Moms Deserve a Break Today

The maternal resentment has evidently been building up for a while, and New York Times blogger Judith Warner is letting loose. She recounts slights perpetrated against her and her friends and wonders: "Why do people so often permit themselves to dump—verbally, emotionally, with a surgically precise ability to wound viscerally—on mothers? And why do we put up with it? "

"I suspect that highly successful working mothers suffer a disproportionate amount of scorn," Warner theorizes. She cites and commiserates with Ayelet Waldman, author of the headline-grabbing book Bad Mother. The condemnation isn't of a piece with "it takes a village" parenting, Warner argues, because however well-meaning, backhanded barbs "make a mother feel condemned in the court of world opinion."
(More parenting stories.)