The enormous public response to the recent “Nanny Trial,” in which Louise Woodward was convicted of manslaughter for shaking an 8-month old baby to death is so striking because it was so irrational. Consider, for example, that the public supported the defendant enthusiastically enough to pour upwards of $300,000 into The Louise Woodward Campaign for Justice even though the EF Au Pair agency paid all her legal fees. Moreover, parents flooded her with job offers to work as a nanny for their own children.
By contrast, the slain baby’s mother, Dr. Deborah Eappen, was vilified for working. She could have stayed home to care for her children, so the illogic goes, because her husband, also a doctor, earned more than $100,000 a year. On a call-in radio show the day the day the trial began, one listener even said, “the mother got what she deserved.” In the end, the convicted au pair went home to England in glory. The bereaved mother, hounded by hate mail and reporters, had to flee her Boston home with her husband and remaining son.
Echoes of 17th-Century Salem ring eerily in the background. To silence them, we need to ask the relevant questions: Why have so many Americans ardently proclaimed the innocence of a convicted British working-class girl and the guilt of her blameless middle-class employer? Why have Dr. Eappen’s defenders felt the need to point out that she only worked three days a week and often came home for lunch. Why should that “exonerate” her when she had nothing to do with her child’s murder in the first place? Would she somehow be guilty if she had worked five days a week and didn’t come home for lunch, like most mothers now do? Hardly, and that’s what makes this now infamous case such a crucible; it was the mother, not the murderer, whom the American public punished for the crime.
The fury against Dr. Deborah Eappen is part of a sharp new backlash against working mothers that has built over the last decade as women have moved into prestigious, lucrative jobs. Had Deborah Eappen been a nurse instead of a doctor, had she and her husband both worked in a factory and put their children in daycare, the public would likely have sympathized, perceiving her as “having to work.” But that’s also code for working at lower paying, lower status “women’s” jobs — the ones that just 30 years ago were listed in the women’s section of any newspaper’s employment pages.
Historically, no one ever thre(less than or equal to)w stones at the mother who cleaned fish or other people’s houses for a livings, which is, I suspect, why Congress had no problem telling welfare mothers they would just have to put their children in daycare and go to work. A mother’s working does not offend most Americans, but a growing number are offended by mothers like ophthalmologist Deborah Eappen because she signals how relatively easy it is now for a woman — even one from a working class background as she is — to rise to the heights of the American economy. The very fact that she is no longer unique reveals just how much America is changing.
The greater the change, however, the more people are upset by it, if for no other reason than change is frightening. The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t. And the change in the status of women touches every household. As women become more equal to men economically, it means that the homemaker/provider roles will finally be left behind. And they must, for we have outgrown them. They no longer fit women and men who study and work along side one another, who raise girls and boys alike to be whatever they want, and who both contribute to the family income. But we’re too afraid to let the old roles go. Women have a new work identity, but we haven’t yet created a new mothering identity. So the old roles and the new coexist uneasily within many of us. Sometimes their public faces — the stay-at-home and the working mothers — are at war.
The “Nanny Trial” dramatized this conflict. It gave voice to the polarization between the old woman’s role and the new. Yet, there is no longer a real divide between the two. None of us are either “cold careerists” or “devoted mothers.” We know better, because most women today, including Dr. Deborah Eappen, are devoted mothers who have a clear work identity. And this is true whether or not we’ve temporarily cut beck or stopped working to care for children. Most women have studied or trained to work. Most know the pleasure of their own paycheck and the dignity of paid labor. Most also know the pleasure of hugging, loving and caring for our children.
The problem is that we haven’t fully integrated these two sides of ourselves — the side that works because it’s part of who we are and the side that nurtures because that, too, is who we are. Instead, we are ambivalent about each, as if we’re not quite sure it’s all right to be working mothers, or quite sure it’s still all right to stay at home to care for our children. The stay-at-home mother envies the independent life of a woman who goes off to work every day while the working mom wishes she could just move through the day in sync with her children’s rhythms.
We are a transitional generation, navigating unexplored territory. It is our ambivalence about doing so that gets acted out publicly as a battle between divided camps. It is this ambivalence that cast Dr. Deborah Eappen into the cold careerist role and canonized the young girl who stayed home to care for her children, despite her dreadful failure to do so.
Nothing can bring back Dr. Eappen’s slain child, nor even the life she and her husband worked so hard to create in Boston. But at the very least, perhaps her losses can help us understand ourselves. Perhaps the “Nanny Trial,” like its Salem predecessors, will finally be seen as one excruciating episode in the difficult process of social change. And if it is, then hopefully, it will have turned the public fury to the real outrage: our country’s lack of affordable child care, adequate schools, family-friendly jobs. Perhaps, in the ensuing national shame, it will have helped to heal our divided hearts.
