“For
many generations it has been believed that woman’s place is
within the walls of her own home, and it is indeed impossible to
imagine the time when her duty there shall be ended or to forecast
any social change which shall release her from that paramount obligation…
if woman would keep on with her old business of caring for her house
and rearing her children, she will have to have some conscience
in regard to public affairs lying outside of her immediate household.
The individual conscience and devotion are no longer effective.”
– Jane Addams, Why Women Should Vote, 1917 (1)
Eighty-six years after Jane Addams implored
American mothers to apply their maternal sensitivity to the ballot
box, her reflections on the perpetuity of women’s
“paramount obligation” to home and family may be viewed
as either archaic or disturbingly prophetic. Perhaps Addams could not foresee
the churning of social forces in the latter half of the 20th century
that led to such a dramatic shift in attitudes about women’s
right to equality in both private and public life. However, when
it comes to women’s primacy in the matter of care work, Addams
was dead on -- we’ve yet to witness a meaningful transformation
of our cultural understanding about who, precisely, owns the “duty”
of attending to the health and well-being of the nation’s
children and families. Today, as in Addams’s day, we rely
on mothers -- above all others -- to perform this indispensable
social function.
The asymmetry of who
is held responsible for care in our society -- and the various
consequences that flow from that imbalance -- are compelling factors
in mothers’ latest quest for social change. Beyond that, the
philosophy that drives the contemporary mothers movement is the
product of a cultural climate that mingles the heady ambitions of
the women’s rights agenda with a popular idealization of motherhood
and family life that harks back to Jane Addams’s time. This
situation will inevitably lead to friction as movement organizers
work to build a broad coalition of supporters. One of the biggest
ideological hurdles ahead for the mothers movement can be summed
up by a single question: If we adhere to the notion that mothers
make their most critical contribution to society by putting the
needs of children and family before the fulfillment of their individual
interests, is it moral for mothers to demand social justice on their
own behalf?
1.
Jane Addams was at the forefront of a Progressive Era (1890 –
1920) social movement to improve the health, education and welfare
of American children -- a chapter of women-led activism historians
have described as the "maternalist" movement. Under the banner of “social
housekeeping”, professional reformers -- including Addams, Florence
Kelley and Julia
Lathrop -- inspired millions of middle-class wives and mothers
to concentrate their civic energies on lobbying for a cleaner, safer,
more humane world.
Addams and her colleagues
were intent on propagating a new political meaning for motherhood
based on cultural ideology that championed the emotional and social
value of women’s attachment to children and family. As men’s
public interactions became increasingly defined by the impersonal
conditions of market competition and waged work, women were venerated
for safeguarding the moral outposts of charity, compassion and care.
The maternalist reform ethic emanated from the popular notion that
women -- and most particularly mothers -- were uniquely qualified
to set their hands and hearts to righting the wrongs of an uncaring
society. To maternalist activists, the gateway to women’s
political empowerment lay not in breaching the status quo of male
dominance, but in engaging women’s sentimental fervor over
the innocence and vulnerability of children.
Rapid industrialization
and urbanization during the second half of the 19th century generated
a host of social ills that captured the attention of maternalist
reformers, including urban poverty, the unchecked spread of communicable
disease, exploitation of child labor, and high rates of infant mortality.
By organizing through a nation-wide network of voluntary groups
and social clubs, maternalist reformers coordinated a number of
successful campaigns for policy reform which included state-funded pensions for
abandoned and destitute mothers, reduced work hours for women, improved
health and safety conditions for women workers, the establishment
of a separate juvenile justice system, pure food and drug regulations,
laws restricting child labor, compulsory school attendance, public
kindergartens and the institution of a nationwide program to reduce
infant mortality and promote child health.
Women’s individual
and legal rights were not a high priority for the rank and file
of the maternalist reform movement (which included members of the
Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the General Federation
of Women’s Clubs, the National Congress of Mothers, and the
National Consumer’s League, among others), and reform leaders
initially encountered resistance to their commitment to supporting
women’s suffrage as part of the maternalist agenda. Maternalism
-- as practiced by early 20th century reformers -- was not a fundamentally
egalitarian philosophy. Its power to mobilize millions of homemakers
was based on spinning the cultural zeitgeist about women’s
responsibility for preserving the sanctity of the home into a greater and
more glorious cause.
Feminist historians have
argued that public policies and social services derived from the
maternalist reform ethic operated to institutionalize white, middle-class
standards of family life, which directly disadvantaged mothers from
working-class families and those of color. For example, records
indicate that the distribution of mother’s pensions (the precursor
of Aid to Families with Dependent Children) and decisions to remove
minor children from “unfit” homes were strongly biased
against families of color, and that mothers in impoverished families
were frequently excoriated by social service workers for seeking
paid employment outside the home.(2)
In codifying cultural
attitudes restricting women’s social agency to matters
of hearth and home, maternalist activities ultimately reinforced
the secondary political and economic status of all women. The maternalist
ethic also prescribed culturally and economically appropriate behavior
for fathers -- men were expected to go forth and earn a sufficient
wage to support their dependent families. Key social programs in
the U.S. -- which are still predominantly designed to protect the
economic security of the traditional breadwinner/homemaker household
-- can be viewed as a product of trickle-down from the maternalist
mentality of the early 20th century.
