Moms Signaling Compliance
As women, and particularly mothers, we not only conform to norms: we signal our willingness to follow them—to our detriment
I found myself yesterday scurrying to pick up my daughter early from her first day at a new school. My mission? To apply carefully selected, attractive, expensive Etsy nametags, emblazoned with her formerly favorite non-animal—unicorns—to the spare clothing in the almost-regulation-size wooden box in her cubby. I had considered several candidates for this box, which was supposed to be 10 * 8 * 5 inches, according to the school supplies list. I prowled around the house, anxiously, measuring tape in hand, when I read this detail. My best contender for the box—an attractive plain wooden one that used to house puzzles—turned out to be half an inch too large in two dimensions. I considered just packing a small shoebox instead. I decided this would be inadequate. I considered buying a special box. I decided this would be too extra—and too wasteful.
I brought my slightly-too-large box to school, during the open house earlier this week, somewhat surreptitiously. It fit into the regulation space! Just! I was briefly ecstatic.
A friend caught me labeling the clothing in said box anxiously and I told her what I was doing, somewhat embarrassed. “Classic bum mom move—I forgot to label the spare clothing. They made a point of it at orientation.” She shrugged. “I never label anything of my son’s,” she said. “It usually makes it home.” “I was worried about the size of the box,” I confided, “but it fits: just.” She shrugged again. “Ours was too big last year. It hung over the edge of the shelf. Nobody said anything.” We smiled. I observed the shoeboxes in many of the other cubbies around me. I mentally conceded that I had been fussing about nothing.
But that’s not exactly true. Yes, we do these things as a way to expend anxious energy, as our kids prepare to make big transitions that seem daunting or even overwhelming during the days beforehand. Yes, I am a chronic perfectionist in recovery, a phenomenon Virginia Sole-Smith and Sara Petersen have brilliantly analyzed. And yet, as women in general, and mothers in particular, we’re doing something pointful in attending to these details. We’re not just following the rules in the handbook. We’re signaling to others—the teachers, the school administration, other parents, even our own children—that we’re willing to follow the rules. We are performing our compliance. We are saying: I am going to make the effort. I am not going to be a problem. In the hopes and expectations that our children, and maybe we ourselves, will be treated well on this basis.
I say “mothers” here and not “parents” because, historically and currently, so much of the emotional and detail-oriented material labor of caregiving falls on us. The second shift problem, where women do about twice the domestic labor as that of their male partners after having children, hasn’t budged in two decades. Even in my (genuinely!) co-equal parenting relationship, I am the one who fusses: over the labels, the size of the box, the clothing, the shoes, the lunches, the organization. And I am going to make a, perhaps shocking, confession: I actually enjoy this. Because my husband picks up the slack, and does at least as much (maybe more) of the hands-on parenting labor—getting up with our kid in the morning, driving her everywhere, playing the endless slightly interminable imaginative games she comes up with—I get to invest in said mothering minutiae. I am good at this, and—perhaps bizarrely—I like it. But that doesn’t mean I endorse it, morally or rationally.
Image: IStock photos
For one thing, signaling compliance is a huge exercise in privilege. It’s drawing on resources we have as a family—financial, social, and time-wise—to procure the perfect thing, and to deploy it to an effect that is pretty problematic. It’s a way of saying: I’m a good mom, and you should treat my child well, or else. Of course, I don’t want her to get special treatment, or be treated better than anyone else’s child. At the same, my behavior is a way of signaling that I am paying attention—and that, if things go awry, my kid has fierce advocates in her corner.
All of this feels irretrievably upper-middle-class and precious and wasteful. And it creates a kind of moms arms race—labels race?—that is individually exhausting and collectively irrational. (I’m reminded of the literature on how some social practices as egregiously harmful and inane as dueling are similarly sustained by signaling conformity to norms that clearly serve no one.)
So there’s no question in my mind that I need to divest from the mom minutiae, especially in matters that affect neither my daughter’s well-being nor the well-oiled machinery of the school as an institution. There is a question in my mind of how to wean myself off this tendency. It strikes me that my friend, who didn’t worry about labeling her son’s clothing, but clearly accepted that this might result in the odd lost sock, and who also didn’t stress about the slight overhang of his spare clothing box, had the right approach here. I know she cares, and is attentive, to what matters. She was not sweating the small stuff that is a waste of time and bandwidth—and also an insidious form of conspicuous compliance. (I wonder if the fact that she’s a queer person, married to a woman, has helped her divest from the performance of hetero-normalcy that I evidently have a harder time letting go of as a mother.)
