The Political Uses of Motherhood in America

Cynthia Stavrianos

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138777354
• eBook ISBN: 9781317679189
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Ideologies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

As various contemporary groups use the language of motherhood to advance their political causes, maternal rhetoric has become very visible in the American political discourse of late. Yet while it has long been recognized that women have invoked their political status as mothers to organize and authorize their political action in the past, scholars have only just begun to examine the recent reemergence of this frame. This book describes the wide variety of political causes that mothers are organizing to address, and analyses whether ideologically conservative organizations are disproportionately represented among groups using motherhood to mobilize women. Stavrianos examines the use of maternal discourses in closer detail through a comparative case study of five groups using motherhood as their primary frame for collective political action: Mothers Against Drunk Driving, Million Mom March, Mothers Against Illegal Aliens, Mainstreet Moms Organize or Bust, and Mothers in Charge.

Scholars interested in women and politics, interest group politics, social movements, political behavior, women's studies, motherhood studies, and framing strategies will find this book noteworthy, as it adds to a growing body of literature exploring the use of motherhood as an emerging political frame, and to the interdisciplinary discussion of contemporary discourses of motherhood.

1
Introduction

“Rights, not roses!”

— slogan chanted by National Organization for Women protestors at the White House, Mother’s Day 1969

“The NRA is big and scary. But it can be beaten by mother power.”

— television personality Rosie O’ Donnell, Master of Ceremonies at the Million Mom March, Mother’s Day 2000

On August 26, 1970, tens of thousands of women took to the streets of New York City, Washington, DC, and dozens of other cities and towns across America to demand social and political change.¹ This “Women’s Strike for Equality” was organized by Betty Friedan, founder of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and author of The Feminine Mystique (1963), and timed to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment guaranteeing all American women the right to vote. The general objective of this march was clearly conveyed by the name of the action—women’s equality. Friedan and her sister strikers advanced three specific policy demands to realize this goal: free abortion on demand, equal educational and employment opportunities, and publicly provided day care to enable women with children to work outside the home.

While the goals were very serious, the day was full of political theater. In New York, demonstrators visited the headquarters of corporations whose advertising was seen as degrading to women to present them with ignominious “Barefoot and Pregnant Awards.” Marchers lampooned the constricting domestic roles women sought to leave behind by carrying placards that read, “Don’t Cook Dinner Tonight—Starve a Rat Today” and chanting, “Male chauvinists better start shakin’, Today’s pig is tomorrow’s bacon.” Another handmade sign read, “End Human Sacrifice, Don’t Get Married, Washing Diapers is Not Fulfilling.” The slogans crafted by the women protestors that day used a mix of humor, sarcasm, and audacity to draw attention to their message. The strikers were launching a concerted effort to secure equal rights. Though this effort involved a sharp critique of the domestic roles women were expected to play within their families, marchers made it clear that they were not simply airing their particular, personal grievances; they were participating in a mass movement for social and political equality. Indeed, when Friedan announced to the women assembled in New York City’s Bryant Park after their day long strike, “This is not a bedroom war. This is a political movement and it will change the politics,” the crowd responded with wild applause.

Nearly three decades later, on May 14, 2000, women again took to the streets of Washington, DC and at least seventy-three other cities and towns across the nation to demand change.² As was the case with the 1970 action, the date of this march was significant—it was Mother’s Day. Donna Dees-Thomases, the organizer of this action, symbolically chose this day to stage a Million Mom March (MMM) calling attention to the problem of gun violence in America. Although Dees-Thomases did not quite succeed in reaching the million mom mark, the turn out in Washington, DC alone was estimated at 750,000. As it had been some thirty years earlier, the day’s message was serious. Participants in this Million Mom March called specifically for stricter enforcement of gun control laws, mandatory built-in safety locks on guns, and background checks for all would-be gun purchasers. But unlike Friedan, the organizers of this march steadfastly insisted that they were not engaging in a political campaign. As Chaislee Crawford, Ohio Coordinator for MMM, succinctly put it, “This is not political. We are in this for one reason only: to keep our kids safe” (Pulfer 2000).

