Still a Mother by Jackie Krasas Rogers

Author:Jackie Krasas Rogers [Rogers, Jackie Krasas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781501754302
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2021-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

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Having a good job works against mothers, but so does having a bad job or no job. Mothers work too much and mothers work too little. Because we are still conflicted as a society when it comes to mothers working and work is such a polymorphous thing, discourses can be harnessed against women no matter what their employment situation. In either case, custody determination tends to erase women’s unpaid labor in the home. On the other hand, male ex-partners’ good jobs were seen as an asset rather than a liability. When a man was employed in a job that paid less than his ex-wife’s job, his relative position could be seen as a benefit, providing him the flexibility to care for the children. Class and race ideologies help to construct middle-class white fathers seeking custody as the new, involved father while simultaneously failing to challenge the trope of deadbeat dads, a racialized and class-marked concept.8

Gender-neutral discourses and myths about equality contribute to creating this contradictory set of affairs. The assumption that gender equality already exists in social institutions undergirds the gender-neutral discourse, creating experiences that have everything to do with gender. Even though there is formal gender equality under the law, labor markets and contributions to household labor are indeed very gendered. We confuse “equality of status with identity of contribution” (Starnes 2007, 231). Thus, in our desire as a society to reach a gender-equitable state, we have prematurely encoded illusory equality into law in ways that perpetuate gender inequalities.

Maternal employment resonates quite well with the imperatives of the neoliberal state. The ever-shrinking safety net of the neoliberal state pushes women out of welfare roles and into a labor market that is stacked against women, people of color, and those with less education. In the realm of child custody, the tender years doctrine cedes to neoliberal demands for maternal employment. Maternal employment, however, must be instrumental rather than self-actualizing. Mothers “should be in the paid labor market providing a model for their children, and should be able to accrue the financial resources necessary to support their family independent of government assistance” (Gross et al. 2014, 166). This imperative has bled into custody determination such that mothers must be employed enough to not require public assistance, but they should not be working in ways that disrupt gender hierarchies. In other words, they should not be in charge or earning more than men.

Mothers will be ordered to pay child support without regard for gender, but they are subject to different labor markets or may have been out of the labor force for childbearing. Because noncustodial mothers remain routinely involved with their children in ways that fathers often do not, removal to the paternal household does not result in deadbeat mothers who drift away and are difficult to track down to collect child support. In addition, although child support is conceptualized as paying for the necessities in the custodial home, mothers are more likely to spend additional money directly on children’s necessities than men.

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