Edited by Amelia Cantwell and Rishi Chandra
“I know [motherhood is] thankless and exhausting,” Audrey remarks to her exhausted daughter Mandy. “But hopefully someday CeeCee will appreciate you the way you appreciate me.” While these comments may have been prompted by a tense mother-daughter relationship, both serve as poignant reminders of just what little value we attribute to the labor of our mothers—an ongoing issue that is aggravated by practices that evaluate the significance of a mother’s workload through the lens of traditional masculinity.
The comments in question come from Season One, Episode 18 of Georgie and Mandy’s First Marriage, which explores the intersections between marriage, social norms, and parental responsibilities. As a young couple living in Mandy’s parents’ house and navigating how to raise a child in a world that is so undeniably not their own, Georgie and Mandy come across a challenge quite common to couples: determining how to allocate and spend money. When Mandy plans to treat herself to a spa day after her relentless labor, Georgie can’t seem to understand why—his confusion stems largely from his father-in-law Jim’s interference, who doesn’t believe Mandy is making a respectable decision (9:27-9:45):
Georgie: “We’d be less poor if we were more careful with our money.”
Mandy: “And when you say ‘we’ you mean ‘me.’”
Georgie: “But I said ‘we.’”
Mandy: “The same way that ‘we’ take care of CeeCee all day and then ‘we’ work at the diner all night?”
Georgie: “Well, this ‘we’ gets tow truck calls all night.”
Mandy: “So, you think that ‘we’ works harder than ‘we’?”
Georgie: “Fine, we both work hard, but only one of us is buying spa days.”
Although the couple banters about whose labor is more taxing than the others, which is problematic for more reasons than one, our main concern should be that both partners attempt to minimize and even devalue the responsibilities of the other. While we should note that Mandy’s defensive tone contributes to this conflict, her reaction is not solely provoked by her husband’s concern for their financial life, it’s triggered by the realization that two influential men in her immediate family couldn’t comprehend why a moment of relaxation was necessary for her. In fact, just seven to eight minutes after the aforementioned scene, Jim goes on to correlate Mandy’s hopes to invest in the spa day with a lack of appreciation for what he has done for her (16:19-25). This argument is, of course, met with confrontation from his wife, Audrey, who emphasizes the tiresome duties of motherhood and her own struggles raising their two children just a few decades ago (16:25-32). When Jim refutes just how taxing motherhood must be by saying “You got to stay home and play with [the children] all day” (16:38), he doesn’t just diminish his wife’s crucial part in building their family; he unintentionally elucidates the elevated importance society places on male-dominated roles and work habits. Jim alone is not to blame for these statements. The outdated social standards that continue to discriminate against women’s work efforts inside and outside the home should be condemned as well.
Although Georgie and Mandy’s First Marriage takes place in the mid-1990s, the constraining nature of gender expectations continues to reveal itself in the ways we measure domestic labor relative to that of traditionally masculine work. It isn’t really any surprise that the men in Mandy’s life downsized her contributions to their family. Just like the families of today, they operated within a labor force that constructed the concepts of “work” and “labor” according to a traditional male-centric and patriarchal model of men’s lives, which excluded women’s efforts, responsibilities, and productivity in private spheres like the home. As gender constructs have emphasized men’s public production of goods and accumulation of wealth, they have simultaneously minimized the “quiet” role mothers play in raising workforce-ready adults and keeping a well-structured home, both of which have contributed to the reproduction of the neoliberal social order.
More specifically, our disregard for the tiresome labor of mothers perpetuates androcentrism, which “positions men as the gender-neutral standard while marking women as gender-specific” and discreetly prolongs the concept of “invisible labor,” the unseen, unpaid, and often undervalued physical, mental, and emotional work women partake in to keep households and relationships functioning. In other words, androcentrism explains why mothers often lack the appreciation they deserve: they’re functioning within communities that are conditioned to view their sacrifices as the norm.
The home isn’t the only place where women’s labor goes overlooked, either. Depreciation of women's work plagues most female employees. Despite women aged 25-54 contributing to the labor force at higher rates than their male counterparts, their efforts are often overshadowed by traditional gender norms that lead people to dismiss their economic contributions. The centuries-old gender pay gap, which has prevented women from receiving equal compensation with men in spite of similar work, speaks for itself. Without this benchmark being met, her work is not only rendered secondary; it’s considered dismissible.
There’s still one more aspect to the nature of this adversity that we’re missing though and that’s because women like Mandy don’t unilaterally allocate their time to the workforce or to motherhood but invest a fair share in both. Just as in the 20th century, the 21st-century working mother is expected not only to succeed in the workplace but also to carry the burdens of managing an efficient household. The weight of these expectations is often shouldered by women alone, resulting in nearly one in two working mothers experiencing high levels of burnout and depression. These adverse realities contribute to the epidemic of emotional exhaustion occurring today—one that is aided by a culture and its political platforms that demand perfection from our mothers and then treat their contributions as the norm.
The abstract guidelines that we use to craft the “ideal mother” are impossible to attain. Our society’s limited understanding of what universal perfection entails places women and mothers in a constant state of remodeling that neither they nor their critics can achieve. When political influences enter these conversations, the issue becomes particularly murky, as women never clearly fulfill all social expectations. For example, reinvigorated social demands expect women to either fulfill the role of the traditional housewife or take on more employment-related responsibilities without additional support. Right-wing politicians are encouraging young women to embrace a domestic life of marriage and motherhood, while young left-wing spokespeople have been advocating for women to chart paths outside the home. Women can’t position themselves on one end of the spectrum without being deeply scrutinized by the other, nor can they be fully accepted for performing one duty if it lacks the other.
Our inability to honor women’s decisions and respect their contributions says something about our social programming. We've been trained to believe that we’re owed something by the female sex as a whole. It might be through family formation, child-rearing, participation in the work force, or otherwise. But to make these endless demands known is both to strip women of their god-given right to self-determination and produce the implication that the burden is theirs alone to bear.
The simplest solution? Encouraging spouses to tackle chores equitably or in a manner that is most suitable for the success of their personal and unique relationships. Without pushing husbands and fathers to accept these negotiations, we further the very culture that made a mockery of Mandy’s desires for rest, aid a future where women’s work is considered trivial, and push a narrative that men can play a limited role in the upbringing of their children.
As the episode closes with Mandy and her mother receiving that long awaited spa day, Jim takes on the responsibility of caring for his granddaughter alone. His struggles to feed her become a testament to the practice, effort, and patience required to be a mother—a skill set that can be developed through sacrifice alone. For this, we should give our thanks.