Soccer Mom

The phrase soccer mom generally refers to a married, middle-class, suburban women with children. Sterotypically, a soccer mom is viewed as driving her children to and from their soccer games in her minivan. Metaphorically, a soccer mom is a woman who is devoted first and foremost to her family's needs, and as a result, puts her children's desires and activities above her own, even if she also has a job. The primary descriptor of soccer moms is as harried, stressed women who are attempting to juggle both their domestic and professional responsibilities.

The term soccer mom originated in Susan Casey's 1995 Democratic campaign for the Denver City Council. When Casey was asked about the term a year later in the 1996 presidential campaign between Bill Clinton and Bob Dole, she insisted that she had no intention of gender stereotyping. Rather, Casey was simply trying to describe her dual responsibilities as an accomplished woman and mother and to suggest she could manage both. By 1996, however, soccer mom became the term Republican strategists used to describe what was believed to be a primary swing vote in the presidential campaign.

Soccer mom was also a very important political shift from the media discourse of Year of the Woman that dominated the 1992 presidential political campaign, to the “women as mothers” discourse that dominated the 1996 presidential campaign. In fact, this change between the presidential campaigns shifted media from discussing women as political power wielders (Year of the Woman) to discussing women as a group of swing voters defined primarily by their family and mothering obligations. In other words, there was an important shift from seeing women as accomplished public women—as well as mothers—to primarily as mothers, regardless of their roles or professional life roles. As a result, this shift also suggests a soccer mom is unquestionably a mother first, with all other roles as secondary.