Mother wars, the pitting of at-home and employed mothers against each other, dominate public discourse. Mother roles are contested and, as a result, mothers are inundated with contradictory messages that affirm a particular mother role and simultaneously condemn a mother for achieving it. This content analysis explores 4 maternal contradictions in contemporary women 's magazines: (a) Buxton (1998) and Maushart (1999) contended that we are living in a historically and culturally unprecedented era of contested mother roles and ideologies. Mothers have choices in how to define their mother role, but with choice comes conflict. Maternal feminism has risen slowly in the wake of the feminist movement (Gimenez, 1980;Graglia, 1998). Feminist theory neglects to recognize women's desires to be both mothers and feminists (Allen, 1983;Fox-Genovese, 1996). Caregiving and feminism together are constructed as an oxymoron, and caregiving has been condemned for embroiling women in dependent and powerless family roles (Graglia, 1998). Studies of third-wave feminism reveal that an increasing number of young women resent the feminist movement for neglecting family roles (Fox-Genovese, 1996;Peters, 2001). MASS COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY, 2003, 6(3), 243-265 Requests for reprints should be sent to Deirdre D. Johnston, Department of Communication, Hope College, Holland, At this point in history, mother wars-the pitting of at-home and employed mothers against each other (Buxton, 1998)-dominate public discourse. Contemporary mothers are living in the culture's zone of contested identities (Hall, 1996). According to Hall:Identity … is a matter of considerable political significance, and is only likely to be advanced when both the necessity and the "impossibility" of identities, and the suturing of the psychic and the discursive in their constitution, are fully and unambiguously acknowledged. (p. 16) Bakhtin (1934Bakhtin ( -1935Bakhtin ( /1981 further described the importance of discourse to this process: "Individual consciousnesses … come together and fight it out on the territory of the utterance" (p. 360). Grossberg (1996), discussing the paradox of how a person can be both the cause and effect, both the subject and the subjected, contended that the task is to locate the "machinery" by which identification and belonging are produced and assimilated into structures of individuality (p. 98). The purpose of this study is to explore the prevalence of maternal identity contradictions in the public discourse of women's magazines.
MATERNAL DOUBLE BINDSThe mother wars are fueled by contradictory messages that affirm particular aspects of mother identity but sanction others (Buxton, 1998). When expectations and condemnations are tied in such a way that to achieve the expectation is to invite the condemnation, a double bind is present (Bateson, 1972;Watzlawick, Beavin, & Jackson, 1967). Double binds have the effect of undermining confidence and engendering feelings of guilt and inadequacy (Bateson, 1972;Watzlawick et al., 1967). In a cultural ...