Lara Descartes - Media and Middle Class Moms: Images and Realities of Work and Family

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Media and Middle Class Moms

Written by nationally recognized anthropologists Conrad P. Kottak and Lara Descartes, this ethnography of largely white, middle class families in a town in the Midwest explores the role that the media play in influencing how those families cope with everyday work/family issues. The book insightfully reports that families struggle with, and make, work/family decisions based largely on the images and ideas they receive from media sources, though they strongly deny being so influenced. An ideal book for teaching undergraduate family, media, and methods courses.

Lara Descartes is an Associate Professor of Family Studies at Brescia University College. She earned her doctorate in Anthropology from the University of Michigan. Her research interests include work and family, popular culture, and how identity factors (race, class, gender, geographic locale, etc.) impact family life.

Conrad P. Kottak is the Julian H. Steward Collegiate Professor (and former Chair) of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. He has done ethnographic fieldwork on work/family issues in Brazil, Madagascar, and the United States. His research interests also encompass global change, national and international culture, and mass media.

Media and Middle Class Moms

Images and Realities of Work and Family

Lara Descartes and Conrad P. Kottak

First published 2009
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016

Simultaneously published in the UK
by Routledge
2 Park Square,Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2009.

To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledges collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.

2009 Taylor & Francis

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Descartes, Lara
Media and middle class moms: images and realities of work and family / Lara Descartes and Conrad P. Kottak.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Working mothersMichiganDexter. 2. Middle class womenMichiganDexter. 3. Middle class familiesMichiganDexter. 4. Mass media and the familyMichigan Dexter. 5. Work and familyMichiganDexter. 6. Dexter (Mich.)Social conditions. 7. Dexter (Mich.)Economic conditions.I. Kottak, Conrad Phillip.II. Title.
HQ759.48.D48 2008
306.874308622dc22
2008032481

ISBN 0-203-89273-9 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0-415-99308-3 (hbk)
ISBN10: 0-415-99309-1 (pbk)
ISBN10: 0-203-89273-9 (ebk)

ISBN13: 978-0-415-99308-1 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-415-99309-8 (pbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-203-89273-2 (ebk)

To all the moms in our own lives

FIGURES

Main Street

Feed Store

Cider Mill

Subdivision

Subdivision

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to acknowledge the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for their generous support of this project. We also wish to thank Thomas Fricke, the Director of the Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life (CEEL) at the University of Michigan, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Center for the Study of Working Families, for his ongoing encouragement through the years of our research and writing. As well, we thank our fellow researchers at CEEL and throughout the Sloan community for regularly sharing with us and each other their findings and insights. We also thank Kathleen Christensen, Director of the Program on the Workplace, Work Force, and Working Families at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Without her support none of this would have been possible.

We are particularly grateful to Anita Garey for her constructive criticism of the complete draft of the manuscript and Elizabeth Rudd for providing us with valuable feedback on . Conrad Kottak wishes to thanks the graduate and undergraduate students in his two fall 2007 seminars for their comments on the manuscript. We are grateful to all our reviewers, especially Jodi OBrien, for their helpful comments and constructive suggestions.

For their assistance at various stages we thank: Autumn Kelly, who helped transcribe interviews and assist with focus groups; Mollie Callahan, who enabled our completion of the ethnographic observation portion of this project; Melissa Fleiss; and Alison Levitch. Lara Descartes thanks the skilled child care providers whose help gave her the time to complete this manuscript. We are grateful as well to Isabel (Betty) Kottak, who facilitated our initial contacts in Dexter. Judy Baughn and Jana Bruce deserve our thanks, too, for their organization and managerial support. At Routledge and Taylor & Francis we thank Steve Rutter for his confidence in our work and his suggestions for making this a better manuscript.

And finally, we wish to express our gratitude to the many people in Dexter who made our research experience there a lively, intriguing, and memorable one.

1
MEDIA-TING WORK AND FAMILY

The shows we watched, like Father Knows Best, absolutely have no relevance today. The times have just changed so much. Its old news.

Gus, full time working father of two, married to a stay-at-home mother

Those fathers back then, Ozzie and Harriet, I think they get a bad rap. I think they were a good family And those dads were not the doofuses that we see now. They were real dads. If their kids needed money, Im sure they wouldnt go to their moms.

Brianna, stay-at-home mother of two, married to a full time working father

We do tend to watch shows, the old shows like Leave it to Beaver, just so that our son and daughter kind of see Well, gee, maybe thats how moms were. Its good for them to see a mix of work/family situations on TV because theyre going to see that when theyre out there. They already realize that. Their friends have an entirely different makeup than my friends did when I was a kid. Theyve got friends who have one parent, two parents, four parents, because they spend some time with mom and dad here and some time with the other mom and dad over there, theyve got a dad with a girlfriend, a mom with a boyfriend, theyve got friends where there are two moms that are together, and weve had discussions about that as well, or situations where a grandparent lives there.

Morgan, full time working mother of two, married to a full time working father

Father Knows Best, Ozzie and Harriet, Leave it to Beaver: the television programs cited by these parents are American cultural referents that still evoke potent images of middle class family life. Their titles have become shorthand for very specific configurations of family, gender, class, and workbreadwinner fathers, stay-at-home mothers, and obedient, industrious children. Media are a significant and pervasive part of the American cultural landscape. Our central argument in this book is that the mass media, and the representations they offer (whether based in fiction, myth, or real life), powerfully shape the ways in which people organize themselves and their expectations, albeit in a manner that is more complex than simple analysis might indicate.

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