Site Presented By
Wednesday, Jan 7, 2009
A new magazine, Total 180, is targeted at moms who have "opted out." But its pages are full of despairing screams, no sex, and women who are "let out" weekly by husbands.
Dec 6, 2005 | Brouhahas about maternal vs. professional priorities come and go like fashion: Remember when hollering about Sylvia Ann Hewlett was all the rage?
This season's vogue is for debate over women leaving the workforce to raise children full-time. It heated up in 2003 with Lisa Belkin's New York Times piece "The Opt-Out Revolution," which earned criticism for focusing on a small group of wealthy women and for Belkin's questionable data. This fall, the Times ran an equally controversial piece by Louise Story about how some Ivy League undergrads already claim to know they want to stay home full-time. In October, Times tornado Maureen Dowd blew through with a book excerpt alleging that post-feminist women were moving in reverse -- toward husbands and housewifery -- with such alacrity that we would soon have a population of Ativan-popping suburban mommies. In November Linda Hirshman wrote a searing piece in the American Prospect in which she dissed Belkin, Story and Dowd, but asserted that much of what they've proclaimed may actually be true. Then on Friday, the Times backpedaled, publishing a piece on research that suggests that maybe women aren't opting out at all.
Welcome to the fray the premiere issue of Total 180!, a magazine for working women who have chosen to stay at home full-time, with a tag line that reads "From briefcase to diaper bag..."
Total 180! was founded by three California women who left their careers -- one in publishing, one in real estate marketing, and one in dentistry -- to raise kids, only to find that there was a dearth of magazines addressing their specific situation. They threw their money together to create the Girlfriend Media Group, which publishes Total 180! The initial subscription base is 25,000, and they work for a few flexible hours a day. Their aim is to publish six times a year.
I should confess that I picked up Total 180! expecting to read a pious and self-congratulatory ode to the virtues of child rearing. What I found was perhaps more disquieting.
Whatever studies tell us about whether privileged women are or aren't opting out, this magazine, produced by women who have, suggests that some stay-at-home moms are in a dark, dark place. As a woman who is neither married nor a mother, but who someday hopes to have children with a partner, I was left petrified by Total 180! and its vivid depiction of the inequities of domestic life that I -- apparently naively -- had assumed were a thing of the past in a post-feminist world.
An editor's letter by Erika Kotite kicks off by describing pizza joints where groups of "stay-at-home moms 'let out' by their husbands" huddle "for a once-weekly session of lamenting, venting, laughing and girding for the next week of chaos." Let out? Yikes.
There's also a message from Total 180! founders Debbie Klett, Kirstie Zamboanga and Andrea Bandle, who write, "We hear what you're screaming because we're screaming it, too!" Can you hear them, Clarice?
A contributor's note explains that writer Kelly Pollard used to be an after-school-program teacher until she elected "the more rewarding, exasperating, and challenging job of CHO [Chief Household Officer]." A Total 180! ad tells readers that "being an at-home mom is the absolute hardest and most important job there is..." Is it? Is it harder than being a Middle East peace negotiator or a janitor at a sports stadium? Is it more important than being an environmental preservationist or a bus driver? It's possible to rightly assert that stay-at-home mothers work hard at an extremely important job without testing the limits of credulity or coming off as defensive or judgmental. But maybe the Total 180! people are just desperate for a ray of positivity in what sounds like their hellish daily lives.
The first item in a section about goods "that no stay-at-home mom should do without" is a big bottle of Rodney Strong Chardonnay. A photograph illustrating a piece called "Martha Doesn't Live Here" depicts a crazy-eyed woman wielding a turkey-carving knife. The "Sex Scorecard" feature is about women who tally up their husbands' daily good deeds and sins and allow his score to determine whether "he is -- or ISN'T -- 'getting any.'" What about whether she is or isn't getting any?
One chart called "Coulda, Shoulda, Woulda" compares, "just for fun," what CHOs are obligated to do during the holidays vs. what they would actually like to do. Among the required tasks? "Do all the shopping for my entire family and my husband's relatives," "Buy a new dress for my husband's company party," "Cook endless batches of cookies" and "Put the decorations away and clean the house on New Year's Day." Among the things that CHOs would like to do are "Sit in front of a cozy fire drinking wine," "Buy a whole new winter wardrobe" and "Send my husband to the bakery." Another table listing "20 ways to amuse yourself on a bad day" includes suggestions like making "pancakes in the shape of those really nice Jimmy Choos you used to wear before you had kids," and affixing "a smiley face sticker to your forehead, because frankly, it's the only smile that's been on your face all day."
Isn't the new "staying at home" about empowerment of sorts? Isn't it supposed to be about exercising choices made possible by feminism? Why are these women doing all the baking and cleaning and schlepping to husbands' office parties? In a feature called "Gettin' CHOey," the Total 180! ladies write that "We needed to validate, support and reassure one another. Lord knows our husbands can't do that for us, and we shouldn't expect them to -- that's what girlfriends are for." Why is there no expectation of validation, support or reassurance from the husbands whose dinners they're cooking? Did they all marry the Great Santini?
Reading Total 180! made me want to introduce the CHOs to an incisive little volume titled "The Feminine Mystique." In it, they would find a description, in Paragraph 1, of a suburban wife who, as she "made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night ... [was] afraid to ask even of herself the silent question -- 'Is this all?'"
I called Total 180! co-founder Debbie Klett to ask her directly about these questions. Klett, 38, spent seven years in sales at International Data Group before deciding to stay at home full-time more than two years ago. She lives in Rocklin, Calif., with her husband (who wrote the male perspective on the "Sex Scorecard" in which he wondered "why [wives] can't remember that we're giving 'it' to you too?"] and 3-and-a-half-year-old twin daughters.
Do you find a contradiction in publishing a magazine about stay-at-home mothers when you yourself have gone back to work?
We feel that we're reinventing ourselves. We're still putting our families first. And if I'm on the phone for business and my kids need me then I can say, "I've got to call you back." It's not really opting back into the workforce, it's reinventing a way to stay involved and hoping society will play along. Imagine if companies put families first and tried to work with women! Imagine if they were better about hours and on-site day care and job sharing and flexible shifts.
That would be great. But that's different from full-time motherhood, which is what the magazine is about, right?
Well, by no means do we want to frown upon moms that need to work. We are not telling working moms you need to stay home; we do not want to do that at all. I have a friend who needs to work. If she were home with her kids all day she wouldn't be able to mentally take it; everybody's different. But there is a trend in society; women in their 30s have been able to have the success of having a career, and then they have their children and they say what I want to do is be there for all those firsts and be here for my children.
The New York Times recently interviewed women at elite colleges who said they planned to stay home to raise their kids. I think that's great. I am biased, of course, but I think that if you focus on your family and you're there for your children and they're not coming home to an empty house then that is going to create a positive wave of change across society.
Get Salon in your mailbox!
