Morality or equality? Maternal thinking and the social agenda

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Maternalist ideologues believed that importing the ideal qualities of motherhood -- care, nurture, and compassion -- to the civic agenda would counteract the indifference and corruption of commercial interests. In the present day, we still to look to women to warm up the cold edges of modern life: In the workplace, we depend on women to infuse the competitive business model with the values of connection and cooperation. On the home front, women continue to bear the standard of “expressive” leadership -- the art of putting words to feelings and sustaining the familial and social bonds which enrich intimate life. Mothers are called upon to act out the receptive side of human relationship -- tenderness, patience, sharing, empathy, tolerance -- as part of their daily routine. And as far as the future of America is concerned, our society -- with very few exceptions -- still counts on mothers to serve as the enlightened custodians of the next generation of competent citizens.

The power of mother love still delivers substantial political clout. In recent years, maternalist thinking has been used to build momentum for a broad spectrum of social causes, including gun control, hazardous waste, drunk driving, preventing sexual predation of children, environmental protection, restricting pesticide use, curing chronic disease, expanding access to mental health treatment, restricting children’s access to offensive pop music, reducing sex and violence in the media, and working for world peace. While individual campaigns typically draw supporters with a specific self-interest or outlook, they all share a common goal -- to eradicate or control a potential source of harm to children. (4)

Agitating for services and legislation to protect the health and safety of children and the world they will inherit is not only worthy -- it is necessary, particularly in a rich nation which has demonstrated an astonishing disregard for the welfare of its youngest citizens.(5) And it's undeniable that the well-being of individual mothers can be tragically and irreversibly altered by the preventable harms and random accidents that befall children; the mobilizing potential of maternalism rests not so much on a commonly-held ethic of care as it does on every mothers’ ability to imagine the emotional devastation of child loss. But maternalist ideology also relies on the culture-bound assumption that the public and private actions of socially responsible mothers are in all ways care-driven and child-centric. This leaves little room for the acceptance of an alternative ideology that suggests the full and normal experience of motherhood involves much more than a preoccupation with tending and mending the world for someone else.

In its most conservative representation, the maternalist ethic refuses to suffer any intrusion of the mother’s identity into her commitment to activism – unless the mother’s identity happens to be single-mindedly directed toward serving others. This exaltation of selfless motherhood as a political tool is strikingly evident in a 2002 book by Jacqueline Hornor Plumez, PhD, Mother Power: Discover the Difference That Women Have Made All Over the World.(6) Plumez’s primary subjects are mothers who have valiantly transformed their personal hardships into successful campaigns for social progress -- which is all well and good; the personal fortitude of some of the activists profiled in Mother Power is genuinely inspiring. However, the author makes it patently clear that tapping into “mother power” depends on the complete suppression of the needs and interest of the mother as an individual.(7)

Maternalism elevates the routine sacrifice and emotional investment of motherhood to a higher moral plane – a strategy that gives mothers both the personal courage and collective authority to branch out as social actors on the political stage. But a growing group of contemporary mothers insist they are entitled to a life that is not entirely defined by selfless service -- that they are not just mothers, but women, too, who have every right to the opportunities and responsibilities of full citizenship. Can a maternalist agenda possibly tolerate this upstart perspective of motherhood and social justice?

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On October 29, 2002, the Barnard College Center for Research on Women co-sponsored a half-day symposium on “Maternal Feminism: Lessons for a 21st Century Motherhood Movement”. The event -- which was hubristically scheduled to fall on the anniversary date of the founding of NOW -- was organized by Enola Aird, Director of the Motherhood Project at the Institute for American Values, a conservative think tank and research group concerned with reversing the decline of marriage and the traditional family (read the MMO interview with Enola Aird).

In addition to a panel discussion highlighted by a mildly contentious exchange between Kim Gandy, president of NOW, and Sylvia Ann Hewlett, the author of A Lesser Life: The Myth of Women’s Liberation in America, (8) the symposium was used as a forum to roll out the Motherhood Project’s formal manifesto, the Call To A Motherhood Movement. “We, women who nurture and care for children, we who mother, call all mothers to a renewed sense of purpose, passion, and power in the work of mothering,” reads the opening statement of the Call. “We call mothers to a new commitment to building a movement aimed at honoring and supporting mothers and mothering… We call for a motherhood movement to ensure the dignity and well-being of children.”

Both the impassioned rhetoric of the Call to A Motherhood Movement and its focus on recruiting mothers for political activism to promote the welfare of children are classically maternalist in approach. This is predictable, since both Aird and The Motherhood Project have a history of commitment to children’s advocacy (Aird is the former director of the Children’s Defense Fund’s Violence Prevention Campaign and previously served as the acting director of the CDF’s Black Community Crusade for Children; in 2001 The Motherhood Project launched a national protest of product advertising targeted to children).

Aird and her colleagues on the Mothers’ Council (an informal group consiting of signatories of the Call to A Motherhood Movement) invoke the familiar dichotomy of public indifference/private compassion by emphasizing the contrast between the values of “the money world” -- a heartless landscape of uncontrolled materialism and individualistic greed --and “the mother world:” an insulated comfort zone of care, commitment and connection. The Call does stress the importance of mothers’ rights and favors equality between men and women in both public and private spheres, but social action to improve conditions for children and families is its central aim.

Members of the Mothers’ Council are not alone among mothers’ advocates who identify the fundamental incompatibility of the individualistic ethic embedded in the free market system with the fluid reality of human feeling and need as a source the contemporary motherhood problem.(9) However, the subtext of the Call to a Motherhood Movement seems to suggest that mothers have a superior claim to the moral capital of care and compassion. By identifying the emotional and relational priorities of intimate life as part of “the mother world”, The Mothers’ Council implies that mothers have a more advanced sensibility to apply to rescuing our society from the post-modern scourge of capitalism gone wrong. To incorporate a less gendered agenda into the platform for a “motherhood” movement, we must begin by asking mothers and others to enter into a serious dialog about why the boundaries between “the money world” and “the mother world” are so culturally and politically durable.