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Morality or equality? Maternal thinking and the social agenda notes |
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(1) Why Women Should Vote, Jane Addams, from the “The Blue Book”; women’s suffrage, history, arguments and results, Frances Maule, editor, 1917. The adaptation of maternalist rhetoric by suffrage activists offers an interesting opportunity to examine the philosophical contrast between the maternalist agenda and that of early women’s rights supporters. Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Seneca Falls Declaration (Declaration of Sentiments, 1848) makes no reference to any relationship between the demand for women’s rights and the social significance of the maternal role. In an 1892 address before the Committee of the Judiciary of the United States Congress, Stanton proclaimed: “it is only the incidental relations of life, such as mother, wife, sister, daughter, that may involve some special duties… In the usual discussion in regard to women’s sphere, [influential men]… uniformly subordinate her rights and duties as an individual, as a citizen, as a woman, to the necessities of these incidental relations… In discussing the sphere of man we do not decide his rights as an individual, as a citizen, as a man by his duties as a father, a husband, a brother or a son.” But by the late 1910s, even the more radical factions of the women’s rights movement had co-opted maternal imagery to advance their cause, and posters supporting women’s enfranchisement were printed with illustrations of adorably plump babies urging “votes for our mothers”. (2) See Molly Ladd-Taylor, Mother-Work: Women, Child welfare and the State, 1890-1930 (1995) and “Bad” Mothers: The Politics of Blame in Twentieth-Century America, Molly Ladd-Taylor and Lauri Umansky, editors, 1998. (3) For more about the connection the influence of maternalist ideology and New Deal policy, see William H. Chafe’s The Paradox of Change: American Women in the 20th Century, 1991. (4) In her essay on the Million Mom March for The Nation, Katha Pollit writes: “Under the rubric of maternalism, women can fight for kids but not for themselves. Thus there was no mention at the march of the thousands of women killed and injured each year with guns.” Moms to NRA: Grow Up!, June 2000. (5) Rates of child poverty and infant mortality in the U.S. are the highest of all wealthy nations. Of course, children do not live in poverty because they lack access to good jobs with good pay; they live in poverty because their mothers lack access to jobs with good pay, and/or the training that would qualify them for employment that pays a living wage. Infant mortality is high in populations that lack access to good pre- and post-natal care; for affluent white families, the rate of infant mortality is as low as that in the Nordic countries, which have the lowest rates of infant mortality in the world. (6) The epigraph to the first chapter of Mother Power is a quotation from Introduction to Psychology by Clifford T. Morgan: “Even in an animal as lowly as the rat, such an ‘unselfish’ drive as the maternal drive (to protect her pups) can be stronger than the so-called ‘self-preservation’ drives of hunger and thirst”. I found this an incongruous example of the power of maternal instinct, given that the tendency of mother rats to eat their young in conditions of overcrowding is well documented. (Mother Power: Discover the Difference That Mothers Have Made All Over The World, Jacqueline Hornor Plumez, PhD, 2002). (7) In chapter seven of Mother Power, Plumez recounts the story of Yolanda Manuel, mother of Sherrice Iverson, a seven-year-old girl who was raped and murdered in the bathroom of a Nevada casino. During the course of the crime, a friend of the perpetrator was aware the assault was taking place but did not notify security. Manuel’s outrage that the second youth could not be held legally responsible for his inaction led to a campaign to pass bill that would allow prosecution of any by-stander who witnessed the sexual assault of a child without informing the police. By Plumez’s account, Manuel received an outpouring of support, and the bill was signed into law in the state of California. Plumez notes that “similar laws would probably have been passed around the country and on the federal level” if Yolanda Manuel had not sacrificed “the moral high ground” by filing a wrongful death suit against the casino. It seems a mother is only qualified to be a “spiritual leader” of the crusade to protect children if she is willing to forgo her legal right to seek damages. (8) An audio version of the entire panel discussion from the symposium is available on The Motherhood Project Web site. (9) See Motherhood and its discontents on this Web site. (10) For a number of married mothers with young children, the most immediate agent of their personal discontent is likely to look a lot like their husband, which does not bode particularly well for marital harmony. Although men are participating more consistently in child-rearing and household tasks than they were a few decades ago, the division of domestic labor is not yet equally shared by most couples with young children and recent studies show that women still handle the majority of the most time-sensitive demands of family life. The challenge of the mothers movement is to sensitize women to the larger cultural context that constrains men and women’s work – not to justify the existing gendered division of care work, but as way to motivate women to take action for change on their own behalf. (11) It is undisputed that motherhood was rejected, and in a few cases vilified, by some early radical feminists as both the symbol and structure of women’s oppression -- for an overview of early Second Wave attitudes about mothering and motherhood, see Lauri Umansky’s Motherhood Reconceived: feminism and the legacy of the sixties (1996). More recently, feminist theory has greatly informed interdisciplinary studies of the consequences of care work on women’s equality and the philosophy of social justice and a political ethic of care. The titles are far to numerous to list here, but a few are particularly relevant to the work of the mothers’ movement: Child Care and Inequality: rethinking carework for children and youth, Francesca M. Cancian, Demie Kurz, Andrew S. London, Rebecca Reviere and Mary C. Tuominen, editors (2002); Care Work: Gender, Labor and the Welfare State, Madonna Harrington Meyer, editor (2000); Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency by Eva Feder Kittay (1999); and Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care by Joan C. Tronto (1994). (12) A recent statement on the MOTHERS Web site read “we believe that correcting the economic disadvantages facing caregivers is the big unfinished business of the women’s movement.” A more elaborate detraction of the Second Wave’s perceived failure to acknowledge the motherhood factor comes from Sylvia Ann Hewlett, who wrote a pair of poorly-received books on the subject (A Lesser Life: The Myth of Women’s Liberation in America, 1986, and Creating A Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children, 2002). To put this in a fair perspective, feminist mothers writing about feminism describe their sense of alienation from a movement galvanized by the activism of young women whose political and professional achievements were unfettered by obligations to children and family, including Jane Lazarre (The Mother Knot, 1976) and Anne Roiphe (in her 1996 memoir, Fruitful: A Real Mother in the Modern World). (13) Feminist theorist Nancy Fraser writes that “Feminists have so far associated gender equity with either equality or difference, where “equality” means treating women exactly like men and “difference” means treating women differently insofar as they differ from men. Theorists have debated the relative merits of these two approaches as if they represented two antithetical poles of an absolute dichotomy.” According to Fraser’s analysis, “difference” proponents argue that the equality model of feminism requires women to conform to social and cultural structures based on a masculine norm, which disadvantages women and imposes “distorted standards on everyone,” while “egalitarians” hold that the difference approach runs the risk of institutionalizing stereotypes about feminine behavior and qualities and would ultimately confine women within existing gender divisions. Fraser remarks that both positions are based on legitimate logic, but concludes that “Neither equality or difference …is a workable conception of gender equality”. Gender Equity and the Welfare State: A Postindustrial Thought Experiment in Democracy and Difference, Seyla Benhabib, ed, 1996, Princeton University Press. Grateful acknowledgement to Carla Eastis for bringing this article to my attention. |
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