Confronting Postmaternal Thinking

Feminism, Memory, and Care

Julie Stephens

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780231520560
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

There is a deep cultural anxiety around public expressions of maternalism and the application of maternal values to society as a whole. Julie Stephens examines why postmaternal thinking has become so influential in recent decades and why there has been a growing unease with maternal forms of subjectivity and maternalist perspectives. In moving beyond policy definitions, which emphasize the priority given to women's claims as employees over their political claims as mothers, Stephens details an elaborate process of cultural forgetting that has accompanied this repudiation of the maternal.

Reclaiming an alternative feminist position through an investigation of oral history, life narratives, Web blogs, and other rich and varied sources, Stephens confronts the core claims of postmaternal thought and challenges dominant representations of feminism as having forgotten motherhood. Deploying the interpretive framework of memory studies, she examines the political structures of forgetting surrounding the maternal and the weakening of nurture and care in the public domain. She views the promotion of an illusory, self-sufficient individualism as a form of social unmothering that is profoundly connected to this ethos. In rejecting both traditional maternalism and the new postmaternalism, Stephens challenges prevailing paradigms and makes way for an alternative feminist maternalism centering on a politics of care.

1

Unmothering

The world we know is one fashioned by the dreams of those who, by and large, consider themselves independent.

EVA FEDER KITTAY, Love’s Labor

Two decades ago Sara Ruddick made an observation that to claim a maternal identity was “not to make an empirical generalization but to engage in a political act.”¹ Today, in stark contrast, it has become almost “politically impossible” to make a public claim on the basis of motherhood, according to feminist state theorist Ann Orloff.² Political support for women’s caregiving role has diminished in favor of endorsing women’s claims as workers or limiting entitlements to economically active citizens. This chapter will critically review some of the current explanations for this dramatic shift and proceed to discuss how its impact extends far beyond the policy arena to a much more widespread cultural unease with forms of nurture and care identified as maternal. Policy-oriented approaches derived from or associated with the ascendency of postmaternalism will provide a good starting point for an examination of some of the changes that have accompanied the so-called march of neoliberalism. These changes will become the backdrop for subsequent investigations of the different ways certain memories of feminism have become implicated in attempts to account for the glorification of paid work in the market over relationships involving care, nurture, and dependency.

Maternal forms of selfhood have proven especially unsuited to neoliberalism. The shifts in social provision of the 1990s that occurred through welfare restructuring imposed especially harsh penalties on those least advantaged in our society: children, sole mothers, the frail elderly, women both in the workforce and mothers at home and poor immigrant women working in domestic labor and child care. Questions therefore are often raised about feminism’s role in these damaging developments. The impressive contribution made by Ann Orloff to our understanding of the gendered implications of this restructuring has already been noted in the introduction to this book. In States, Markets, Families: Gender, Liberalism, and Social Policy in Australia, Canada, Great Britain, and the United States,³ Orloff, with colleagues Julia O’Connor and Sheila Shaver, richly detail the contradictory nature of neoliberal developments in social policy in these advanced democracies. Their study encompasses cross-national variations in these four states, while maintaining a clear focus on gender relations and families. The definition of neoliberalism used by Orloff, O’Connor, and Shaver is a movement that has been strongest in English-speaking countries that emerged after 1980. The authors define neoliberalism as a reassertion of “liberal principles of freedom, market individualism and small government,” where freedom is understood in the most narrow and negative sense of “minimal restriction of the individual by the powers of the state” (52). The authors’ argue that a key goal of neoliberalism is to “restore market forces to areas of social life in which they had been displaced or altered by the state” (53). This restoration is achieved by transformations in the labor market including the following: increasing casualization of labor, global mobility of capital, and changing patterns of paid and unpaid work by women. Shifting gender roles and relations therefore have been crucial in decisions about restructuring the social provision of welfare support for women. Notably, such reshaping is predicated on the public recognition of a cultural transformation that accompanied women entering the labor market in steadily increasing proportions.

While Orloff, O’Connor, and Shaver highlight the significant alignment between neoliberalism and conservative political forces, they show how the celebration of market individualism is decidedly contradictory when it comes to women. On the one hand conservative opinion favors the traditional family and on the other, neoliberal policy supports the dual-earner family with care (such as child care) best outsourced to a minimally regulated market. In picturing “women in the same terms as men,” as equally “possessive individuals,” neoliberal policy intersects with feminist demands for freedom and autonomy, both philosophically and empirically. This has had a significant cost for women.

Under neo-liberal conditions, the price of women’s liberal individualism is that their needs and satisfactions are defined by the market paradigm. Neo-liberalism has been vocal in its opposition to welfare state support for women on the grounds of gender and gender disadvantage. It is frequently argued, for example, that intervention to address race and gender discrimination is undesirable because it contravenes individual freedom, and is moreover unnecessary because in time such problems will be overcome by the rationality of the market.

(54)

Neoliberalism offers no grounds for reconciling claims for autonomy with what the authors describe as the “constraints of human dependency” (54). They collectively identify the benefits of workforce participation for women, but acknowledge that in a neoliberal context the social rewards are for paid labor, not for unpaid caregiving.

