‘Competitive and rapacious and amoral and moralising and just plain mad.’ That’s how middle-class American motherhood seemed to Judith Warner when she returned to the ‘pressure cooker’ of Washington DC after having her first child in Paris, where she had enjoyed the readily available support and relaxed attitude to parenting that French mothers apparently take for granted.
Perfect Madness arises from Warner’s conversations with American parents in their thirties and forties — educated, able, affluent people who ought to be leading happy and fulfilled lives. Instead, she finds a society fuelled by neurotic anxiety. She meets intelligent women whose intellectual horizons have narrowed to ‘tracking down the last gram of trans fat in their kids’ crackers’, women who weep as they tell of the strain of ‘trying to replicate Martha Stewart’s online cupcake decorations’, fathers who work 70-plus hours a week to pay for the elaborate luxuries that 21st-century Americans have come to regard as the simple bare necessities of life.
Warner decries the cult of perfectionism, seeing eating disorders, excessive exercising, and obsessions with largely imaginary food intolerances as the dark underside of the expansion of ambition and emphasis on high achievement that in the 1970s appeared to be liberating women.
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