Mothering While Black by Dawn Marie Dow

Author:Dawn Marie Dow [Dow, Dawn Marie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Social Classes & Economic Disparity, Ethnic Studies, African American Studies, Gender Studies, Family & Relationships, Parenting, Motherhood
ISBN: 9780520300316
Google: tAmBDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2019-03-05T04:14:48+00:00

DOMINANT PERSPECTIVES ON WOMANHOOD AND MOTHERHOOD IN WORK–FAMILY RESEARCH

The cult of domesticity and separate spheres are two related ideologies that have been integral in organizing America’s gendered division of labor and the relationship between the marketplace and the family.10 Together, these ideologies relegate women to the domestic sphere, foster a societal belief that a woman’s place is in the home, and specify how women’s work should be enacted and evaluated.11 These ideologies largely free men from regular domestic duties and support a stark division between the private world of the family and the public world of work and demand a strict gendered division of labor within both.12

These ideologies of womanhood and motherhood did not always exist. They emerged in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century during the Industrial Revolution, when capitalism became a durable part of modern American society.13 These ideologies were initially forged in the homes of the white middle- and upper-middle-class and, ultimately, were presented to all white women and men as an ideal to which to aspire and the standard against which to evaluate their family and work decisions.14 These ideologies supported the new economic order of modern industrial capitalism by encouraging a new gendered division of labor in the household and marketplace and a new vision of motherhood. Before the Industrial Revolution, the public and private spheres were not as divided.15 Indeed, the work of the family within the home—what Dorothy Smith has referred to as women’s lived experience—was integrated with market work, and men, women, and children were all active participants.16 Many white working-class families continued to need women’s economic contributions, but their lack of conformity to the ideal was less visible to the public eye because they were often able to engage in paid work inside their homes, such as taking in boarders or engaging in piecework.17

The logics of separate spheres and the cult of domesticity were used to create changes in labor laws and policies that reinforced men’s status as breadwinners and women’s status as homemakers.18 Progressive Era maternalist reformers used both ideologies as key rationales to regulate women’s activities in the public sphere and to create government initiatives that would enable mothers to focus their attention on caring for their children and their homes.19 The logic behind these ideologies also undergirded the creation of early welfare policies, including widows’ and mothers’ pensions that provided certain groups of mothers with financial support to reduce or eliminate their workday, permitting them to stay at home and raise their children.20 Although these pensions were often symbolic, functioning more often as economic subsidies for low-income white mothers rather than entirely eliminating their need to work,21 they sent a powerful message that, under ideal circumstances, white mothers should stay at home and care for their children.

These ideologies also influenced changes to labor laws that permitted regulations limiting a woman’s workday based on the rationale that women should be able to focus on their duties within the domestic sphere.22 In Muller v. Oregon, in a unanimous

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.