Whereas the women who marched for equality in 1970 chose symbols and language that highlighted their demands for equal rights and protested the constrictions placed on them by normative gender roles, the Million Moms suffused their demonstration with rhetoric and symbols that emphasized maternity and domesticity. In Los Angeles, marchers chanted, “Guns kill babies” to drown out the shouts of counterdemonstrators. At the main stage in Washington, DC, speakers invoked commonly used stereotypes of motherhood, telling listeners, “When moms get mad, watch out,” and “When you want something done, ask a mom.” Self-proclaimed children’s troubadour Raffi led the demonstrators in a sing-along of “This Little Light of Mine.” And when journalist Anna Quindlen asked the assembled audience, “Why should members of Congress listen to us?” the answer that was roared back by the crowd was not “because I vote” or “because Congress must represent the people.” Instead, the audience enthusiastically responded with the maternal cliché, “Because I said so!” Rather than chafing against the confines of motherhood and women’s domestic roles, these marchers seemed to be celebrating them and calling on the moral authority of motherhood to back their calls for stricter gun regulation.

These examples illustrate the use of very different rhetorical strategies for motivating collective action and calling for social and political change. The Women’s Strike for Equality encouraged the public to look at the common societal expectation that women ought to be primarily concerned with domestic and maternal duties in the home and interpret this as a problem. Strike organizers maintained that women deserved equal social, legal, and political rights and suggested specific policy remedies to facilitate this. In adopting this equal rights frame, Friedan and the larger women’s movement were clearly influenced by the ideals and strategies of the Civil Rights Movement, which had successfully been using this frame to mobilize collective action and call for political change for nearly a decade. Other constituencies also embraced this powerful frame, including Chicano/as, Native Americans, gays and lesbians, senior citizens, and the disabled. By the mid-1970s, the equal rights frame had not only become the dominant frame animating women’s political action, it had also become what movement scholars call a master frame, loosely uniting a number of streams of activism and marking them all as part of the political left (Snow and Benford 1992). This equal rights frame remains the dominant political frame underpinning women’s collective political action (Goss 2013; Wolbrecht 2000).

Given this context, it was remarkable that the Million Mom March did not adopt the equal rights frame to mobilize women. Instead, organizer Dees-Thomases placed a maternal frame around the issue of gun control. This maternal framing suggested that women, as mothers, should be especially attuned to the problem of gun violence because of the potential harm that guns could visit upon their children. MMM organizers encouraged women to embrace their identities as mothers or potential mothers, assert their moral authority, and perform their traditional maternal duty to protect their children. Congress, it was hoped, would listen to the mothers and pass gun control legislation because they said so.

After three decades, the American public had become accustomed to seeing women organizing under the banner of equality in pursuit of progressive goals. The apparent novelty of hundreds of thousands of women gathering in Washington in 2000 pushing strollers, carrying pink signs, and embracing motherhood to advance the quintessentially liberal cause of gun control no doubt contributed to the tremendous amount of media attention lavished on this protest. This progressive political use of motherhood was not unprecedented, however. Maternal frames had simply fallen into disuse by women on the left. As I discuss in greater detail in chapter two, the political use of motherhood has ebbed and flowed over the course of our nation’s history. In the early decades of the 1900s, progressive women won the vote and secured important social benefits in large part by highlighting their special status as actual or potential mothers and invoking the moral authority that mothers are afforded in American society (Baker 1984; Skocpol 1992). Women continued to employ maternal justifications for their collective political actions for several decades following the hard won suffrage victory of 1920, but by the 1960s use of this frame declined precipitously (Goss 2013). As the equal rights frame gained prominence, motherhood retained only limited political visibility primarily as a countermovement frame employed by conservative women opposing abortion rights (Rohlinger 2002).

