The Mommy Wars Are Class Wars

Except nobody knows who the oppressed ones are.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

When I ask you to imagine a SAHM, do you imagine someone more or less financially fortunate than you? What about a working mom?

A while ago, I wrote The Gender Wars are Class Wars about how the arguments (typically on Twitter, but also elsewhere) between “the manosphere” and its female (often feminist) opponents tend to have an underlying class conflict. While it’s typically unspoken, the men of the manosphere tend to be lower middle class or middle class, and they butt heads with educated middle to upper middle class women who they view simultaneously as inferiors and oppressors—see the ire directed at Gen Z Boss and a Mini. More charitably speaking, the two sides are living in very different worlds, which makes it very difficult for them to agree on the fundamental realities of life (for example, the frequent assertion that CEOs are marrying teenagers who work at Krispy Kreme, or that girls in high school are “always” dating men in their twenties and thirties.) The reality of upper middle class women in urban environments also probably seems hard to believe, such as high-earning folks marrying each other, often when both parties are over thirty, or it being completely uncontroversial for a woman to have kids at forty.

A similar thing is happening with the Mommy Wars, otherwise known as the long-term conflict between SAHMs and working moms.

Most moms get along just fine, whether they work for an income or not. But if you’re a mom (or spend any time on online mom spaces for some other masochistic reason) you’ll notice that skirmishes related to a mother’s working status are just about as common as stories of husbands peacefully sleeping through late-night feedings, or old ladies at the park scolding moms about their baby’s lack of socks in eighty degree weather. For a while now, I’ve thought that these conflicts represented some degree of class resentment. But what’s so striking about the Mommy Class Wars in particular is that basically everybody believes they are “punching up.”