Numerous debates over motherhood have been fundamental to feminist movements for decades now. Broadly speaking, critiques of motherhood have argued that women have biological instincts that make them selfless nurturers. Such assumptions, in turn, have shaped social practices that make women automatically responsible as caregivers and live with that label for the rest of their lives. Feminist theorists, in response to that have argued that such myths, constructed mainly by our patriarchal society, are there to support social practices that eventually restrict women and do not allow them to be fully productive in society. Only feminists (both liberal and radical) realize that motherhood, or the role of a caregiver, is not something innately natural and instinctive to women, but it is socially constructed and it is one of the most important structural causes that push women to either take on professions that are considered “caring professions” or opt out completely from the labor force just to stay at home and raise their children. In their struggle to either condemn or celebrate motherhood, feminists have come to emphasize that it is women’s freedom of choice to become mothers.
A lot of radical feminists have looked at the root cause of the problem of women not being able to reach their full potential in our society and have come to realize that their genetic makeup is used by our society to justify their role as mothers. The French writer Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) argued that gender inequality is imposed upon women through their biological makeup since day one. Since that day, women are repeatedly told that they are "made" for childbearing. This biological makeup that they got saddled with, gave them the disadvantage of menstruation, pregnancy, child birth and child rearing. The burden of all those things combined has assigned them a role and a "marvelous privilege" that men don’t have, and that is the “privilege” of being able to bring children into the world. Beauvoir pointed out that such pervasive socialization has shaped women’s desire to choose motherhood over anything. That as a result has left them behind in their fight of catching up with men in the job market and any other social arenas. In other words, this has made women get perceived as weak, passive and incompetent and get excluded from other productive roles in our society. Even though this view is pretty radical in nature and generally attacks motherhood, I would slightly agree with it because it does seem to look at the root cause of the problem (just like any radical feminist theory).
Women are here not just to look pretty, get married, have kids and then their lives are over because they have someone else to care for. Of course, by having kids, they do contribute to our society a lot, but who recognizes this? They are seen as lesser because they haven’t achieved much, but how could they, when all throughout history they had no major role in society because they were left at home and were not allowed to get educated. How could they when they would get punished if they did more than what society and their fathers allowed them to do? If they were given the same options and opportunities that were available to men, they clearly would have been in higher and better positions now. They would have gained so much more respect and they would have probably been in the same level with men. However, our patriarchal society has only over emphasized their role as mothers; a role that has limited their attempts to give more to society than just healthy children. Even the latter does not seem to be appreciated or praised as much as it should. No one recognizes women’s struggles to raise children and no one seems to understand how difficult it can be (even though I have not yet experienced it myself.
With that said, although I believe that Beauvoir did make some good points about how women’s biological make up has made them suffer more than men and has imposed on them expectations that require caring for others, I still believe that difference should be celebrated and that it is natural for a woman to have children. However it is important to stress that our society needs to recognize these differences, give women more credit for what they go through (especially those women who do the double shift) and put them in the same category with men. I also believe in nuclear family and I do think that those women who choose to become mothers and stay at home should not feel guilty about it. Our society however, should understand that just like men, women have also the freedom of choice to either have children and work, work and not have children, or have children and not work, depending on their needs and choices.
In my experience with feminism three specific contemporary constructions of motherhood were emphasized that really caught my eye and those were,:intensive mothering ( the “new monism”), other mothering and transnational mothering. In each case motherhood is practiced differently, because just like Patricia Hill Collins has stressed in her article “Toward a New Vision”, race, class, nationality and sexuality shape each woman’s identity, life experiences and privilege in various ways, and of course all of those combined together, make women (or anyone) who they are and differenentiate them from other women. All these categories are very important for each woman individually, and they are interlocked in a way that can simultaneously structure their social identity. At any moment race, class, nationality and sexuality may feel more salient or meaningful in a given person’s life, but they shouldn’t be analyzed separately because they overlap and are cumulative on their effect on these women’s everyday experiences.
Because of their importance, we tend to use the approach of the “matrix of domination” to analyze them as different but interrelated axes of social structure and see what aspects of each combined together can affect a woman’s individual consciousness and her ability to interact with others and their ability to have access to institutional power and privileges. In a few words, Hill Collins emphasizes that oppression affects every individual differently depending on what combination of race, class, nationality and sexuality they come from. She invites her audience to distinguish between “thinking comparatively” and “thinking rationally”. Most of us think comparatively only when we learn about other people’s experiences only when we compare them to our own. This helps us realize that everyone can be the oppressor or the oppressed depending on someone’s intersection of race, class, nationality and sexuality (and gender but not mentioning it here because we are focusing on women). With that being said, motherhood should not be considered as a universal trait that gets treated equally in each case. Motherhood in each case takes on a different characterization, depending on women’s levels of privilege (earned or unearned). This is why in the case of the three constructions of motherhood, women view and treat motherhood differently.
Let’s start with the idea of intensive mothering or the “new momism”. There has been a new feminist revolution of women freely choosing to leave the work force and return to their nuclear family, or in other words opt-out completely from the work force, but again this is only prevalent among middle class women who can afford raising their children without having to work. And then, on the other end of the spectrum, there are women who don’t choose, but have to do both in order to provide both emotional and economic support for their children.
