Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (JMI - York University)
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Ain’t I a Mama?: A Black Revolutionary Mother in the Women’s Rights Movement
Full text linkIn 1851, former slave Sojourner Truth gave a moving speech at the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio. Her speech reflected on the intersections of gender and racial inequality experienced by Black women. While white women were fighting for the right to be treated equal to white men, Black slave women were fighting for their right to be treated as a whole human being. While men used white women’s fragility and gentleness as excuses to deny women equal rights, abolitionist Truth pointedout—over the cries of white women’s rights activists—that as a Black former slave, she was expected to do the same work as men and received no such preferential treatment. She demanded answers and clarity to a double standard of womanhood by repeatedly asking, famously: “Ain’t I a woman?”
Even though years of progress have passed, there is a long-standing critique of the women’s rights movement for its lack of and limited application of an intersectional analysis and frame when it comes to Black and other women of colour. In her speech, Sojourner exclaimed: “I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?” Today, as a long term activist in the women’s rights movement, I ask: Ain’t I a mama?
Through personal storytelling of experiences as a Black feminist mama working in the women’s rights movement, this piece will reflect on the inequities and hypocrisies of the feminist movement and motherhood. When the day-to-day work of a feminist is to ensure that women’s voices are heard, this Black feminist mama’s personal experiences of being invisiblized, silenced, and denied access to privileges embolden her to raise the question harkening upon the ancestral spirit of Sojourner Truth: Ain’t I a mama?
This article was originally printed in The Chicana M(other)work Anthology: Porque Sin Madres No Hay Revolución. Reprinted with permissions
Mothers for and against the Nation: Complexities of a Maternal Politics of Care
Full text linkThe politics of care linked with maternal activism often takes for granted a mutually agreed upon understanding of care. However, care is deployed in varying ways by those engaging in maternal activism. Caring cannot be assumed to be inclusive and may be exclusive, particularly when used by maternal activists linked with rightwing politics. This article explores how a maternal politics of care can reflect both progressive and reactionary politics. It uses Andrea O’Reilly’s framework of patriarchal motherhood to explore theoretically divergent international case studies of maternal activism. These cases demonstrate that a maternal politics of care can be used to support a myriad of issues on either side of the political spectrum to reflect individualized and exclusionary visions of care, “paternalistic maternalism,” (Wu), or a collective politics of care. Despite the connections often drawn between mothering labour and care labour, the function of care differs across the political spectrum. For some, caring entails collective liberation and common good and disrupts exclusive—often racist—membership in the nation. For others, care for some necessitates the denial of care for others to ensure the purity of the nation. For others still, some mothers are unable to properly care. The latter reflects a white-saviour complex, which is as concerning as the politics of hate that seeks to limit caring to certain groups. What this suggests is that constructions of who can care and who is worthy of care are deeply raced and classed as well as based on gender, sexual preference, and other social identity factors
Double-Consciousness Squared during Black Pride Movement: Self-Determination and Maternal Activism in Alice Walker’s Meridian
Full text linkAlthough the Black pride movement encouraged a singular identity, Alice Walker’s novel Meridian, recognizes the faultiness presented in singular identities. Black women were not able to identify fully with Black movements because these movements were male centric. Similarly, the feminist movements of the era were concerned primarily with issues of white women and did not address the issues of women of colour. Because of this lack of complete belonging to either movement, women of colour understood that their doubly marginalized identities depended on the success of both movements while not being able to expect personal progress from either. Walker explores how the movements of the 1960s and 1970s sought to differentiate themselves from the civil rights movement of the 1950s. The expressed questions “What does a movement require?” and “What should a movement do?” encourage Walker’s protagonist, Meridian, to explore her own understanding of activism. Because there are no clear answers to these questions regarding the movement, Walker, by way of Meridian, is free to create a new understanding of activism, which becomes Meridian’s sacrificial performance of maternal activism. And very similar to how she seeks to redefine activism, Meridian pursues a new concept of the maternal that pushes beyond the requirement and/or expectation of physical motherhood
Artist Mothers and Virtual Collectives: Making Art and Community from Home
Full text linkArtists who are mothers are still disadvantaged in the trajectory of their careers by the patriarchal institutions of motherhood and the art world as well as by the physical realities of mothering that may prevent them from pursuing their professional creative practices. Despite the contemporary discourse around equality in the home and the workplace, women still carry the burden of the majority of domestic chores. The transformative experiences of pregnancy, giving birth, and mothering are often dismissed by professionals in the art world, a disavowal that may exaggerate the split between one’s artistic and maternal selves. This failure of recognition within the art world may be deleterious to a mother artist’s sense of wellbeing. Conversely, art that embodies maternal experience may be beneficial to the wellbeing of mothers who may otherwise only be exposed to images of idealized motherhood in mainstream visual culture. This article examines the ways in which technology and the Internet are changing and expanding the ways mother artists can connect and form communities as well as how this shapes their art and may increase their sense of wellbeing. It will explore in particular An Artist Residency in Motherhood, an “open source artist residency to empower and inspire” mother artists (Clayton).A version of this paper was first presented at the AMIRCI Conference 2019: Beyond Mothering Myths? Motherhood in an Age of Neoliberalism and Individualisation, University of Sydney, 10–12 July
Parenting Policies and Culture in Academia and Beyond: Making It While Mothering (and Fathering) in the Academy, and What COVID-19 Has to Do with It
