Not long ago, my friend Eve telephoned me and whispered, "I need your advice." She was calling from her home, where, in a neighboring room, her new nanny was putting Eve's baby to sleep. Meanwhile, Eve was looking after the nanny's baby. "She asked me if she could bring her 8-month-old son with her to work, and I didn't see why not," my friend said, clearly struggling with her newfound role as boss. "But our kids aren't on the same schedule, so while she tries to get mine to nap, I'm taking care of hers!" In the end, they altered the nanny's schedule so she could spend more time at home with her own son, but this is a good example of the delicate negotiations that take place between mothers and nannies—which is basically to say between women—with well-chronicled frequency these days.
Literature has long recognized this fraught alliance, but it has only recently begun to track it as a sociological dilemma. The genre came into being in 1934 with Mary Poppins, P. L. Travers's stern but magical nanny. And yet it wasn't until The Nanny Diaries—the 2002 roman à clef by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus about their tours through Upper East Side Richie-Rich households—that the mother-nanny relationship became a cultural fixation. Soon thereafter, Caitlin Flanagan took the subject on in "How Serfdom Saved the Women's Movement," her now-infamous 2004 Atlantic Monthly article. In it, she pointed out the feminism-chasing-its-tail aspect of the phenomenon, given that hiring women to care for our children means taking them away from their children—often for meager, under-the-table wages.
Since then, nanny-lit has held a solid corner of the front table at Barnes & Noble. The most recent entries—from last year's essay collection Searching for Mary Poppins, edited by Susan Davis and Gina Hyams, to the current And Nanny Makes Three, by Jessika Auerbach, and Lucy Kaylin's The Perfect Stranger—come from authors who on the surface look a lot like Flanagan. They are career women, mostly late-in-life mothers from the upper middle class, who worry about the mysterious consequences of outsourcing care for their children. These writers, however, take a decidedly different tack when expressing their views. Where Flanagan is deceivingly straightforward, banging women over the head with a frying pan of guilt while often herself indulging in the very acts she criticizes, these authors are straightforwardly straightforward. They implicate themselves in discussing the problems of child care today—and in so doing, they offer a more incisive and heartfelt look at the issue.
One thing they make abundantly clear is that the tremendous pressure modern mothers feel—to be good to their children, to get their work done, to have full lives—has edged them into a kind of exhausted ruthlessness. "The notion that women with careers callously trample their less fortunate sisters in order to catch up with men who still rule the world is a neat argument, but it is also a spurious one—for what else are we to do?" Auerbach declares early on. "I'm simply too tired and too busy with running our family's life to get particularly worked up about it anymore."
But in saying this, Auerbach undermines the strength of her own book—for she offers the strongest case among her peers for not losing sight of the inequalities. She does this most effectively by interviewing nannies. (Kaylin interviews them, too, but to a far lesser extent.) Here is Claudette, describing her boss: "'I hate that she's always late.... I hate that she comes swooping in at the end of the day like some goddess and gives the kids everything I've been telling them they can't have, and then she tells me she thinks they're getting spoiled.... But I love the kids. And I love that they love me, because if they didn't I'd rather be cleaning toilets.'" And here is Anna, a recently retired Bolivian woman in her 70s: "'I had many families where they think, just because they're rich and I'm from a developing country, they're better than me.'" (Nothing like seeing things through someone else's eyes to prompt a harder look at yourself.)
The subtle racism that can creep into day-to-day interactions is perhaps the hardest thing to confront when discussing the relationship. Thankfully, there is an inspiring level of openness about it in these books. Kaylin, in particular, is admirably—at times brutally-candid. She even admits to her own vain hope that she will be praised for her liberal sensitivity, and perhaps forgiven for participating in this controversial enterprise, when she announces to a prospective nanny that she would never hire someone who'd been forced to leave her own children in another country. "She fixed me with a what-is-it-with-you-white-women stare," Kaylin writes. "Finally she said, 'But those women really need the job. They really need to send money home to their kids.'" Proving there is no right position to take, only a constant striving for mutual respect.
Which, unfortunately, is easier said than done. "Nationalities are tossed around as casually as paint colors," Kaylin continues, describing the way some people discuss nanny searches. "Indeed, there is a risible whiff of shopping to all of this, of comparing labels, from down-market to designer."
Searching for Mary Poppins contributor Elissa Schappell also speaks to this point: "People said, Hire a Filipino nanny. They are gentle, patient, and often Buddhist, so they will work on holidays if you want them to.... People said, Hire a Hispanic or non-English-speaking nanny. That way they can't gossip about your private life."
Still, there are happy working relationships. Many Poppins essays read as love stories—about the contributors' nannies, more so than their spouses. "We are more like our nannies than we realize," Poppins's Susan Cheever writes. "We're all ... torn between the demands of money and the demands of love. They have chosen to give their children less mothering and so have we.... It's our similarities rather than our differences that make the situation so painful."
But Cheever's image of all women striding arm-in-arm begs this question: Where are the men? The main reason this is considered a feminist issue, after all, is because we so often overlook that men are our co-employers. Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Hochschild, the editors of Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy, remind us of this in the introduction to their crucial 2003 anthology: "Rather than saying that immigrant domestics enable relatively affluent women to enter the workforce, it might be fairer to say that they enable affluent men to maintain their privileged status within, or in relation to, their families."
For all its forward exploration of the maternal double bind, the current nanny-lit takes an oddly submissive attitude when discussing the man's role. "[The husband] tends to be involved with the nanny in only the most tangential sense," Kaylin writes. "An occasional writer of checks; the guy scooting past, grabbing his coffee from the microwave." And though Auerbach devotes a chapter to men, she, too, naively dismisses them in the end: "Mothers still change most of the diapers, get up at night, consult the pediatrician, and hire, fire, pay for and deal with the nanny." But not all husbands shun these duties—nor do they all earn more money or work longer hours than their wives.
In the end, these books fall just short of where they need to take us. Both Kaylin and Auerbach vividly illustrate the predicament and then fail to offer solutions. Even Flanagan is adamant about the rights of domestic workers—in particular that everyone must, by law, pay Social Security taxes for their nannies. (Of course, a more farsighted approach would be good, nationally subsidized day care—but that's another column.) Nevertheless, these women have written useful books. And they wrote them while raising children, overseeing nannies, not bothering their husbands with the nagging details, and exploring their own lives in order to make us feel a little less alone.