The apparent resurgence of this frame invites us to consider the political potential of maternal frames in the contemporary context. Can calls for change couched in the rhetoric of motherhood once again be politically powerful, as they were in the early decades of the last century? This is the larger question this work was designed to address. To get to that point, I examine the contemporary use of motherhood as a frame for collective political action by considering a series of related empirical questions. Just how widespread is the political use of motherhood today? Are many groups actually drawing on maternal identities to authorize their political action, or is it the case that a few high profile uses of this frame have created the impression that political motherhood is enjoying a resurgence? Why do group founders choose to organize as mothers and employ maternal symbolism? What political issues are maternal frames being used to advance? Do we see evidence of this frame being a flexible one used in the service of a wide variety of political goals, or is it generally only adopted by groups working on causes traditionally categorized as women’s issues? Are groups pursuing liberal causes as likely to adopt motherhood as a frame for action as groups pursuing conservative ones? Does the content of maternal frames vary according to the ideological leanings of the group? That is, do organizations on the right of the political spectrum emphasize the same attributes of motherhood as do those on the left? Finally, should American women choose maternal framing strategies to advance their policy agendas? In the remainder of this chapter, I will outline the prevailing views concerning the efficacy of motherhood as a frame for collective political action in the modern era, before turning to a brief explanation of how I collected evidence to address the related empirical questions.

Perspectives on Maternal Collective Action Frames

Scholarly interest in the utility of motherhood as a frame for collective action has been building over the past several decades, but a consensus on the question of its efficacy has not emerged. Instead, we can characterize two dominant perspectives regarding the political potential inherent in the motherhood frame. The first offers a qualified yes to the efficacy question posed above; the second is decidedly more adamant in stating its affirmative response. To situate my own analysis, I consider each in turn.

Scholars positioned within the first of these perspectives see a sort of stealth agency in motherhood. On this view, maternal status can be invoked to provide political cover, enabling women to fly below the radar and be active public participants in contexts where their political activities would otherwise be difficult. Elsa Chaney documented this use of motherhood among women elected to public office in Chile and Peru in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Chaney found that these women were able to overcome very high cultural barriers to women’s political participation by portraying their governmental work “as an extension of their motherhood role in the family to the larger family of the municipio or the nation” (1979, 79). However, Chaney also observed that, in adopting a supermadre identity to authorize their political participation, women office holders remained confined within traditional gender boundaries and were expected to champion stereotypically feminine issues such as education, social welfare, and the arts.

A variant of this perspective sees motherhood as a shield, enabling women’s political participation in situations where it might be physically dangerous. Rita Noonan (1995) argues that Chilean women were able to protest safely and effectively against the repressive military rule of Augusto Pinochet by employing a maternal collective action frame and voicing their dissatisfaction with the regime as mothers. Marysa Navarro (2001) maintains that Argentine women used their maternal identities in a similar fashion to protest the military juntas that ruled the country from 1976–1983. During this time, women whose children had been “disappeared”—kidnapped and killed by the repressive regime—famously came together as the Madres de Plaza de Mayo (Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo) and publicly called for an end to junta rule. According to Navarro, it was motherhood that “empowered them to continue marching at a time when no public expression of dissent was allowed and to engage in other activity without risking being kidnapped, because mothers were not perceived as political subjects. Their actions were therefore politically invisible” (257, emphasis added).

The second, more recent strand of scholarship sees motherhood as a more unequivocally empowering political stance for women. Annelise Orleck’s perspective is emblematic of scholars in this camp. Orleck argues that “the notion that mothers are by definition apolitical, isolated with their children in a world of pure emotion, far removed from the welter of politics and social struggle” is a myth, and one long overdue for shattering (Orleck 1997, 3). Instead, Orleck maintains that motherhood can be a radicalizing experience that provides women with both “the tools and inspiration to fight for radical change” (18).

