Over
the last 25 years, the boundary between feminism—
the conviction that all women have a right to full social, economic
and political citizenship— and the individualistic ideology
of choice— a belief in self-determination and the
freedom of self-expression— has become exceptionally permeable. In
fact, in today’s market-oriented culture, the popular definition
of feminism (which the remarkable Katha Pollitt describes as “feminism
lite”) is typically summarized as a woman’s
right to choose. The trendy new mantra of “choice”
still fits its original application— to establish and preserve
women’s legal right to end an unwanted or unsafe pregnancy.
But it’s also summoned to settle such disputes as whether
or not “real” feminists wear lipstick and push-up bras,
undergo cosmetic surgery, change their last names when they marry,
or become stay-at-home moms. As Summer Woods writes for Bitch Magazine:
For many young feminists,
“choice” has become the very definition of feminism
itself— illustrated by the standard-bearing right to choose
abortion and supported by the ever-advertised notion that they
have choice in everything else in life as well. The cult of choice
consumerism wills us to believe that women can get everything
we want out of life, as long as we make the right choices along
the way— from the cereal we eat in the morning to the moisturizer
we use at night, and the universe of daily decisions, mundane
and profound, that confront us in between.
The lure of “empowerment”
through personal choice also resonates for those who are hesitant
to self-identify as feminists— and recent opinion polls show
that many egalitarian-minded women fall into this camp. Lately,
affluent mothers have turned to the language of “choice”
and “options” to justify their work-life arrangements—
whether they are employed full-time, part-time or remain at home
to care for their children. Yet the media’s recent focus on
highly-educated, mostly white, professional women who “choose”
to trade in their promising careers for full-time child-rearing
tends to overlook workplace practices, social conditions and cultural
forces that limit mothers’ occupational advancement and exacerbate
their inequality. When it comes to work and family, the flimsy rationale
of “choice” is most damaging when it obscures the legitimate
needs and concerns of mothers who are essentially “choiceless”
because they lack the resources that make family-friendly work “options”—
and many other life opportunities taken for granted by more privileged
women— possible.
Historian Rickie
Solinger, author of several critically acclaimed
books on reproductive politics in the United States, believes that
the substitution of “choice” for the more substantial
concept of “reproductive rights” has broad repercussions
for American mothers. In an era when effective contraception and
safe abortion are presumed to be universally available (although
as Solinger explains in Beggars
and Choosers: How the Politics of Choice Shapes Abortion, Adoption
and Welfare in the United States, federal
and state laws now limit poor women’s access to both), the
ideology of choice determines which mothers— and which children—
are viewed as “worthy” in the eyes of society. Making
“good choices” about whether or when to become a mother—
a concept, Solinger notes, that “evokes women shoppers selecting
among options in the marketplace”— is an opportunity
reserved for women with the right combination of social and economic
resources. Women without some or all of these assets— a degree
of maturity, a good education and/or marketable job skills, work
that pays a living wage, a husband or another dependable source
of supplemental income— can only make “bad” choices
by expressing their sexuality and fertility. “Bad” women
who make “bad” choices—who may be poor, young,
unmarried, women of color, or all of the above— have been
savagely stigmatized by politicians and pundits as selfish, uncaring
mothers whose illegitimate choices jeopardize the health and well-being
of their children and society as a whole.
The sharp separation
of mothers along race and class lines— a divide that determines
which women are valorized for their motherhood and which ones are
vilified for it— leads Solinger to pose a troubling question:
“Do Americans want motherhood to be a class privilege? A life
experience only available to middle class women?” The
MMO interviews Solinger about her work and the perilous intersection
of motherhood, race, class and choice.
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MMO: You’ve
worked with artists to create companion exhibitions for two of your
recent books, Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race
Before Roe v. Wade and Beggars and Choosers: How the Politics
of Choice Shapes Adoption, Abortion and Welfare in the United States.
Why did you decide to take this unique approach,
and how have the traveling exhibits contributed to changing awareness
about the intertwining issues of motherhood, race, and class?
R.
Solinger: I found my
career as a historian a little late in life. But once I finally
discovered my life’s work, I became passionately devoted to
combing the archives, reading old newspapers, scouring government
documents. I was very moved, unearthing voices and other details
that showed, for example, how laws that forbid females from controlling
their own bodies had shaped the lives of girls and women in the
United States. Right away, I knew it was important and meaningful
to find— and write about— politicians and other authorities
who claimed that some women produced “valuable” babies,
but that the babies of other women had no value and cost taxpayers
too much.
