Mothering

Ideology, Experience, and Agency

Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang, Linda Rennie Forcey, Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang, Linda Rennie Forcey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780415907767
• eBook ISBN: 9781134953073
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume presents a variety of unique perspectives on mothering as a socially constructed relationship, assessing many of the political, legal and cultural debates surrounding the issue.

1 Social Constructions of Mothering: A Thematic Overview

DOI: 10.4324/9781315538891-1

Ordaining a woman as a priest is as impossible as me having a baby … it’s not going to change.

Auxiliary Bishop Austin Vaughan of New York, quoted at a meeting of Catholic bishops on role of women in the Church.¹

Abortion rights; the ethics of reproductive technology; children’s right to “divorce” parents; the establishment of maternity and family leave policy; requiring workfare for welfare recipients; women’s entry into the priesthood: some of the most heated social and political debates taking place in late-twentieth-century America turn out to revolve around disputed meanings of mothering and motherhood in contemporary society. These disputed meanings lead to different orientations toward such fundamental questions as: Is mothering women’s primary and sole mission and chief source of satisfaction, or one of many roles and sources of satisfaction? Is women’s fate tied to their biological role in reproduction, or is biology only a minor factor? How much significance should we place on pregnancy and childbirth as putting women in a unique position that justifies special treatment?

Opposing orientations to these questions lie at the heart of the national debate over abortion. Kristin Luker’s interviews with activists in the right-to-life and pro-choice movements revealed that these women’s positions on abortion were rooted not just in their differing beliefs about the embryo–as unique individual or as fetus–but in their divergent definitions of motherhood. The pro-life position grew out of a conviction that women were bound by their biological roles, and that motherhood should be women’s sole mission and source of gratification. In contrast, pro-choice women’s position grew out of a conviction that women were not or should not be subject to the dictates of biological reproduction, and that motherhood was one of many roles, “a burden when defined as the only role.”²

In a similar vein, contending ideas about the significance of motherhood in delimiting women’s place in society are central to debates over whether institutions should be required to make special accommodations for women because of their unique responsibility for bearing and caring for children. Feminist lawyers took opposing sides in a case brought by an employer challenging a California law requiring employers to provide pregnancy and maternity leave. Lawyers at Equal Rights Advocates, pioneers in the fight against sex discrimination, filed a brief in the Supreme Court supporting special treatment for women, saying it was valid to recognize “the real differences in the procreative roles of men and women.” The sex discrimination and reproductive rights staff at the American Civil Liberties Union filed a brief on the other side, opposing special treatment for women, arguing in part that pregnancy should be treated as one of a number of temporary disabilities warranting accommodation by employers.³ This position reflected the belief that codifying “difference” would work against women, since historically, women’s capacity for bearing children has been the rationale for excluding them from public roles and high-paying jobs.⁴

Another case of controversy over the issue of special policy for mothers was sparked by an article in the Harvard Business Review proposing that employers establish a so-called “mommy track,” a separate, slower, career track for women who “want to participate actively in raising their children.” The author, Felice Schwartz, claimed her proposal would expand opportunities for women by allowing them to combine mothering and careers. Her conception at least avoided lumping all women together as mothers or potential mothers by distinguishing between “mothers” and other (presumably career-oriented) women. Still, most feminists felt that legitimating special treatment of women labeled “mommies” served to regularize women’s secondary status in the labor market. Moderate observers pointed out that the proposal simply recognized the reality that women still carry the primary responsibility for parenting.⁵

As these examples show, mothering is contested terrain in the 1990s. In fact, it has always been contested terrain. However, a particular definition of mothering has so dominated popular media representations, academic discourse, and political and legal doctrine that the existence of alternative beliefs and practices among racial, ethnic, and sexual minority communities as well as non-middle-class segments of society has gone unnoticed. As Third World women, women of color, lesbians, and working-class women began to challenge dominant European and American conceptions of womanhood, and to insist that differences among women were as important as commonalities, they have brought alternative constructions of mothering into the spotlight. The existence of such historical and social variation confirms that mothering, like other relationships and institutions, is socially constructed, not biologically inscribed.

As a working definition, I propose looking at mothering as a historically and culturally variable relationship “in which one individual nurtures and cares for another.”⁶ Mothering occurs within specific social contexts that vary in terms of material and cultural resources and constraints. How mothering is conceived, organized, and carried out is not simply determined by these conditions, however. Mothering is constructed through men’s and women’s actions within specific historical circumstances. Thus agency is central to an understanding of mothering as a social, rather than biological, construct.

