Going off on a tangent – On the one hand I definitely agree that there is a set of visible internet moms who – for the purposes of marketing and image – say they are SAHMs while running what is essentially a media empire (blog, FB, Twitter, Instagram, etc. etc. etc.). On the other hand, I think there is some gray area where one makes the transition from being a SAHM to a WAHM. I have a friend who works 40hrs per week out of her home office selling mutual funds. I (and she) would 100% call her a WAHM. But I work about 10-ish hours a week adjuncting 4 classes (3 online) and do a little ad-hoc project work now and then but the bulk of my time is spent caring for my kids (ages 2 and 4 so not in school FT yet). Am I a WAHM? I work so few hours that it’s hard for me to call myself that, and I certainly don’t have a media or personal image as a SAHM that I feel like I have to keep up – nearly every mother I know works at least somewhat and many work full time. But I definitely do real professional work most days, and I desire to work more as my kids get older so maybe I am a WAHM. If pressed, I guess I would call myself a SAHM who does some part-time work. Even the qualifications to participate in Laura’s survey seem to show there’s disagreement in what qualifies as a working (vs SAH) parent. Her criteria would consider someone working 30-hrs per week to be a WAHM, but a woman working 30-hours/week isn’t actually working FT (40hrs/week), I think one could reasonably label that same woman a SAHM or working SAHM because she fails to meet the true threshold for FT work.

@ARC – I think no one has a good definition for a stay-at-home mom. For most of the women you’re talking about, it’s a marketing category, pure and simple.

@Meghan – alas, I’m betting that a lot of writers, male and female, don’t understand that indexing is a profession or what skills it entails. Kind of like some members of the general public assuming that now that we have spell check and grammar check, there’s no need for editors…

Have you seen the #Thanksfortyping Tumblr and twitter feed? This is super common in academic books “Thanks to my wife for typing this book….and editing and dealing with the children etc…”

Ooh, I love that #thanksfortyping piece! It reminds me of Dorothea and Casaubon in Middlemarch. Also, as a professional indexer, it has always gotten under my skin to read older, thanks-for-typing era bits thanking academic wives for indexing manuscripts (there’s a funny exchange in Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women about just that [side note, Pym was an indexer]).

YES!! I have noticed this too and it irks me. (Almost as much as when famous authors, artists and crafters describe themselves as ‘stay at home moms’ when they are internationally known, teaching classes and attending conferences worldwide, and writing books. Like it’s somehow bad to admit you have a job. At least call it ‘work at home mom’ if you don’t have an office.)

I have also noticed an interesting trend where female authors who are mothers give detailed shout outs to their babysitters and nannies (enough for the reader to know who that was). On the one hand, great that this isn’t invisible work, and it gives us a clue on how people are able to write a book while having small children. But OTOH, you never see men doing this, but presumably someone is caring for their kids. (Or maybe in most male writers’ cases it’s as you mention above and it’s the saintly wife who’s doing everything.)

@DVStudent – I read a few books this month with a really strong sense of place: Cather with the prairie west, Wharton and Fitzgerald with New York, Kline with Maine, Wendell Berry’s Kentucky. I guess Hemingway’s Paris too! Maybe I’m particularly drawn to those sorts of books. I always like writing about the natural world, and Cather, Kline, and Berry did a lot of that (fun fact: my office is decorated with several Wendy Hollender botanical drawings/prints).

@Spring – I had not seen that hash tag, but…yeah. At least now that we have computers, the grunt work of typing later drafts doesn’t need to be outsourced (to the supportive wife or anyone else).

My next book will really be for everyone! It’s just that to get data on time stress I needed people who were highly likely to feel time stress. Gallup does a poll every year and finds that people who work full time, and people who have kids, are more likely than other people to feel like they lack the time for the things they want to do. If I didn’t have those requirements, then I already knew what the biggest correlation would be for feeling relaxed about time: not working full time, or not having children. I am hoping to find other things. I really appreciate your interest in my books 🙂