I was completely catalyzed,
writing about how and why different groups of women had different
reproductive experiences in the United States, and what race has
had to do with these differences. I wrote about how and why these
experiences changed over time. I wrote about how our recent past
has clarified the fact that women’s legal capacity to manage
their own bodies has always been key to their status as full citizens.
I felt relatively useful and fulfilled writing books about the politics
of fertility and the politics of motherhood.
But soon, as a fundamentally
political person, I began to think about the limited audience I
was reaching with my academic-style books. And then, at just about
this same time, I got the chance to be an Associate of the Rocky
Mountain Women’s Institute in Denver. Here was a chance that
changed my life. (And it’s worth noting that I was about 43
years old at this time— a great example of how wonderful life-changing
moments come along at many different and unexpected ages!) The group
of Associates in my year— a photographer, an installation
artist, a sculptor— decided to take up the inspired idea of
one of the artists, Kay Obering: that we should make a collaborative
piece of art, a room-sized installation based on my books — Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race before Roe v.
Wade (1992, 2000) and The Abortionist: A Woman Against
the Law (1994). This exhibition, “Wake Up Little Susie:
Pregnancy and Power before Roe v. Wade” opened in 1992 on
a university campus in Denver. Kay took up the job of keeping this
exhibition on the road. Over the next decade, she booked the show
into fifty-six college and university galleries, from Maine to New
Mexico, from Oregon to Florida.
In 2001, just before
my book, Beggars and Choosers: How the Politics of Choice Shapes
Adoption, Abortion, and Welfare in the United States was published,
Kay and I began to curate a new exhibition, “Beggars and Choosers:
Motherhood is Not a Class Privilege in America,” a photography
show including the work of many of the leading documentary photographers
in the United States. This show is meant to respond to the decades-long
string of ugly images of women who occupy the reviled categories:
women who we are meant to see as too young, too poor, too gay, too
disabled, too non-white, too foreign, to be legitimate mothers in
this country. These ugly images have been fed to media-consumers,
making a strong case that certain women have no business becoming
mothers. In the exhibition, women who appear to occupy the reviled
categories are there in the photographs clearly engaged in being
loving, attentive mothers— with strength, dignity, and determination.
The show makes a strong political point. And it presents an absolutely
stunning collection of photographs.
With this second show,
I am achieving a new goal, one that the “Susie” show
helped define: I am working with faculty and others on each campus
to find ways to use the exhibition while it’s on campus as
an occasion to “interrupt the curriculum.” “Beggars
and Choosers” has provided opportunities for new courses,
film series, symposia, lectures, and other events that press members
of the campus community to rethink what they “know”
about who makes a legitimate mother— and who decides. The
exhibition becomes an occasion for offering social justice perspectives
and good information about the experience of mothering in the United
States in the early twenty-first century. “Beggars and Choosers”
opened at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in 2002 and has
been traveling to campuses since then. The show is booked for the
next couple of years and will have a long traveling life.
Just recently, I have
started designing a new exhibition, “Interrupted Life: Incarcerated
Mothers in the United States.” (This is the first time I will
curate and travel a show on a subject that I haven’t first
written a book about. I am working with a great team of experts—
some of us will edit a book about incarcerated women.)
I am convinced that the
curriculum must be interrupted by reconsiderations of the causes
and consequences of incarceration policies in the United States.
With the new show, just as with the others, I am expressing my hope
(and intermittent faith) in democracy. I am using art together with
scholarship to enrich opportunities for public and institutional
education. I am contributing to the project of a well-educated citizenry.
MMO: In Beggars and Choosers,
you discuss American women’s experience of motherhood
as a “choice” in the context of abortion, adoption and
welfare. Why is the language of “choice” drowning out
the language of women’s rights and equality, and how does
the “politics of choice” legitimize the maternal status
of some women while erasing or invalidating that of others?
R. Solinger: I have thought
a lot about the limitations of “choice” as women’s
special guarantee. I worry about the consequences of this: the promise
that women can decide for themselves whether and when to become
mothers is expressed by the individualistic, market-place term,
“choice.” How can users of such a term avoid distinguishing,
in consumer-culture fashion, between a woman who can and a woman
who can’t afford to make a choice? I worry about what aspects
of “rights” are masked or lost when the language of
choice replaces the language of rights at the heart of women’s
special guarantee.
I use the term “rights”
to refer to the privilege or benefits of being a human — and
specifically a woman— in the United States. “Rights”
usually refers to privileges and benefits that a person can exercise
without access to any special resources, such as money. For example,
women and minorities in the United States have struggled for and
won “voting rights,” that is, the right of all citizens
over a certain age to vote, even if they have no money and no property,
and no other resources.