And it strikes me that signaling norm compliance is a much larger issue when it comes to living a feminist life, to borrow a line from Sara Ahmed. Take the puzzle that women’s bodies in particular are required to be thin, despite the fact that the—presumptively and problematically default—male gaze seems to land on fat women’s bodies with quite some regularity. In particular, we have good evidence that fat female bodies are one of the most common search terms in internet pornography. We are the object of attraction. And yet the norm that tells us to be thin remains as powerful as ever. I wonder if this is less about being attractive to men than being seen to put in the work in order to remain attractive to men in perpetuity. To be seen to take care of ourselves, where that is less—or not at all—about health or beauty, than about visible social conformity. We must take care to remain compliant, and to treat that compliance as a job, in a social environment where calories are typically abundant and it’s hard for most of us to achieve leanness without great investments of time, money, and energy. In this environment, leanness is hence a signal that we are a hard worker at conforming to patriarchal and white supremacist and classist beauty ideals. We are a hard worker generally: hitting the gym, carefully preparing our meals, and cultivating a relationship with our body that is disciplined or even self-punitive. (In reality, the average lean person is more likely just genetically disposed toward thinness, in having a faster metabolism and getting less hungry.)
Of course, this signaling system has been compromised in the age of Ozempic, where thinness may indicate not hard work but the “cheating” of taking a GLP-1 receptor agonist for the sake of weight loss. Now, I happen to think that intentional weight loss is a fraught, sad goal, which doesn’t serve the vast majority of people. But if you’re determined to lose weight anyway, Ozempic is not cheating, and the idea that it is is just the “harder-better” fallacy. In fact, better that it be easier! Better that it involves less of the suffering and hunger and the chronic sense of deprivation that comes with dieting. I’m hence prepared to admit that, for people truly steeped in internalized fatphobia, Ozempic may be a form of individual harm reduction—albeit one that does do harm at a broader communal level. But that’s another, complex story, and one I’ve written about elsewhere.
I am reminded of the telling study cited by Tressie McMillan Cottom showing that women’s wearing makeup was rewarded in professional contexts less because it actually increased their perceived attractiveness and more because it signaled being willing to perform beauty labor. Looking “polished” and “well-groomed” is thus about more than looking better. We’re tapdancing not because anyone actually needs or wants a tapdance but because anyone seen not tapdancing will be assumed to be a slacker. McMillan Cottom has subsequently coined the term “bad wig theory.” The name derives from the joke that Black women who wear a wig find well-to-do white men more willing to date them when they put less effort into concealing the hairline carefully. She hypothesizes that this joke has a kernel of truth to it: white men respond positively to the visible effort evident in a “bad wig,” which shows the work their date has put in to eyes generally inexperienced with Black women’s hairstyles. Putting in the cosmetic effort is something that plausibly gets rewarded, both professionally and socially, for women.
The question, I suppose, is whether these rewards are worth having, or whether it is even morally acceptable to reap them—particularly for white women like me who are already steeped in privilege. The lesson, for me? It’s time to stop ordering the dinky Etsy labels and pull out—and then maybe put down—the sharpie. It’s time to cross “signaling compliance” off my back-to-school to-do list.
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As a mom who tries very hard to put my ethics over compliance signaling, I feel very lonely.
I speak up at the PTA meeting (at our public CA school) that 1/3 of our fundraising (tens of thousands of dollars) goes to a for-profit company in Georgia whose conservative rich white male owners do not believe in public education, and no one cares.
I refuse to participate in Ivy League Preschool Syndrome where parents spend all their resources paying for and driving their kids to activities, which means my kids have a hard time finding play dates where kids, for free, play soccer or legos in their neighborhood.
My spouse is the stay at home dad and I’m the working mom and there are no other parents like that, but it’s so important to us that our kids see busted stereotypes. It’s hard to find parent couple friends.
Thanks to KM and many others I have stopped caring about the male gaze, but because I’m naturally thin and love running, it looks like I am putting in the effort to attract the gaze of those husbands many of whom are in my field of work (tech).
I am so lonely and I wish I could find more non-compliance moms. I feel I’m the type of person that inspires others to be compliant because they don’t want to be like me, they want to bond together because it’s natural not to want to be the outsider like me.
Really though my issue is how judgmental I am (see above!) and that really turns people off, ooof.
I have a great life, I really do, I am happy with who I am and my family but I feel so alone in my community and I don’t know what to do about it except to raise my kids in a way they can recognize and change our cultural problems.
So good to hear this and so true because I lived this. I called it the "good girl" pressure that I grew up with. I can say with all the pitfalls of menopause (feeling like you're being burned alive at random intervals and tendons snapping like twigs) that you can just finally let yourself and everything go... menopause has sapped my ability to care about all that in a great way. It may have taken me this long to realize it but I'm so happy my daughter got there much faster. I bought her a necklace that says "be kind" and when you open it up it says "of a bitch".