A recent newspaper headline – “Sorry Radley! These dated handbag brands will make you look mumsy – here’s where stylish A-listers and Royals are shopping instead” – reminded me of a word I despise: “mumsy”.
My list of words that make me want to throw things is varied and long, but “mumsy” is near the top. The quality of being mumsy means to be drab, homely or old-fashioned, essentially “motherly”. Something about the casual misogynistic contempt it carries makes me livid. So livid I might even use “that voice”. You know. The scary mum voice that turns misbehaving children in supermarkets into stone.
“Mumsy” crops up in fashion coverage, which in autumn is unduly focused on the new school-run “style rules”. Articles about how to look chic at the school gate and short-form videos about “what the cool mums are wearing” add to this feeling that the last thing you, as a mother, would want to appear as is what you actually are: someone’s mum.
Of course, it’s understandable, and totally normal, to not want to be entirely defined by your reproductive status. Few of us want our entire identities to be “mother”. I still remember the shock I felt when a health professional first referred to me as “Mum” instead of by my name. It can feel as though you have ceased to be a person in society’s eyes. Add to that the fact your body’s changed because you’ve made and birthed a whole human being, and that you are now responsible for that other human being’s every want and need, drastically limiting the time you have to attend to personal style and grooming, and it can feel hard to know who you are now.
These conflicting feelings are never a reason to deride mothers in general, though, or to act like “I’m not a regular mom, I’m a cool mom”. There’s a reason Amy Poehler’s comic Mean Girls catchphrase has proved so legendary. There’s something inherently ridiculous about working to deny something that you so irrevocably are and will always be. The harsh reality that dawns on you as you transition from not-mother to mother is that you are for ever changed. You can try to dress it up all you want, but the fact is that you’re someone’s mum now.
New theories of matrescence tell us that this change is a lot more complicated than suddenly wearing really naff jeans, although you might be doing that too (or be simply too sleep-deprived to give a toss that you’re wearing really naff jeans. Or using the word “naff”, which is probably also mumsy). The concept of mumsy changes according to the era you are living in. In the 1990s, all the mums wore high-waisted Levi’s 501s, which we even came to call “mum jeans”. This came to be co-opted by fashion brands, albeit using the slightly less mumsy sounding “mom”. I wouldn’t have been caught dead in mum jeans. What am I wearing now, as I type this? That’s right, a pair of vintage 501s. It all comes back round eventually. The teenagers I pass on the school run every morning would never.
I look at how their baggy jeans are soaking up the puddles and pigeon piss all the way up to their knees and am not nostalgic. This must have been the sort of zen that my own mum felt; I feel confident in my personal style. That doesn’t mean that fear of mumsiness doesn’t try to stalk us all regardless. The anxiety around this question is palpable on forums such as Mumsnet: what shape of jeans should we be wearing now? Are coloured trainers fashionable?
I’m not going to pretend that I don’t care at all, but I would think less of someone who uses the word “mumsy” about other women. I will never forget, long before I had a child myself, one writer I know saying of another that her work was “a bit mumsy”. The writer in question wrote brilliantly and hilariously about parenthood, and also about a lot of other things. I found the way that “mumsy” was used to reduce and deride her intelligence and the quality of her work deeply unpalatable. I also recall an editor saying that she hated seeing the word “mum” in print. I suppose she preferred the more literary sounding “my mother”, which has its place but, let’s be honest, it’s not how most of us speak.
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It made me realise that it isn’t just fashion, then, that is resistant to mumsiness but culture more generally, and that’s only going to change when mothers and the work they do are afforded the respect they deserve. As it stands, to become a mother is to not only be confronted with biological reality and structural sexism, but to somehow navigate this without dressing, writing or sounding too much like a mother. Perhaps, like the fashion writer Frankie Graddon, whose Substack’s strap line is: “I’ve had a baby, not a style crisis”, the solution is to simply be “Mum-ish”. Whatever. You can prise my 501s from my cold, dead hands.