But “choice”
has come to be associated with possessing resources. Many Americans
believe that women who exercise choice are supposed to be legitimate
consumers, women with money. This is true even when the choices
they exercise, such as the choice to be a mother or the choice to
end a pregnancy, might be considered a very fundamental issue of rights.
Distinctions between
women of color and white women, between poor and middle-class women,
have been underscored in the “era of choice” partly
by defining some women (rich and middle class) as good choice-makers
and other women (the ones in the reviled categories) as bad choice-makers.
During a time when babies— and pregnancy itself— have
become ever more commodified, only “good” choice-makers
have a “legitimate” relationship to babies and motherhood.
The other woman are “illegitimate” mothers because without
resources, they are illegitimate consumers.
The use of the concept
“choice”— focusing on what a given, individual
woman decides to do, reproductively— encourages us to ignore
the social and economic context in which women are fertile. We look
at the individual woman and her choices while we ignore the content
and the consequences of public policies, and the impacts of racism
and very low minimum wage rates on the lives of women who may become
mothers. These factors arguably have a lot more to do with the quality
of any given woman’s mothering than her own “choices.”
We say that women who
can’t give their children all the advantages and have babies
anyway are selfish, and they are bad choice-makers. We say that
motherhood should be a privilege reserved for middle-class women,
the ones who can afford to be proper mothers. And suddenly we have
backed ourselves into a corner. Suddenly we are supporting an economic
test for motherhood in America. Is this appropriate in a democracy?
How many of us come from families in which a poor woman was our
grandmother or great grandmother, or our mother? A woman who, despite
her lack of middle class resources, was a wholly legitimate mother
and one whose fertility we would not have wanted to see degraded
or reviled.
MMO: You’ve suggested that the political intersection between
motherhood and “choice” positions women as consumers
and defines women’s fertility as a commodity which is either
desirable or undesirable depending on a woman’s marital and
economic status. What happens to mothers themselves when motherhood
is conceptualized as a privilege reserved for those who can afford
to enter the market? How does this contribute to the popular opinion
that middle-class mothers care more deeply for their children than
poor mothers do?
R.
Solinger: I’ll
respond to this question with an example. In working on this issue—
who is a legitimate mother in the United States, and who decides?—
I learned some things I didn’t expect to learn. For one thing,
I came to understand a lot about how adoption works. This wasn’t
a subject I’d set out to learn about. But in studying how
a woman’s economic class— her access to resources, and
her race— structure her “right” to be a mother,
I stumbled into the domain of adoption.
I learned that ever since
adoption became a mainstream practice in the United States, in the
mid-to-late 1940s, the girls and women most likely to surrender
their children (in this country and around the world) have always
been among the most profoundly resourceless females wherever they
live— because of their non-marital sexual shame, because of
their poverty, or for some other reason.
In the 1970s, some women
in the United States were more able than those in earlier eras to
achieve degrees of economic self-sufficiency. And with legal contraception
and legal abortion, many women could make a greater number of reproductive
decisions in their own interests. For these reasons among others,
white women who got pregnant without having husbands stopped giving
up their babies for adoption, even when their parents and clergymen
and teachers said they should. Girls who would have been sharply
pressed to give up their “illegitimate” babies just
a few years earlier (“Without a husband, you are not a mother!”),
drew on their new economic and reproductive autonomy and rejected
that pressure. They kept their babies and inaugurated the new status:
single mother.
By the early 1970s, there
were hardly any more white babies available for adoption in the
United States. So potential adopters turned to other resourceless
populations of women: Colombian, Peruvian, Chinese, Korean, Indian.
The poorest women from the poorest countries in the world. North
Americans and Europeans looking for children to adopt typically
defined their project as part the search for a child to “complete”
a family, and partly as a way to rescue a child from destitution.
Generally however, potential adopters did not and do not speak about
the woman who gave birth to the child. The birthmother is usually
effaced in discussion about adoption.
Adopters experience their
own intense desire for a child and their own intense attachment
to the child they select for adoption. But they rarely imagine—
or publicly discuss— the birthmother’s capacity for
intense attachment to the same child, even though she is the one
whose body delivered the child.
I have become convinced
that many (most?) middle class Americans have a hard time imaging
that a poor mother loves and wants her children as much as a middle
class woman does. Middle class adopters most typically believe that
they have the (morally upright) choice to adopt. They are able to
believe in this “choice” in part because they make themselves
blind to the fact that their “choice” depends completely
on the choicelessness of anothe woman.
