Motherhood, activism, and social reform - American Thought

MOTHERS are sometimes the least likely candidates to spearhead social movements. However, a closer look reveals more than meets the eye. On my way to work each day, I pass a billboard promoting the platform of the Million Mom March organization. The black-and-white photograph depicts a diverse group of women, all staring at the onlooker. Some have their arms folded, others have their hands at their sides, but not one has a hand raised in response to the query, "Anyone not in favor of stricter gun laws raise your hand." With the rise of youth violence, the billboard makes it clear that if you are not in favor of stricter gun laws, you are acting in opposition to all that mothers represent.

The members of this national grassroots organization are not the first mothers to take a stand. Throughout U.S. history, women--whether or not they were mothers--have used Americans' collective sentiment and ideology regarding mothers and motherhood in social reform. Essentially, this belief holds that mothers are selfless, caring, and nurturing people. They bear the physical pain of labor and tend to their offspring. They are considered to be a youngster's first teacher. Some individuals even believe that mothers possess an instinctual proclivity for children's needs. Such notions are part of Americans' collective consciousness, and mothers' influence is reinforced with the commonplace usage of such aphorisms as "The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world."

Indeed, mothers appear to be more active today than ever. In addition to working full- or part-time jobs, they volunteer at houses of worship and schools and are involved in political campaigns. Then there are the national crusades, such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving and the Million Mom March, which borrowed its name from the African-American movement. It would be facile, if not paradoxical, to assume that with the women's liberation movement in the 1970s, mothers have become more politically active and outspoken. In fact, a much-more intense period of maternal activism occurred a century ago. While females today enjoy more rights and greater freedoms (suffrage being the most obvious), mothers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were organized, vocal, and effective, if only for a short period of time.

The origins of political motherhood can be found after the American Revolution and the ratification of the Constitution, when the Founding Fathers were faced with a central concern regarding the education of the citizenry. Within the framework of popular sovereignty, how could order be maintained within a free society? One popular solution was the notion that it would become women's responsibility--and not that of the masses--to educate the nation's sons for the role of virtuous citizen. Since that time, the notion of mother as civic guardian has remained.

Over the course of the 19th century, the effects of industrialization, immigration, and urbanization created new roles for men and women. Their spheres of activity, particularly of the white middle class, became more circumscribed, with males belonging to the public world of work and females increasingly relegated to the home. Such clearly defined gender roles necessitated that women--if they were to have a public role at all--use their motherhood as a lever in establishing rights and fomenting social change.

During this time, based on assumptions about the importance and purity of mothers' love, middle-class women were barraged with advice literature which told them how to be ladies and mothers. Catharine Beecher, a popular writer of this era, argued for the importance of women's domestic sphere, despite their lower status in the new democratic nation. Accepting rather than challenging gender roles, she claimed that the separate duties of males and females better served the work that society was to undertake. Beecher's position was effective in allowing women to leave the home for paid employment in at least one respect. Her suggestion that it was woman's responsibility as caretaker of children led to the widespread acceptability of females in teaching beginning in the 1830s and 1840s.

By the end of the 19th century, maternal activism reached its apex with the widespread acceptance and growth of women's national associations and Progressive reform fervor. In order to understand the motives and accomplishments of women at the turn of the 20th century, it is important to remember that it was a time when they did not have the vote; de jure and de facto segregation were the norm; and white, middle-class women were seen as higher moral beings whose primary responsibility was caring for the young. Women took this assumed caretaking role and made it a national, public concern.

Two theories defined female activism in the public arena. First, the notion of maternalism held that all women were mothers, or at least potential ones, and therefore needed to act on behalf of all children for the betterment of society. In the years prior to the 1920 ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, maternalist rhetoric was employed by women at various points on the political spectrum. The language of maternalism was so pervasive that even the single, college-educated, liberal women of the settlement houses considered themselves "public mothers."

Another common understanding of the early 20th century--municipal housekeeping--went hand-in-hand with maternalism. Women of this era were able to enter the public world, despite the widely held belief that they belonged at home, by arguing the community, city, or town was an extension of the walls of their homes. Women's and mothers' clubs around the nation established playgrounds and parks, raised money for new schools, and petitioned for child labor laws. It was an era in which females were to mother other people's children despite the obvious rub that white, middle-class women were imposing their values and expectations on a culturally, ethnically, and religiously diverse group of people. Americanization efforts dovetailed with these activities, as maternal reformers sought to promote the value of cleanliness, thrift, and temperance to the immigrants and lower classes.

These reforms were not scattered attempts, but were united through women's national associations. Among the largest and most influential were the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, General Federation of Women's Clubs, National Association of Colored Women (NACW), and National Congress of Mothers (NCM). Figures on national membership reached into the millions.

