I belong to a local mothers’ club, a group that arranges playgroups, hosts special events for kids and parents, and aggregates information about monthly happenings in the area in a newsletter it distributes to all members. Admission is open to anyone who can pay the dues ($35 a year), and women from all over the North Shore join, although the club bears the name of our town. There must be upwards of 300 members by now, so many that I know only a small portion, and in fact when I meet someone new I’m never sure whether they’re in the mothers’ club or not. What I’m getting at here is that this is hardly an exclusive group. There’s no secret handshake, no special members-only jacket, no blackball process. Yet about once a week I meet a woman who says she is hesitant to join the mothers’ club because she fears the other mothers will be “too snooty.”

Now, I’m not the rush chair for the mothers’ club, and I could care less whether you join or not. I do, however, hear this kind of characterization of “other mothers” all the time, both in real life and on the web. Women constantly express their distaste for “other mothers” who are too conventional, too cliquey, too materialistic, too snobby. This strikes me as the worst kind of reverse snobbism: “They’re all housebound suburban Stepford wives, whereas I…I’m an iconoclast who just happened to reproduce and was forcibly relocated to the suburbs by the Witness Protection Program.”

Hey, I’m as judgmental as the next person. There are mothers I want to hang with and those I don’t. I’m sure that there are women in the mothers’ club who are conventional, cliquey, materialistic, AND snobby. It’s a tiny minority, though. In fact it’s so tiny that I can’t really think of an example of a woman like this. Sometimes I see women at club functions who obviously know each other well and chit-chat volubly together, neglecting the newcomers in the group. Sometimes I see women like me who are so flummoxed by the dual demands of socializing and baby-minding that they can’t string together a coherent sentence and just sort of stare at the chit-chatting friends, unable to break in. There are no mean girls here, though. So from whence this disdain?

It smells a little like sexism to me. “Girls are catty,” “Women are too emotional to think rationally,” “Mothers are shallow thinkers”–these are messages meant to diminish us. Why should we buy into this bull? Why should we repeat it, at least without being really, really sure that we mean it? I mean, isn’t Linda Hirshman fulfilling this role more than ably?