Full text linkFor those of us involved in MIRCI, it is no surprise that being a mother in academia is often seen as a liability. In fact, Anna Young found that “no other industry has a higher ‘leak’ rate for mothers” than academia, and she surmises this is partly because “the upper echelons of the academy are still overwhelmingly dominated by men”—a cultural institution that historically has been “a place by and for men” (x). Recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated these inequities in our workplaces. As a matter of maternal health and reproductive freedom, academic mothers must be considered in policies in academia. This article will examine necessary policy and culture shifts that can help mothers in the academy while also discussing personal and local decisions that can be made by those with institutional power that can immediately improve the conditions of mothers in the academy. Of course, we should continue to push for larger systemic changes—such as fair parental leave policies and quality as well as affordable universal child care that need to happen at a societal level—but until those developments are a given, we should work on the following steps, which will be expanded below: 1) Individual choices to not bifurcate our lives into parenting and scholarship; 2) reappointment, tenure, and promotion (RTP) decisions recognizing the importance of interdisciplinary and autoethnographical scholarship, along with enforcing policies and transparency around tolling or stopping the tenure clock and fair research productivity expectations; 3) tolling policies to account for the time needed for the parenting of young children, with options for being part-time on the tenure track or remote teaching possibilities; 4) local decisions to provide intentional community and friendship to parents as well as dedicated space for breastfeeding mothers and children on campus; and 5) sensible scheduling. Our ultimate goal must be larger systemic changes towards parental leave and childcare that will grant the types of policies that will help all parents. In the meantime, we need to use everything we have to help our colleagues who are raising the next generation
A Problem of One’s Own: Single Mothering, Self- Reliance, and Care in the Time of the Coronavirus
Full text linkThis essay uses my experience as an American academic single mother as a point of entry into a conversation about the particular complexities of single motherhood during the stay-at-home order. Although quantitative research indicates pressures on all families, single mothers—especially those with school-aged children or younger—are hit particularly hard, as there is no recourse to public school, paid childcare, or other forms of outside help during this time. The toll on mental and physical health due to social isolation, as well as an increased workload, is significant. What strategies and policies may help mothers cope? In the absence of respite by others, what does “self-care” mean for single mothers during this time?A hybrid critical-creative, or auto-theoretical, piece, this essay braids together three strands: personal discussion of parenting while single during the stay-at-home order, an analysis of the heteronormative nature of academic work, and a reading of Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own. In doing so, this piece uses the pandemic as a lens through which to explore maternal wellbeing in general as well as the fault lines of the heteronormative workplace and the ideal worker
Spiraling
Full text linkDuring COVID-19, people’s lives suddenly changed, and many faced severely unjust experiences. This article focuses on one such group—mothers who work in higher education. It draws on research and informal discussions with women across Asia, Europe, Australia, and the United States. It is a story about the fictional characters, Li and Laura, but is informed by international research about mothers in academia with children learning at home during these unprecedented times.For Li living in Asia, she felt the stress of the world when the virus officially was deemed a pandemic. It was like she and her home country of China were being blamed for the spread. Yet she still had to work to do—hundreds of students to teach, her own children to help through the stressful time, and her ailing mothers to care for, all in full lockdown. Her mind raced: What can I do? How do I make sure my family is okay?Across the world in the United States, Laura heard the news of “some kind of virus” threatening the world, but it didn’t seem real, until her good friend suddenly became really sick. Her fear skyrocketed. She tried to pretend everything was okay but couldn’t stop thinking: What will Dana think? She’s only four and won’t understand why she was just sent home for the year. Then Laura’s university closed its doors and required a quick overhaul of all her courses. The blackhole that Laura had been trying to avoid since her divorce started to envelop her again.Li and Laura found one another online. They hadn’t expected to become friends, weren’t looking to, but ultimately it was their friendship that drew them out of depression, anxiety, and fear to see the potential for their lives and for the world as a whole
Beyond Victims: Motherhood and Human Rights
Full text linkThis article discusses specific cases in which women’s reproductive capacity and maternal roles have resulted in human rights violation. It finds that in the context of genocide, women and girls may be specifically targeted because of their reproductive capacity; in assimilationist contexts, mothers may be targeted because of perceptions about their gendered role in the transmission of culture; and women’s gendered role of caring for children and the elderly may also increase their vulnerability to harm in some contexts. The role of mothers’ groups who work for justice in the aftermath of human rights violations is also discussed. Such activism falls within the range of socially acceptable behaviour by mothers, but some dismiss it as innately conservative and limited. It is important to recognize the range of roles that women (and mothers) undertake in the context of human rights violation, extending beyond that of victim, to ensure that women’s agency and activism are recognized
Alone in Paradise: A Review of the Literature Related to Single, Immigrant Mothers in Canada
Full text linkIn most studies, the phenomena of immigration and single motherhood are examined and explored in isolation from each other. In this manuscript, we adopted intersectionality theory as the framework for examining the literature related to the lived experiences of single, immigrant mothers in Canada. We explored single motherhood and immigration in relation to multiple points of intersection concerning dimensions of cultural identity. We began by examining how intersections of gender and ethnicity affect single, immigrant mothers in terms of self-perception, sociocultural experiences, and acculturation processes. Single, immigrant mothers receive specific gendered messages from their families, cultures of origin, and Canadian culture. These messages, specific to the context of mothering, shape their cultural identity and role in society.We also examined the impact of Canadian and country of origin mothering ideologies on single, immigrant mothers, how discourses around these ideologies endorse potentially unrealistic images of the ideal or good mother, and how they affect the mother-child relationship. Single, immigrant mothers hold multiple, nondominant intersecting identities and may not portray adherence to the dominant mothering ideologies, from either Canada or their country of origin. As a result, they are more vulnerable to marginalization, discrimination, and mental health problems. We considered how the intersections of gender, ethnicity, single motherhood, social class, and immigration affected single, immigrant mothers’ labour market participation, social support, mental health, and acculturation. We offer insights into the challenges that single, immigrant mothers face and point to ways to improve social and mental health services for these women