MMO: By
situating child-rearing and care-giving as honorable, socially productive
work, welfare rights activists in the 1970s claimed a right to public
assistance based on their maternal status. This logic is strikingly
similar to that used by the mostly white, mostly middle-class supporters
of the emerging mothers’ movement to frame their demands for
public policy reform. Yet some of the top action items of the new
mothers’ advocates— such as eliminating the tax penalty
on secondary earners and part-time parity— may have a limited
effect on relieving the hardships of low-income single mothers (others
issues on the movement’s agenda, such as enforcing equal pay
regulations, flexible workplace policies, paid parental leave and
paid sick leave for all workers may have greater impact). How can
the emerging mothers’ movement cross the lines of race and
class to formulate an agenda that supports the “reproductive
dignity” of all women and mothers? What are the predictable
conflicts that lie ahead?
R. Solinger: To reiterate and expand: my work in this area has shown me that,
typically, middle class women have a very hard time believing that
poor women (1) should be mothers; (2) have the same problems—
e.g. time-allocation problems, day care issues, sick children, difficult
bosses and husbands or partners— as middle class mothers have;
(3) love their children in the same way that middle class mothers
do. So we approach the project of crossing class and race lines
with a huge chasm between middle class mothers and poor mothers.
Maybe more properly put— we begin with middle class women
feeling quite alienated from and different from poor woman, as mothers.
Then, poverty policy
in the United States has always set poor women and destitute women
against each other as well. A women who earns just a little “too
much,” even though she can barely make ends meet, and is definitely
financially unprepared for emergencies, is disqualified from housing
subsidies, day care assistance, health insurance for her children,
and other benefits available to the poorest of the poor.
In other rich countries,
the government realizes that all mothers (and families) have day
care and health care needs for their children. Here we use means-tested
assistance for the poor, and a shrinking percentage of middle class
persons have some basic needs like health insurance subsidized by
employers. For a number of reasons, then, our arrangement pits groups
of mothers against each other. The biggest challenge is to figure
out how to build cross-class coalitions that support, as you say,
the reproductive dignity of all women and mothers.
And by the way, “reproductive
dignity” means the right to decide whether or not and when
to be a mother— as well as the right to decide whether or
not to raise one’s child. And for “reproductive dignity”
to make sense, fundamentally, it must enfold this: the right to
raise one’s child with access to the basic elements of a dignified
life, such as decent food, shelter, physical safety, health care,
and education. Absent this guarantee, neither reproductive rights
nor reproductive dignity is attainable. Absent this guarantee, some
women will have easy access to reproductive dignity and rights.
Others will be left out in the cold.
MMO: In Beggars and Choosers, you conclude that “reproductive autonomy—
the right to decide whether or when to become a mother and the right
to decide whether or not to raise one’s child— requires
more than the class-and-race inflected guarantee of choice.”
Do women have a right to motherhood, and if so, what could that
mean and how might we protect it?
R.
Solinger: By
now it’s utterly obvious that I believe that women must have
the right to reproduce in order to be full persons accorded full
rights of self-determination. Women must have the right to reproduce
in order to be full citizens in our society. Legal scholar Dorothy
Roberts (author of Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction,
and the Meaning of Liberty, and other important work), drawing
in part on the ways that slavery (in the U.S. in the past, and elsewhere
today) denies women control over their bodies and their reproductive
capacity, has asked us to think about this: that “denying
someone the right to bear children deprives her of a basic right
to her humanity.” Also, she argues that “respecting
Black women’s decisions [and the decisions of other occupants
of the reviled categories] to bear children is a is a necessary
ingredient of a community that affirms the personhood of all of
its members.
Achieving reproductive
dignity, reproductive rights, reproductive justice for all women
is, apparently, one of the most complicated and protracted projects
that social justice activists face. The most important part of this
project, as with all such projects, is to swell the number of people
who understand how important it is for women to have the right to
their bodies and share this understanding with others. It is simply
crucial to increase the number of people who vote for reproductive
justice and the number who join with others to advocate for public
policies that guarantee the reproductive dignity and full personhood
of women— all women— in the United States.
I am a historian. I always
insist that I like to hang out in the past. I usually claim that
I can’t assess the present or predict the future. But these
claims aren’t really true. Lately I’ve learned to say
that I’m devoted to the past because I care so much about
the future. The book I’ve just finished writing, a history
of reproductive politics in the United States from 1776 to 2005,
will be published next year. I hope this book helps readers see
more clearly how women could not be the equals of men as long as
they could not control their fertility or achieve reproductive dignity.
Nor could women of color and poor women be the equals of white,
middle class women as long as their reproductive capacity was reviled
and constrained while the reproductive capacity of white, middle
class women was prized and their children valued. These are profound
insights into the importance of these matters.
mmo : october 2004
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