Morality or equality? Maternal thinking and the social agenda

page three

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

Related articles on the MMO:

An interview with Enola Aird, July 2003

Another Mothers’ Movement, 1890 to 1920: The role of women’s voluntary organizations in Progressive Era social reform
By Judith Stadtman Tucker, March 2004

Motherhood and its discontents: The political and ideological grounding of the 21st century mothers' movement
Paper from a presentation by Judith Stadtman Tucker, Oct 2004. In .pdf.