The notion of mothering developed here is closely linked to the notion of gender that has emerged in feminist theorizing in the humanities and social sciences. Gender is used to refer to socially constructed relationships and practices organized around perceived differences between the sexes. Using gender as a central analytic concept, feminist scholars have documented the ways relations of gender are played out in structural and institutional domains, such as the economy, family, and political and legal systems, as well as in social interaction and identity.⁷ Their studies have challenged notions of womanhood and manhood as inherent qualities linked to biological sex by showing that relationships between men and women, and definitions of womanhood and manhood, are continually constituted, reproduced, changed, and contested.⁸

Mothering and gender are closely intertwined: each is a constitutive element of the other. As R. W. Connell notes, social relations of gender are fundamentally “organized in terms of, or in relation to, the reproductive division of people into male and female.”⁹ Perhaps because the gendered allocation of mothering appears to flow inevitably from the division based on reproductive function, mothering–more than any other aspect of gender–has been subject to essentialist interpretation: seen as natural, universal, and unchanging. Indeed, for most of the twentieth century an idealized model of motherhood, derived from the situation of the white, American, middle class, has been projected as universal. In this model, responsibility for mothering rests almost exclusively on one woman (the biological mother), for whom it constitutes the primary if not sole mission during the child’s formative years. The corollary view of children is that they require constant care and attention from one caretaker (the biological mother).

This collection of articles documents the existence of diverse, often submerged, constructions of mothering that have coexisted alongside this dominant model. I wish to stress that these constructions, like constructions of gender to which they are integral, take form not just in the realm of ideas and beliefs, but importantly in social interactions, identities, and social institutions. The emphasis of this volume is on variations within nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. cultures. Focusing on this narrow range within the global context allows a relatively fine-grained picture of the tense, contested, and dialectical relationship between dominant and alternative constructions. The authors bring a variety of disciplinary perspectives to bear: sociology, anthropology, history, literature, political science, and ethnic studies. The materials and approaches are diverse, but taken together the articles highlight several recurrent themes that arise from feminist analysis of mothering.

To set the larger context for these papers, I will organize my discussion around five themes or issues. I will describe each issue, review some of the feminist literature addressing it, and discuss how particular articles in this collection contribute to its explication. The questions that underlie this essay and the collection as a whole are: How does looking at mothering as a socially constructed, historically specific relationship redirect our attention to new issues? How does this approach change the ways we think about women and about caring?

Challenging Universalism: Diversity in Mothering

In order to free women from the inevitability of current mothering arrangements, feminists have had to challenge theories that tie women’s position to biological imperatives. Feminist writers have attempted to develop theories that locate the origins of the seemingly universal pattern of women mothering in social, rather than biological, sources. The most influential of these writers is Nancy Chodorow. Chodorow uses psychoanalytic object relations theory to develop a compelling account of how the pattern of female mothering is transmitted by the very experience of being mothered by women. She argues that an orientation toward nurturance and care becomes part of women’s personality because the process of identity formation in girls takes place through continuous attachment to and identification with the mother. In contrast, boys develop a sense of self as independent and distinct from others because they must construct a male identity by a process of separation from and contrast with the mother.¹⁰ Also influential in theorizing about motherhood without resorting to natural or biological explanations is Sarah Ruddick’s attempt to account for mothers’ concern for nurturing and protecting children. She does so in two ways; by attempting to show that mothers’ nurturance involves higher philosophical thought (as opposed to instinct), and by arguing that their focus on protecting and preserving life, fostering growth, and molding an acceptable person grows out of “doing mothering”–that is, maternal practice. The implication is that anyone who engages in mothering would develop these same concerns.¹¹

Both theorists have been attacked for universalizing from a narrow social and class base of experiences–presumably their own. I don’t want to engage in what has become an overblown debate, even though the issue is important.¹² What is interesting for the purposes of this volume is the following irony: both Chodorow and Ruddick decry the negative outcomes of saddling mothers with primary responsibility for mothering (for example, boys becoming sexist in the process of distancing themselves from what is feminine), and they catalogue major benefits of men and others sharing in mothering (for example, men becoming more concerned with preserving life.) Yet the message that many readers seem to take away is that the arrangement of “biological mother as sole and exclusive caretaker” is universal, and that the issues that all mothers face are identical. The problem for those attuned to the concerns of non-dominant groups is that the analyses do not sufficiently “decenter” the dominant model. In trying to build a general or “universal” theory, the authors’ focus remains centered on a single, normative pattern, with variation relegated to the margins.

What may be needed to emphasize the social base of mothering is attending to the variation rather than searching for the universal, and to shift what has been on the margins to the center. Women scholars of color have mounted the most serious challenges to universalistic theory. They have documented the different historical experiences of communities of color, and therefore the differing cultural contexts and material conditions under which mothering has been carried out. Because of varying historical experiences, these communities have constructed mothering in ways that diverge from the dominant model