Political scientists Kristin Goss and Michael Heaney (2010) also see real political power inherent in the skillful use of maternal frames. As a result of their multilayered comparative case study, Goss and Heaney conclude that framing strategies that evoke “maternalism, the belief that women have biological—perhaps psychological—differences from men that justify the distinct social roles that have been constructed around those differences” confer distinct advantages (29, emphasis in the original). Maternal frames, they assert, are especially effective in both mobilizing women and drawing media attention. Goss and Heaney also see maternal frames as quite flexible ones that can be used in a playful way alongside frames that emphasize equality and reclaim feminine stereotypes. By employing what they call a hybrid framing strategy that mixes the use of maternal, equality, and feminine-expressive frames, Goss and Heaney argue organizations can “foster a politically productive ambiguity about identity” that facilitates the participation of a diverse array of women (44). In an era in which it is increasingly difficult to motivate political action, motherhood may be seen as holding tremendous potential, then.

Scholars writing in the newly emerging subfield of motherhood studies maintain this promise has already been realized. Andrea O’Reilly, who has been in the forefront of the development of this line of research, argues that the last decade has seen the emergence of a distinct “motherhood movement” that has mobilized a large and diverse constituency of women (2011). Many other scholars and activists concur (DiQuinzio 2011; Kinser 2010; Stadtman Tucker 2004). For O’Reilly, this movement is a “vibrant and vast” one that has embraced a vision of empowered mothering that will enable its participants to deploy the “emancipatory potential of motherhood in the twenty-first century” (2011, 3).

Recent work on maternal framing in both America and abroad, then, sees maternal rhetoric as empowering and enabling of women’s agency. However, the foundational studies of maternal framing strategies emphasized that maternal rhetoric derived its political power by evoking deeply held cultural notions of the domestic, apolitical mother and rendering women “politically invisible.” Which view is more accurate in the contemporary American context? Are women, in fact, remaking motherhood and using maternal imagery and rhetoric to announce to the world, “I am mother, hear me roar!” as much recent scholarship American scholarship maintains? Or do women behave like wolves in sheep’s clothing when they don the mantle of motherhood, claiming they are just apolitical moms while preparing to launch a sneak attack on their political targets, as some of the earlier work on maternal framing implies? Ultimately, we must also ask: Does this distinction matter? If women are able to win policy victories by using maternal frames, should we even be concerned with whether they won as roaring lions or wolves masquerading as sheep? I will argue that we should.

Evidence Gathering

The first step in my empirical analysis of the political use of maternal collective action frames is to determine how widespread this usage actually is. This presents a challenge. Where does one find a comprehensive list of organizations that share a common framing strategy? Traditionally, scholars of politically active groups turn to data sources like the Encyclopedia of Associations, Washington Information Directory, and Washington Representatives Directory, which are all searchable by many categories, including the subject of the group’s interest, but certainly not by the rhetorical choices the group makes. These otherwise excellent resource tools have a number of other limitations for the purposes of this study, chief among them that they do not index small organizations. To collect information pertinent to my question, then, I needed to find a different data source and an alternative search method. (The methodology and data sources used for this research are described more fully in chapter three.)

I used the GuideStar digitial database to assemble the sampling frame for this study. GuideStar collects data on all tax-exempt organizations in the United States that file IRS Form 990 or one of the variants in this series. IRS form 990 is an informational return that most tax-exempt groups operating in the United States are required to file annually to retain their tax-exempt status. The amount of information that groups must provide varies according to their gross receipts, but all but the smallest groups are required to confirm some basic information yearly, including the organization’s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Uses of Motherhood in American Politics
• 3 Motherhood Makes Strange Bedfellows: An Overview of Politically Active Mothers Groups
• 4 Origins of Action: Founding Motivations
• 5 Grieving Mothers, Anchor Babies, and Time-Out Chairs: Ideological Variation in the Political Uses of Motherhood
• 6 The Possibilities and Perils of Political Motherhood
• References
• Index