As it is argued by Susan Douglass’ and Meredith Michaels’ in their article “The New Momism” from the book The Mommy Myth, our generation has created a new set of norms and standards concerning motherhood that tend to celebrate motherhood, idealize its nature make it seem as if it is something that women are blessed to have, when in reality they propagate high standards of perfection that are beyond any woman’s reach. They point out that at its height, the women's liberation movement had a lasting impact on their lives because it allowed them to enter the workforce. However, there were no accompanying policy reforms that could make it easier for women who have children to enter the workforce. For example, there is no publicly funded child care available to American women out there. This had made women in lower socioeconomic statuses to work longer hours just to make ends meet, and some middle class women choose motherhood over their careers.
Instead of genuine equality, our society and Media specifically has fed women with the myth of the "super-mom”; a myth that makes the unattainable ideal of both working and motherhood as something that women can manage to do. And if some of them cannot manage to do that, then they are blamed for failing as mothers and as a productive members of our society. In other words our society puts way too much pressure on women to manage it all, and if they don’t then they are considered lazy or unfit and are simultaneously alienated. According to Douglass and Michaels, this new myth shows that this so-called post-feminist revolution is a product of this backlash against women. What our society needs to do is stop blaming the victim, and start making some structural changes in the workforce that provide equal pay and of course provide child care, just like other Western European Countries. (“How to Bring Children Up Without Putting Women Down” by Ann Crittendon). Even though both the U.S and Europe seem to rely on a capitalist economic system, that of Europe is more compassionate when it comes to making the lives of families with kids manageable.
This system in America has as a result compelled many mothers, mainly white middle class mothers to choose other mothering and continue working. This mothering essentially involves women lending a hand in raising their children, while they are outside working. There are also cases that white upper middle class women choose other mothering simply because they can and because they can afford it. However, we are mainly concentrating on women who have no other choice but to hire nannies while they are busy outside working to provide for their family. But who constitutes the nannies in this case: Most likely black women, who have no other choice but to care for white people’s children, just to be able to provide economically for their own. This phenomenon goes back in history, even when white middle to upper class women were not allowed to leave the house and work. Black nannies have always existed and for that they have not been able to raise their own children properly (and not because they are unfit mothers. If they were no one would hire them to be nannies in the first place!). Again, if day care was offered free to the public, just like it is in other Western European countries, both white middle class women would not have to hire nannies for their children, and black women would not have to take on these professions in order to provide for their children because day care would have been available and they would have been out there seeking other professions that allow them to return home at some point and spend time with their children. Some changes in the policies of this country would have made it easier for these women to both provide for their children and be able to spend quality time with them.
However, there are a lot of black women who’d rather get a job that pays less, than look after children that are not theirs, let alone children of white women. Paid domestic work, ever since slavery was in practice, has always been connected with racial meanings that have whites as the masters and specific-racial groups as maids and servants (in this case black women). Generally domestic work has always been perceived as a job held by only poor women, for immigrant women and for women of color. Black women predominated that job in the South, while in slavery or after, and by 1920 they constituted the largest group of paid domestic work in both the South and the Northeast. However over the last century, with Globalization, that has only become the job of Latina immigrants. According to Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, in her article named “Domestica” , today most of the paid domestic workers are immigrant women, coming primarily from Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. These women replaced black women, especially in Los Angeles, because at that time, black women “would rather work at Grant’s for $1.65 an hour than do housework” for whites(355). Especially by 1970s daughters of black domestic workers refused to take these jobs because they were degrading and were reflecting servitude and racial subordination. “In Los Angeles, the percentage of African American women working as domestics in private households fell from 35% to 4% from 1970 to 1990, while foreign born Latinas increased their representation from 9% to 68%. This shows that other mothering is being replaced with “transnational mothering”.
In another article by the same author named “I’m here but I’m There, The Meanings of Latina Transnational Motherhood” it is argued how the meaning of motherhood has changed and how Globalization, a public sphere system, chooses to stay out of the private sphere of the family, and to make matters worse, it encourages women across the world to choose work over mothering because it is imposing to them to inhibit provider roles instead of traditional roles (just like America is doing to American women). Again in this case women in both cases are somehow suffering, especially Latina women, because they being absent to provide care for their own children and choose to provide economically for them instead. Even though many would view this as an empowering movement, the other spectrum of the debate sees this as something exploitative and oppressive especially in the case of Latina domestic workers.
It is true that women are given more options now to also provide for their children but how many options are Latina workers in this case given, when they do not get to see their children at all? At least white middle class women in this case, that choose to work and have Latina domestic workers take care of their children, come back home at the end of their shift and get to spend time with their children. This reflects how inequality is prevalent in a capitalist world. There is a hierarchy in this practice and that is widely shown. These women that choose to take care of other children and become the breadwinners of their families are seen as servants, just like “mommies” back in the day. So in a few words, this new role of the provider has put a lot of pressure on women across the boarders; it has compelled them to even immigrate in other countries, just so that they can provide economically for their children, while raising other people’s children.
Now all these three models of mothering teach us a lot about the larger political, economic and cultural climate in the United Sates regarding mothering, women and work and work/family balance. What they teach us is that women nowadays are expected to do more than they used to back in Victorian ages. Now the role of the woman is to be both the caregiver and the provider. This simultaneously tells us that the climate in the Unites States is not giving a helping hand to women to achieve all of that. What our country needs to do is adopt a compassionate capitalistic system that Western European countries have. This system will make it easier for women, despite their race and class to be able to be able to be the good mothers that society wants them to be.
