Abstract
After a long history of silence on motherhood as an area of scholarship, motherhood studies have flourished in recent decades, including empirical work on mothers in diverse social locations, such as transnational, teen, Latina, or inner-city mothers. There has not, however, been a book that puts together a wide array of perspectives into a single volume. Mothers, Mothering and Motherhood across Cultural Differences finally does so. Covering 22 maternal identities such as adoptive, black, disabled, poor, nonresidential, older, queer, single, and stepmothers, this book may come up short for those expecting “cultural differences” to indicate global variation, but is a powerful contribution to the understanding of mothering across differing subject positions within North America.
Echoes of Adrienne Rich resound throughout the volume, particularly her distinction between the institution of motherhood, a form of patriarchal oppression to which women are expected to conform, and the actual experience of mothering, which belongs to women and offers the possibility of empowerment. The book explores that tension within widely varied social locations. Its underlying theme, reappearing in almost all chapters, is that the patriarchal institution of motherhood casts “good mother” in mono-color as a white, 30-something, heterosexually partnered, economically privileged, and able-bodied woman biologically related to her children. This construct delegitimizes real mothers, who come in a dazzling variety of forms, and creates challenges as they are forced to navigate prevailing discourses of good mothering from which they are often excluded. Each chapter of the book includes a section entitled “challenges” to explain the particular challenges within the social location under discussion.
In addition to facing challenges, however, nonwhite, queer, poor, disabled, single, or nonbiological mothers, by their very being and “otherness,” issue challenges to the restrictive dictates of the patriarchal institution of motherhood. As O’Reilly writes in her introduction: “Non-normative mothers . . . can never be the ‘good’ mothers . . . so they must rely on and develop non-patriarchal practices of mothering to raise their children. . . . [For example], non-normative mothers seldom mother alone or in isolation as they would in patriarchal motherhood” (p. 5). To explore the richly varied practices of non-normative mothering and its possibilities in dismantling oppression, each chapter also includes a section entitled “possibilities” discussing the prospects for empowered mothering within the subject position in question. Such possibilities include the fact that adoptive mothering does not rely on one woman’s reproductive body over another’s or over a man’s, and thus provides a great foundation for egalitarian parenting, or mothering as an older woman can sometimes resolve the tension inherent in individualized societies between the needs for autonomy and for lasting connection. The tight parallel organization between chapters not only creates clarity and thematic congruence in the book, but also takes the reader on a well-charted journey through difference—and through core similarities among those whose differences society stigmatizes in some way.
The chapters also include the historical background, central issues, and theoretical frameworks used in scholarly understandings of the contexts of the 22 very diverse “non-normative” mothering realities. For example, we learn about the key questions in disabilities studies, queer studies, and aboriginal studies as we learn about mothering in those social contexts. Furthermore, most chapters are written by scholars who themselves inhabit the subject position about which they write, such as gender scholar Diana Gustafson, a nonresidential mother who writes about mothers who do not live with their children. While the degree to which the authors utilize their own experience as data varies and is never central to the chapter, being “out” about inhabiting a stigmatized maternal identity models the very empowerment the authors discuss, and the personalization of experience is almost always revelatory. For example, Elizabeth Bruno writes with both scholarly force and personal conviction about the toxic consequences of idealizing “super single mothers” as exhibiting can-do self-sufficiency. To make this argument real, she discusses her own oft-told tales from the trenches, such as having a broken clavicle but still carrying her toddler, or lugging a large sofa upstairs while the baby slept. She views these superhuman stories of über-independence as a barrier from societal condemnation in an individualistic society, but argues that “they also become a barrier from my friends, my child, and even myself” and make it difficult for women to receive support and to forge a new more humane reality for single mothers that embraces mutual dependency (p. 398).
While intensive mothering looms large in much motherhood scholarship today, this book brings that purportedly hegemonic form of mothering down to size in a vast sea of differing, and typically silenced, maternal perspectives. This book, which stands alongside Maternal Theory as among the finest edited volumes in Andrea O’Reilly’s vast collection, is theoretically rich yet also readable by undergraduate students. It will serve as a valuable resource for family scholars and for those teaching courses that examine race, class, gender, and other axes of inequality.