I happened to be watching the Today Show this morning (which I virtually never do) and heard that they’re doing a special report on the state of women in America. All well and good, I think as I’m watching the anchors describe what they’re going to be covering.

But then they mention something about the ways modern working wives and mothers’ lives differ from their own mothers. To illustrate the mothers we are supposedly so different from, they showed a bit of stock video of a June Cleaver-style, 1950s era mom.

There’s a demographic problem with this. Any woman born and raised in the 1950s would now be retirement-age and therefore, not the purported focus of the story. I’m 42 and when I think of my mother, I think of the 1970s when she, herself, was working as were many of her generational cohort. The silliness of the stereotype gets worse as you go down in age. I seriously doubt that very many 20-something women in 2009 had moms who wore a frilly apron daily, let alone who would have been filmed in black and white.

Our lives are certainly different from our mothers’, but it’s simplistic to say that it’s because we work and our mothers didn’t. That’s a ridiculous fallacy and it completely ignores the subsequent generations of women to enter the workforce. By doing this, the Today Show is perpetuating an image of women that should have died a natural death a long time ago. They’re presenting a dangerously idealized image of women that simply has no relevance in the 21st Century. Not only that, but they’re denigrating my mother’s generation, mine, and anyone else’s who could have grown daughters by implying that this is the image people should have of us.

My mother was *not* June Cleaver and neither am I.