By 1920, nationally-coordinated
maternalist activism had experienced a significant decline. However,
influential women continued to support a social reform agenda shaped
by maternalist thinking, most notably Eleanor
Roosevelt and Frances
Perkins, who during her tenure as FDR’s Secretary of Labor
drafted both the Social Security Act and the Fair Labor Standards
Act.(3)
2.
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?
3.
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.
4.
As a dominant philosophy to guide the 21st century mothers’
movement, maternalism has a certain degree of surface appeal. It represents motherhood as a socially and politically significant
role, and places a high value on the everyday work of mothering.
By accentuating the importance of mothers’ attachment to children
and family and transmuting the strength of the emotional experience
of motherhood into a larger social cause, maternalism also offers
an option for political activism that need not actively challenge
the agents of mother’s internal discontent.(10) In its undiluted form, maternalism is only concerned with the
well-being of women insofar as they are the mothers, or potential
mothers, of at-risk children.
The social dilemmas that confront the current generation of mother activists are markedly
different than those which galvanized Progressive Era maternalists.
Issues of public health and child mortality, although still problematic,
are not nearly as pressing as they were in the early decades of the
20th century. The instability of modern marriage, the stagnation
of wages, the widening wealth and health gap, the changing corporate climate,
the entry of mothers of young children into the paid workforce, and
the prevalence of racial and gender discrimination have created
a full slate of problems that will – realistically -- require
a considerable investment of time, money and policy-making to resolve.
The categories of policy
reform under discussion by proponents of the new mothers movement
are utterly susceptible to a traditional maternalist model which
portrays mothers’ disproportionate responsibility for child-rearing
and homemaking as the combined result of women’s personal
preference and the natural order. Depending on how legislation
is conceptualized, provisions for paid parental leave and part-time
parity could improve options for combining work and family without
substantially altering the conditions that marginalize mothers
in the first place. Social Security credits for mothers who take
extended time out of the workforce to care for children might
reduce rates of women’s poverty in old age without adequately
addressing the complex interplay of cultural and economic factors
that contribute to women’s financial insecurity over the course
of a lifetime. Unless contemporary mothers’ activists keep
the goal of women’s equality squarely in their sights, “family-friendly”
policies will only function as a superficial overlay to a social
structure based on devaluing care work and those who do it.
A maternalistic mothers’
movement may be most attractive to mothers who are eager to improve
the world but are not yet prepared to probe the cultural and
political context of their personal experience. The sticky questions
about why our society expects so much of mothers and low-wage workers
when it comes to caring for others, and so little of everyone
else -- or how the obligations of care limit women’s freedom
of choice -- need not be answered to advance the maternalist agenda.
Mothers want public recognition for their role in the socially important
work of child-rearing, and few mothers would resent a proposal to
do some collective good on behalf of children anywhere or everywhere.
But framing mothers’ issues by politicizing their attachment
to children runs the risk of undermining mothers’ demands
for social and economic equality in their own right. We don’t
just owe it to our kids to make social change – we owe it
to ourselves.
5.
For good or ill, feminist thinking about motherhood and family has
not been especially consistent or clear cut.(11) The focus of the Second Wave agenda on advancing women’s
status by opening opportunities to paid employment has come under
fire from both liberal and conservative critics for underestimating
the significance of women’s care work both as a life experience
and a resilient barrier to gender equity.(12) Lingering objections based on theoretical disputes about the validity
of “difference” feminism also feed the reluctance of
mothers’ advocates to design their new movement around the
standard feminist philosophy.(13)
Reservations aside, the
feminist conviction that women’s capacity for personal and
political empowerment is inherently separate from any specific,
culturally-determined role -- such as “worker,”“wife”
or “mother” -- has provided an invaluable framework
for interpreting the political and cultural context of the social
and economic marginalization of mothers and the devaluation of care work.
But the nagging moral
question continues to pressure the formulation of an activist agenda
based on mothers’ rights and responsibilities. Even those
who reject the valorization of selfless motherhood as a smokescreen
for the exclusion of women from the true locus of power are subjects
of a culture that continues to define self-interest and motherhood
as manifestly irreconcilable. The desire for a life that allows
for the full expression of one’s identity and ability -- with
all the self-centered and urgent cravings that normally entails
-- is still considered the height of unmotherliness. The overriding
implication is that a woman can have a life of her own, or she can
have children -- but not both.
It may cause less discomfiture
– for individual mothers and society as a whole – to
take a stand that couples the welfare of mothers to the welfare
of children, and children and mothers may indeed live in a better
world as a result. But a child-centric approach
to a mothers movement is inadequate to untangle the messy knot of
the 21st century motherhood problem; to achieve that end, we must
cultivate the understanding that it is right and moral for mothers
to own and actualize a self-concept that is not exclusively dependent
on the attachment to children and family.
mmo : june 2003
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