Added: 08/24/2006 |
Working Mother Media: Serving One Mother at Work Well, Missing Another?Working Mother Media, publisher of a popular magazine for the mother at work, offers a wealth of good advice and tips for successful working mothers. Have magazines such as this, however, failed to address the needs of women who lack the funds to buy the products whose advertising supports the publications? Could Working Mother Media or other companies perhaps find a way to share wisdom with working mothers of a different social stratum?
For example, a mother at work may intend to give her full attention to her job, planning to give her full attention to her family when she is at home. What happens, however, when her company plans an awards banquet for the same evening as her daughter’s school play? How does she decide what to sacrifice? Is there a way she can avoid sacrificing either part of her life?
However, the images in the pages—paper and virtual—of Working Mother Media’s magazine suggest the target market is a specific kind of working mother: the “top executive decision-maker.” Ultimately, the marketing company magazine seeks the attention of women with money, mothers who own their own businesses, or at the very least are stepping onto the bottom rungs of a clear corporate ladder with plans to make it, eventually, much closer to the top.
An equally common sort of mother at work is very different from the women portrayed in the pages of Working Mother Media. This is the very low income wage-earner mother, the one trying to raise three children alone while working a full-time job (or two) and attending GED classes at night. She has an even more difficult juggling act, and is under far closer scrutiny from the government and the community. Often she faces a series of serious threats to her security: the too-small apartment in need of repair, the ex-dating partner who has been making threats, the cousin who refused to pick the children up from daycare when the working mother couldn’t get away from work on time. Ordinary tasks such as housework and commuting loom larger for this mother, too. A ten-minute commute across town for a car owner may take an hour and a half for a working mother forced to wait patiently at a bus stop or two before arriving at her destination. Low-rent apartments do not come equipped with automatic dishwashers, and washing clothes means bundling up the kids and laundry bags for a trek to the nearest laundromat.
While waiting for her clothes to dry, this mother may pick up a magazine at the laundromat, encouraged by a cover that promises to let her in on the secrets of managing household and work schedules in ways that leave some time for herself. The magazine, however, is likely to disappoint: its articles far too commonly tell her to buy high-priced products (a $600 high chair?) or to hire household help.
Perhaps, just once, a magazine such as that published by Working Mother Media could print an article or two with real-world advice that speaks to this second kind of mother, written by someone who understands survival in spite of poverty in America.
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