Soccer Moms

The term soccer mom generally refers to a married, middle-class suburban women with children. Literally, 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. In the early 1980s, the term soccer mom was used by mothers who were raising money for their children's soccer team.

However, the term gained media prominence in Susan Casey's 1995 Democratic campaign for the Denver City Council. When Casey was asked about the term after it became introduced a year later in the 1996 presidential campaign between Bill Clinton and Bob Dole, she insisted that she meant no gender stereotype. 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. Republican strategists, in fact, believed that part of the reason why soccer moms needed to be reached [Page 1368]was because they were just too busy, too “harried,” with working and mothering to have time to pay attention to politics. Thus, then and now, the primary description of soccer moms is stressed women who are attempting to juggle both their domestic and professional responsibilities.

The soccer mom was also a very important political shift from the news discourse of Year of the Woman that dominated the 1992 presidential political campaign to “women as mothers” that dominated the 1996 presidential campaign. In fact, this change between the presidential campaigns shifted media from discussing women as political power wielders (as in 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 and mothers to primarily as mothers, regardless of their professional lives/roles. As a result, this shift also suggests a soccer mom is unquestionably a mother first, with all other roles as secondary. Consequently, the soccer mom worked to obscure and diminish women's public success in the service of seeing them most importantly as private women, whose primary work was as mothers in the home, even if a woman actually had a job.