The Hand That Holds the Purse Strings
I am ashamed to admit that I have spent the last six months obsessing over a diaper bag. I have always had a bit of a handbag thing and now that I am pretty much limited to carrying a diaper bag everywhere, I became fixated on obtaining the holy grail -- the Louis Vuitton Mini-Monogram Diaper Bag. Said Louis Vuitton Diaper bag sells for about $1500 and is not a purchase a non-trust-funded Torontonian should make. Particularly a non-trust-funded Torontonian with a new baby and hefty mortgage payments. Even amortizing the cost of the bag over the five years I intended to carry it (you can take the girl out of the bank...), could not justify the purchase. And so I convinced myself that I did not want the bag and that only the very foolish would want to own such an outrageous item -- silly people like Paris Hilton and women who wear Ugg boots in 30 degree weather.
And then, a mom in my daughter's Gymboree got THE BAG. I was no longer able to concentrate during Parachute Time. I sat in the class trying to figure out how I too could justify buying this bag. Perhaps I could cut back on the grocery budget. Perhaps I could stop making life insurance payments!
Around the same time that the L.V. bag appeared in the flesh at Gymboree, some network was airing The Hand That Rocks the Cradle - the 1980's Rebecca De Mornay vehicle designed to dissuade mothers from ever hiring a nanny (I think that Dr. Laura and Danielle Crittenden co-wrote the script). In my normal schizophrenic fashion, I had to drop what I was doing and Google "Hand That Rocks the Cradle" to find the title's original source.
It was a line taken from a poem from William Ross Wallace describing the power of mothers:
Infancy's the tender fountain,
Power may with beauty flow,
Mother's first to guide the streamlets,
From them souls unresting grow--
Grow on for the good or evil,
Sunshine streamed or evil hurled;
For the hand that rocks the cradle
Is the hand that rules the world.
Mothers, working and at-home, remain the primary caregivers for their children and, as such, are the key influencers of their children's behaviour, values, and social mores. As mothers, we have the opportunity to raise our children in a fashion that will benefit them and benefit us. A marketer for Toys R Us would give his right arm for this type of influence.
Moreover, women comprise 52% of the population and, according to U.S. Census data, 82% of women will have children. In other words 42.6% of the total population is or will be a mother. The numbers indicate that in a democracy mothers should have some political clout. U.S.
Women in North America US U.S.
Since we rock the cradle, elect the government and control the purse strings, mothers by all accounts ought to be ruling the world. So why do we have no social insurance benefits for stay-at-home mothers and a terrible lack of quality daycare for mothers in the workforce (in Ontario alone there are only 173,135 regulated daycare spots for the 1,325,000 kids requiring daycare. Um Dalton
And this made me think about the diaper bag (I told you I was obsessed). Why did I want this bag so much? For Pete's sake, it isn't even made out of leather (it's polyamide textile canvas for those who need to know). It probably contains $15 worth of materials. But it promised so much more. I had been struggling with my identity as a new mother. I was used to being the MBA or the Banker or the Executive Director. I was not used to being the lady covered in spit-up with three inch roots and her belly hanging over the waist of her jeans. I was used to being respected. Now, I was not respected by former colleagues. I was not respected by shop-keepers (whose main concern was that my stroller might knock over something breakable). Unable to breastfeed, I was not respected by the attachment parenting crowd (popping open a can of Enfalac in Noah's is pretty much akin to wearing a sign saying "Bad Mother"). Perhaps sporting a $1500 diaper bag would buy me some respect.
I realized I had fallen into the trap set out for me by marketers, politicians and the mass media. I had allowed them to convert the guilt and fear which seem such an inherent part of motherhood (at least for me) into the desire to buy a certain product. As Betty Friedan and Naomi Wolf and Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels told me they would, InStyle magazine had duped me into believing that I was only one diaper bag away from being the calm, beautiful, well-respected Supermom who can retain her A-list career while breastfeeding.
Marketers have been so successful with separating women (especially mothers) from our hard earned dollars by convincing us that we are always one product away from happiness:
Are you struggling to keep the house clean after working 40 hours? You could yell at your spouse but it is so much more fun to buy a Swiffer. Not only will your house be sparkling clean but you dance just like you did that summer when you took all of those magic mushrooms.