Bonnie Thornton Dill has argued that historically African-American, Latina, and Asian-American women were excluded from the dominant cult of domesticity. Because they were incorporated into the United States largely to take advantage of their labor, there was little interest in preserving family life or encouraging the cultural and economic development of people of color; people of color were treated as individual units of labor, rather than as members of family units.¹³ My own study of the labor histories of African-American women in the South, Mexican-American women in the Southwest, and Japanese-American women in California and Hawaii revealed that these women’s value as cheap labor–especially as domestic workers in white households or in lower-level service work in institutional settings–usually took precedence over their value as mothers. Thus they were not expected or allowed to be full-time mothers; nor did their circumstances allow them even to harbor the illusion of a protected private haven. Women had to move back and forth constantly between “public” and “private” labor, since economic provision for the family was an expected part of mothering. In turn, responsibility for mothering often had to be shared with other family members or other women in the community. Mothering or caring was not seen as exclusively women’s work, and the boundaries of domestic cooperation were more expansive than that encompassed in the notion of the private household.¹⁴

Shared mothering has been characteristic of African-American communities since slavery. This tradition continues in many contemporary African-American communities.¹⁵ Carol Stack’s and Linda Burton’s ethnographic study of low-income multigenerational African-American families across the United States between 1968 and 1990 (“Kinscripts: Reflections on Family, Generation, and Culture”) reveals that caring for kin is shared among male and female adults, elders, and children. Caring is reciprocal, so that members may be recruited (kinscripted) to take care of other kin who cared for them earlier; for example grandchildren are expected to migrate to take care of grandparents who raised them. Further, the timing of personal transitions is “scripted” by agendas negotiated collectively by all kin. For example, young, adolescent females may be encouraged to bear children and seek employment while their mothers are young enough to keep up with the physical demands of “mothering” grandchildren. Stack and Burton argue that African-American families have historically experienced issues that mainstream families have only recently become attentive to, such as combining work and family roles, single parenthood, and extended family relationships; therefore the kinscripts model is useful for studying many family forms existing in American society today.

Centering on the experiences of African-American women and other women of color can lead to new ways of looking at mothering, and can raise questions and issues different from those centering on dominant-culture women. In her chapter, “Shifting the Center: Race, Class, and Feminist Theorizing about Motherhood,” Patricia Hill Collins notes that much feminist theorizing about motherhood has failed to recognize diversity in mothering, and has projected white, middle-class women’s concerns as universal. She points out two problematic assumptions based on white, middle-class experience: first, that mothers and their children enjoy a degree of economic security, and second, that women have the luxury of seeing themselves as individuals in search of personal autonomy, instead of as members of communities struggling for survival. According to Collins, these assumptions have led white feminists to be concerned primarily about such issues as the effects of maternal isolation on mother-child relationships, all-powerful mothers as conduits for gender oppression, and the possibilities of an idealized motherhood freed from patriarchy. Collins proposes that focusing on the experiences of women of color reveals very different concerns: the importance of working for the physical survival of children and community; the dialectics of power and powerlessness in structuring mothering patterns; and the significance of self-definition in constructing individual and collective racial identity. Collins thus highlights the importance of race and class in differentiating women’s mothering experience.

In my own research on the racial division of labor among women, I explore the ways race and class hierarchy creates interdependence as well as difference between white, middle-class mothers and working-class ethnic mothers.¹⁶ The idea that the labor market is simultaneously segmented by race and gender, with different jobs being assigned to white men, white women, men of color, and women of color, is familiar. The idea that domestic labor, including mothering or caring work, is “women’s work” is also familiar. What may be less familiar is the idea that mothering is not just gendered...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Social Constructions of Mothering: A Thematic Overview
• I Challenging Universalism: Diversity in Mothering
• 2 Kinscripts: Reflections on Family, Generation, and Culture
• 3 Shifting the Center: Race, Class, and Feminist Theorizing About Motherhood
• 4 Diverted Mothering: Representations of Caregivers of Color in the Age of “Multiculturalism”
• II Ideology and the Construction of Motherhood
• 5 An Angle of Seeing: Motherhood in Buchi Emecheta's Joys of Motherhood and Alice Walker's Meridian
• 6 Look Who's Talking, Indeed: Fetal Images in Recent North American Visual Culture
• 7 Beyond Mothers and Fathers: Ideology in a Patriarchal Society
• III Decomposing Motherhood: Fusions and Dichotomies
• 8 Mothers are not Workers: Homework Regulation and the Construction of Motherhood, 1948–1953
• 9 Family Day Care Providers: Dilemmas of Daily Practice
• 10 Working at Motherhood: Chicana and Mexican Immigrant Mothers and Employment
• IV The Politics of Mothering: The Dialectics of Struggle and Agency
• 11 Mothering Under Slavery in the Antebellum South
• 12 Undocumented Latinas: The new “Employable Mothers”
• 13 Race and “Value”: Black and White Illegitimate Babies, 1945–1965
• 14 Biology and Community: The Duality of Jewish Mothering in East London, 1880–1939
• 15 Negotiating Lesbian Motherhood: The Dialectics of Resistance and Accommodation
• 16 Feminist Perspectives on Mothering and Peace
• Index
• List of Contributors