In the 1910s, women's clubs saw through the short-lived mothers' pensions that provided income for widows so they would not have to get jobs. Based on the belief that woman's most important role was as mother, the stipends were at one time available in 40 states. In what scholars consider to be a major political coup and precursor to New Deal legislation, women's clubs fought for the Sheppard-Towner Act, passed in 1921 and repealed in 1929. The legislation provided Federal funds for states to establish clinics to distribute advice and literature on pregnancy and childbirth with the goal of decreasing infant mortality rates. It was defeated as private physicians assumed the role of dispensing advice and providing maternal health care.

Perhaps the most-well-known maternal activist association was the National Congress of Mothers, today known as the National Parent-Teacher Association (PTA). The association was a major force behind the mothers' pensions and Sheppard-Towner Act. Alice Birney, the founder of the association, helped popularize the notion of motherhood as women's highest calling. She maintained that bonds of motherhood united females regardless of their race, class, or religion. During the years of the rise of women's college attendance, Birney insisted that education for motherhood took precedence over a college education. Her vision of the "highest and holiest of missions" was embraced by popular factions who wished to further relegate women to the home and a particular role during a time of suffrage agitation. After the 1920s, the NCM enjoyed its greatest growth spurt as it transformed to the National PTA and focused its energies on the public schools. After 1925, the rhetoric of motherhood was used less frequently as a political position by women throughout U.S. society.

Despite the liberal rhetoric of Progressive-era women reformers like Birney, white women in general did not actively involve black ones in their associations. At best, black women were to be helped, but not included. Nonetheless, black women engaged in separate yet parallel maternal reforms, but with the added challenge of racial discrimination. African-American females had their own organizations to address their own set of worries. For instance, during this era, they were five times as likely to work outside the home. Black women activists had little hope of influencing white institutions and policymakers, so they focused on community reform efforts and self-help. Their clubs engaged in a kind of social motherhood that provided much-needed services to the community, such as old-age homes, orphanages, day nurseries (the early 20th-century version of day care centers), and funds to help bury black friends, neighbors, and relatives.

African-American mothers had an additional burden, not only to raise their children to be good citizens, but to teach them to live in a racist society. Poverty, racial animosity, and violence, in addition to the belief that black women were immoral and prone to promiscuity, hindered them at every turn. Black females during the Progressive era challenged this view, and they, too, used the language of "highest womanhood" and "true motherhood" in their efforts at racial uplift. One key difference between white and black women's clubs was that, unlike white females, who valued the stay-at-home mother, African-Americans were accepting of the black working mother out of necessity. Therefore, black female leaders valued the working mother as one who was worthy of respect.

The National Association of Colored Women was formed in 1896 to coordinate philanthropic and self-improvement efforts. Mary Eliza Church Terrell, a key figure nationally and in the NACW, was an outspoken advocate for racial understanding, and she used motherhood rhetoric to this end. Under Terrell's leadership, the NACW asserted black women sameness with all females, yet it worked for racial uplift. In so doing, Terrell linked motherhood to the condition of all African-Americans as she relied on images of mothers and children in her speeches and writings, thus speaking of the NACW in maternalist terms. Despite local successes, the NACW had little national influence within the context of Jim Crow segregation and as racial unrest increased as the 20th century wore on.

It strikes me as ironic that, prior to suffrage, women may have had greater political leverage since they were united as an oppressed class. To add yet another irony, suffrage eventually was won based on the contention that women's more-virtuous ways would clean up party politics, rather than on an argument about their equality to men. After 1920, the female voting bloc never materialized, as women in subsequent decades splintered into various factions and faced many different struggles and challenges.

Major ideological shifts took place after 1920. In the post-World War I and post-woman suffrage era, exemplary mothers were those who focused on their husbands and children. With this shift came the responsibility of the individual mother for children's problems. This is a stark contrast to the Progressive era emphasis on social factors of poverty and unhealthful conditions.

From the 1920s through the 1960s, mothers' activism retreated from the national stage. It appears to have taken place largely in local PTAs and other conservative venues. After 1970, as the women's movement gained intensity, females became further divided along political ideology. One major area of debate pitted mothers against nonmothers and working vs. nonworking mothers. Prior to 1920, all women were viewed as mothers or had the leverage to use maternalist rhetoric in their social reform efforts. These days, the status as a biological mother gives a woman that foundation for political change, as long as the issue connects to the care of children.

Nevertheless, something is wrong with both Progressive era and contemporary pictures. Men are absent from the equation. The assumption that the care of children is the purview of women or that men are not caretakers hinders reform efforts in such areas as violence and poverty, as well as family issues like maternity/paternity leaves and adequate and affordable day care. While marginal advances in thinking about and accepting men's nurturer role can be noted since the 1970s, a major shift in thinking still needs to occur. The transformation would include men--as biological fathers or not--as those who have a stake in the care and development of children at home and in society at large. Men and women of different races and classes thus would work together for a better society.

Christine Woyshner, assistant professor of education, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pa., is co-editor of Minding Women: Reshaping the Educational Realm.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Society for the Advancement of Education
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