Is your child having learning problems? Sylvan Learning promises that not only will little Johnny get into Harvard but he will present you with his acceptance letter at the perfect birthday celebration he and your devoted husband put together for you.
Feel exhausted from putting everyone's needs before yours (since Good Mothers always put everyone else's needs before their own)? Join Curves and in half and hour you can become an empowered woman capable of giving speeches and fitting into a mini-skirt. Hurrah!
It is implied that all of the other moms are buying these products and if we do not -- so suffer the little children. Little Susie will turn into a glue-sniffer because mommy did not use a Swiffer Duster and allergies drove her out of the house and into the arms of a waiting pimp.
The marketers helpfully tell us about problems we did not even know we had. Remember as a child, sitting around watching Little House on the Prairie while mom and dad bleached their teeth. Of course not. Tooth whitening was reserved for people like Charo and George Hamilton. And in spite of our horrible yellow teeth, we still managed to get through the day. But no more! We must whiten at work, whiten while we drive, whiten while we sleep!
And, it used to be that diapers were for babies. But now there are Good Nights for 10 year olds and Tena and Poise Pads for 35 year old women. In 1998, I interviewed with a consumer packaged goods company and a zealous (they were all zealous) employee told me that his vision was to see everyone in diapers one day. I thought he was joking. I'm sure he has made V.P and currently is working on capturing the lucrative tween, teen and 18 to 35 diaper markets. The next time you think you see some guy staring at your ass in the neighbourhood park, he is probably not the town pervert. He's just some ambitious category manager sizing you up as a potential customer. Now if they only could co-brand with Louis Vuitton...
We work harder, we are stretched thinner and we feel guiltier than ever. So we purchase these products to make us feel better and we get deeper into debt and we have to work harder. Contrary to what the evening news would have us believe, we shouldn't fear weapons of mass destruction, West Nile Virus and child abductions. We should fear Madison Avenue.
Beyond making us work harder each year to buy stuff that we never knew we needed, these corporations do not have a history of being particularly mom-friendly. Most businesses provide little or no maternity leave top-up, provide little or no on-site childcare, and still pay women 70 cents* on the dollar. [*As a side note, The Fraser Institute (financed by many of said corporations) discounts the 70 cents statistic as an "urban myth" which does not take into account factors such as "Women who take time off to give birth and raise children [what luxury!] have a different relationship with the labour market [uh, ya - one that sucks] than do men and childless women [wow the decision to forego having kids puts those "childless women" on equal footing with men with families! How progressive!]. For any number of reasons [read: "Because a really good Oprah show is on that day"], Canadian women often opt for part-time employment or choose work in child-care or clerical because they can exit and re-enter such jobs with relative ease [how freeing -- and with no medical benefits too!!]]".
But do we have a choice? We need to buy things to run our households and, quite frankly, no-one with kids has the time, money or energy to take on big business, the government and the mass media.
Well, a simple way to fuel necessary change is to direct some of the $212 billion we control towards mother-friendly businesses. For example, last year, Canadian mothers spent an estimated $6.5 billion on children's clothing. Most of this money was given to large companies who manufacture clothing using an underpaid, off-shore, mainly female workforce (some may have even been made by children for children -- how sweet!). If mothers instead bought their children's clothing from home-based, mama-run businesses or from companies like American Apparel who employ fairly paid workers, the money not only buys cute clothes for the kiddies but also helps empower other mothers. If you read the Vanity Fair article on the Skull and Bones secret society which counts both George W. and John Kerry as members, you will recall how Bonesmen help other Bonesmen. If mothers help each other --through hiring each other, caring for each other's children, supporting mama-run businesses, paying each other well, and supporting mothers in other countries by buying Fair Trade goods, and mentoring and promoting each other, one day we can ensure that a mother runs this country too. If nothing else we can take the wind out of the sails of journalists who love to report on the so-called (and oh so tiresome) Mommy Wars.
And so we return to the diaper bag. For $1500 I could make a generous contribution to a shelter for survivors of domestic violence. I could help elect a woman to parliament. I could help support a number of mom-based businesses. Or I could buy a plastic bag covered in some guy's initials. Sometimes to seize back control of the purse strings, you've got to let go of the purse.
Jen Lawrence, a Toronto-based mother and writer, is still looking for the perfect diaper bag. Kate Spade, if you are thinking of making a diaper bag out of fairly traded, organic cotton, she'd love to talk.
