What is "liberal" parenting?

Miss Self-Important brings our attention to an egregious example of parental overshare, but of the variant where the parent’s the one who comes across as looking ridiculous. It's a piece about so-called liberal parenting, although I'm having trouble sorting out what that is, seeing as today's coastal elite liberal types are supposedly helicopter parents, while the let-the-kids-be sorts are the throwbacks. Liberal parenting has been in the news, what with the National Review accusing Lena Dunham’s parents of child abuse through excessive liberalism. But let’s turn instead to some historical examples of liberal parenting. Not 17th century pamphlet. 20th-century sitcom:

Two examples come to mind immediately. The first – in the order of coming to mind, not chronologically – is 1990s Britcom “Absolutely Fabulous.” Has there ever been a more liberal parent than Edina Monsoon? But she ends up with a daughter like Saffy. Saffy’s not politically conservative – if anything, she’s a better leftist than Edina, calling out her mother’s various rich-hippie hypocrisies – but she’s super-serious, sensible, buttoned-up. It’s precisely because Edina’s useless in that area that Saffy figured out, at a young age, how to deal with all that's practical. A typical Saffy move will be explaining to Edina, whose alimony's being cut off, how to buy milk at a supermarket. (Edina would have otherwise had it delivered from an upscale department store, which is apparently a thing that can be done in England.)

Next up is the more subtle pairing of Phyllis and Bess on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” Phyllis’s thing is that she’s a liberal-and-liberated woman. She has a Master’s degree and myriad artistic and philanthropic involvements. She’s also a housewife, on a show that centers around a woman with a high-powered career. When Phyllis, Rhoda, and Mary are together, Phyllis’s progressive credentials are a kind of running joke. Because it’s the 1970s, Phyllis is into a kind of liberal parenting that seems very… 1970s. She has Bess call her “Phyllis,” and has a deeply-researched parenting philosophy, complete with many books she in one early episode heaves at Mary, who’s babysitting.

Bess's upbringing is in some respects really jarring today. When the time comes for a birds-and-bees discussion, poor Bess comes to Mary and explains that while Phyllis had told her about sex, she didn’t say anything about love. This is a problem because Bess’s boyfriend (she and – presumably – the off-screen boyfriend are 10 or 11 at the time) says he loves her, and she’s afraid that saying she loves him back will mean she has to sleep with him. Mary, who’s the mix of horrified and amused that the audience is meant to be (and might have been in the 1970s; I had trouble getting past horrified.)

There’s also the great episode where Rhoda’s mother - under the influence of Phyllis - suddenly tries out liberal parenting… on a 30ish Rhoda. She decides she's going to be Rhoda's "friend," and announces she's not wearing a bra. Rhoda is aghast.

In any case, Bess, like Saffy, has a good head on her shoulders. She’s not uptight like Saffy (she laughs at Rhoda’s jokes, and plays poker with Mr. Grant), but is several notches more reasonable than Phyllis. The Phyllis-Bess dynamic is a less farcical version of the Edina-Saffy one, but is overall the same idea. The major difference is that Phyllis's liberal parenting is of the hyperinvolved variety. Phyllis has time on her hands, and turns Bess into a project (see the episode where she decides that Bess should write a book, and sits down to write it herself). Edina, meanwhile, is off being a libertine and leaves Saffy to her own devices.

But I'm left wondering: What’s the relationship between liberal parenting and liberal politics? It seems at best a really limited one. Here, we might turn to a different (and far inferior) sitcom, “Family Ties,” where the ex-hippie parents have to contend with their Reagan-loving kid, played by Michael J. Fox (not to mention the mall-and-boy-crazy Mallory). The parents – and perhaps it’s key that in this case, there are two of them (Phyllis is married to the eternally offscreen Lars) – do impose rules. The Michael J. Fox character’s conservatism is a rebellion against his parents’ politics, but not their parenting.

But more to the point, as Heather Havrilesky, Emily Matchar, and others keep pointing out, the new supermom fixation on feeding kids home-farmed everything isn't really one way or the other, politically. Those who embrace it tend to see themselves as being on the left (anti-corporate, etc.), but are also rejecting the basic tenets of what it means to be a feminist, namely the need for a woman to be able to support herself financially, and to have an identity that isn't just relational. "Liberal" parenting today is neither a) permissive, nor b) feminist. And sitcoms have turned my brain into too much mush to sort that paradox out.

