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 |
