic information. But even in terms of opinions about child-rearing issues, mothers are a motley crew--just like they are on issues ranging from politics to war to noise pollution.

It turns out that Mellisa in Roanoke, who hadn't seen Leno and doesn't have a computer, didn't even know that she had been whittled down to one fact in the national media until the Roanoke Times came back to interview her again. Apparently she's letting the criticism roll off her back. "I really don't pay that much attention to it," she said. "If people don't like it, that's their opinion. They've got theirs and I've got mine."  Exactly. And if she hadn't had her picture alongside the story, her opinion might have registered. --S.W.
 

Art by Elizabeth Hannon