Part II of the previous post

There's this incredible scene from an episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show that completely addresses all of this. The episode begins with Mr. Grant, Mary's bosses, discreetly sussing out if she'd be interested in his job upon his promotion. She blows it, fails to "lean in," as it were. Back home, she discusses this with her friends Rhoda and Phyllis. Rhoda, also single and with a career, and Phyllis, a housewife, disagree (sort of) about what Mary should do, but not in the manner you'd expect. Phyllis insists that Mary go after the promotion, and that she do so for all womankind. She offers up a very 2013 - and startlingly non-Phyllis-like in its reasonableness - feminist manifesto. Rhoda, however, has a different take. She advises Mary to find a rich and good-looking husband, to marry him, to have his baby, and then to blame him when she doesn't have a successful career.

To capture Rhoda's tone here, though, you kind of need to have seen the show, because "sarcasm" doesn't begin to cover it. Earlier in the episode, when Phyllis insists there's no job a man is more suited to than a woman, Rhoda responds - with impeccable timing - that there is such a job: "female impersonator."

And then, sigh, Mary goes back into work, decides she does want the job, but by then Mr. Grant has already given it to Murray. Mary asks if this was because she'd said she didn't want it, he says no. She asks if it's because she's a woman. He says yes. As text, you might think, whoa, Mr. Grant, such a 1970s throwback sexist! But as performed, you can perfectly well see that he wanted to offer Mary the job, but that her socialization as a woman prevented her from taking it while it was still there for the taking. So it is, in a sense, because she's a woman that she doesn't get the job.

Expect more such profundity from WWPD now that workouts are Hulu-compatible.

Trappings

Is there some kind of equivalence - as Britta suggests - between taking one's husband's name and being a housewife? Anecdotal evidence - along with n-of-one evidence - says these two things aren't all that related. Common sense says they must be somewhat related. I've never heard of a survey addressing this - Withywindle, holder of the survey information, care to return as a commenter?

I don't think it's necessarily unfair to assume people are announcing something with their symbolic choices. But does name-change make this announcement? There are a lot of things going on here. The choice to take a husband's name and the one to stay home (possibly after having more than one kid) might be happening a long time apart. People change, circumstances change. Also: a woman who takes her husband's name, people will say, what if the marriage ends? Well, what if it does? She's left with a different last name than she used to have, and she can change it back if she likes. Or not, if she prefers/has professionally established herself with the new one.

But I find that there's a certain type of feminism (not all feminism! I consider myself a feminist! and my intention is not to pick on Britta, whom I do generally agree with on such matters) that is too trappings-focused, in a way that ends up rewarding cultural capital (or not even that - more like, being of a certain subculture) than it does actual paths taken. Referring to a husband or wife as a "spouse," or having unconventional wedding jewelry or none at all, these things may point to an egalitarian marriage. Or they may simply announce a socialization in a certain milieu that just does things like this, but at the end of the day, it's Archie and Edith in their household. Whereas in other milieus, a big white wedding dress and being Mrs. Husband is the way it goes, but in no way means one cannot also be a high-powered professional.

If anything, perhaps this works like "organic" - women who feel they've already made their feminist statements by keeping their names, not wearing makeup, saying hell-no to a diamond (of any provenance), calling their husband their "partner"... obviously such women often are super-committed to egalitarian marriage. But other such women may feel that they've already done their part, announced where they stand, refused to identify as housewives, and then that's enough. The financial underpinnings - which are tougher to sort out in many respects - can remain altogether traditional.

Which makes me think of yet another 1970s sitcom reference: the episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show where eternally-offscreen Lars has an off-screen affair with Sue Ann Nivens, "The Happy Homemaker," a kind of proto-Martha Stewart host of a TV show aimed at housewives. Sue Ann is all sweetness on set, but a ruthless businessperson once the cameras stop rolling. Lars's wife, Phyllis, did take her husband's name (they would have married before second-wave feminism), but sees herself as a thoroughly modern woman, with cultural interests, and complete ineptitude in the kitchen. Her image - her clothing, her demeanor - is pure 1970s. Sue Ann: pure 1950s. All of which leads Mary and Rhoda (who need no introduction) to spell out what was on the audience's mind: one would totally imagine man cheating on Sue Ann with Phyllis. The idea being, Sue Ann seems to embody the old-time wife who's gotten the old-time bad deal from the patriarchy. But the financial underpinnings matter more. Sue Ann's an independent career woman with a casual approach to sex (the actress: Betty White), whereas Phyllis, despite dressing like a more chic version of Mary or Rhoda, is much closer to what Sue Ann represents.