Similarly, in Orloff’s penetrating reflection, “From Maternalism to Employment for All,”⁴ the state is viewed as having played a significant role in translating the demands of feminist movements into material social changes. Her argument documents the shift away from maternalist policy models—which once provided for women as caregivers—to the current situation, where support is for women as paid workers via inducements, on the one hand, and coercive measures by state authorities to increase women’s labor market participation, on the other. Orloff specifies what she calls a series of “farewells to maternalism” in countries ranging from Sweden to the United States and the Netherlands. Her analysis maps the different ways gendered policy regimes (supporting women to stay at home to care for children) have been “farewelled.” The “abrupt and uncompromising” farewell to maternalism executed by the United States is widely known. Nowhere is this more evident than in the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act that replaced the social safety net for the poor with directives for welfare recipients to work and penalties if they did not. With child poverty rates in the U.S. the highest in the developed world,⁵ and working mothers without paid parental leave and, moreover, with little state-funded child care or opportunities for increasing women’s employment in the public sector, the maternalist state has well and truly disappeared.

It should be noted briefly that this perspective is not shared by feminist legal scholars Naomi Mezey and Cornelia Pillard. In “Against the New Maternalism” they argue that “the state, the market and the family all reinforce maternalist ideology.”⁶ This overstatement is not supported by evidence, particularly at the policy level. On the contrary, a hyperindividualist work-centered ideology is dominant in the U.S. and other developed industrial economies. Mezey and Pillard’s position undermines an otherwise nuanced analysis of the emergence of a particular form of maternalism, detached from and conflicted in its relationship to feminism. As Orloff so carefully documents, maternalist ideology has long departed from state policy decision making. While the family and the market might present a more complicated picture, the logic of postmaternal thinking remains intact and ever prominent in cultural debates about the role of care and the implications of being dependent in our society. A further dimension is added to this argument by turning to Lynda Faye Williams’s The Constraint of Race: Legacies of White Skin Privilege in America.⁷ In her powerful study of the evolution of racialized social policy in the U.S., Williams provides perhaps the most dramatically vivid characterization of the paradoxical nature of these postmaternalist policy developments. In her view, “by the end of the Clinton years, the nation had virtually come full circle. More than at any point since the 1960s, poverty and racial discrimination, once seen as problems requiring state action, were now seen as the result of state action. What was once the solution (activist social policies) had now become the problem (dependency); and what was once the problem (the lash of poverty) has become the solution (market forces).”⁸ If we take Williams’s depiction here, of a world indeed turned upside down, where solutions have become problems and problems solutions, it is little wonder that in the written narratives and oral testimonies I later discuss there is such a strong perception at the personal and public level of a general failure of care, in short, of feeling unmothered.

Often the American social policy landscape that Williams describes is depicted as being at the extreme end of the spectrum. However, returning to Orloff, one can see similar policy shifts in the 1990s throughout the developed world. These changes may have been less abrupt, but their impact on those most socially disadvantaged is shown to be just as comprehensive. Orloff comments:

The U.S. approach is echoed in Europe (albeit generally in somewhat milder fashion) by so called labor market activation policies that pressure those outside the labor force—whether unemployed youths, the long-term unemployed, the disabled, older workers or mothers—to take some kind of a job. The explicitly gender-differentiated maternalist logic of politically recognizing, and financially supporting, mothers’ caregiving is being displaced by ostensibly gender-neutral notions of recognizing and supporting only economically “active” adults, with support to care taking the form of temporary leaves to workers or public services for the care of their dependents.⁹

At the level of specific states, different combinations of incentives and coercions apply. The complexities of intricate forms of state provision and the distinctive ways neoliberal ideas have been shaped by national contexts and different labor movement histories are beyond the scope of this book. However, as the studies discussed make abundantly clear, there is a shared logic at work here that crosses national boundaries.

Admirably, Orloff manages to delineate features of the postmaternalist state and its new policy agenda without herself engaging in what I am calling postmaternal thinking. This is also true of her joint interventions with Shaver and O’Connor in States, Markets, Families. It is necessary here to return to my opening definition of postmaternal thinking as a pervasive cultural logic.¹⁰ This denotes a situation where the values associated with maternal forms of care are repudiated in the public sphere and conflicted in the private domain. Privatizing maternal values is to deny their social significance and reduce nurture and care to the status of an individual choice. For the purposes of this chapter, this definition of postmaternal thinking can be extended to include a form of reasoning that “naturalizes” (in the wider culture) what Orloff calls postmaternalism (in the social policy arena). In the service of neoliberal policies and practices that reward if not exalt the ideals of market performance and unfettered individualism, a thinking or cultural logic which presents care, birth, interconnectedness, and dependency as infantalizing, burdensome, and somehow primitive is ideologically very useful.

Postmaternal thinking plays a key role in sustaining a normative idea of the self as both genderless and autonomous. It reinforces the dominant neoliberal claim that recognition and support should only flow to those who are economically active. It also assists in further marginalizing unpaid caregivers, thereby reinforcing unjust social relations and hiding the true gendered aspects of care. Like other ideological formations, this logic sometimes creeps into the very analyses set up to critique it. Orloff is an exception here. She acknowledges the way maternalist premises and programs were questioned by second-wave feminists as women moved into the labor force in large numbers.¹¹ Yet she does not forget that a significant strand of feminism was never built on the assumed equivalence between workforce participation and emancipation. This is an important point, to which I will frequently return.

DEPENDENCY

Before assessing other attempts to theorize the relationship between feminism and neoliberalism, it is worth examining an instructive account of some of our deeply held beliefs about dependency. Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon’s contribution to the collection The Subject of Care: Feminist Perspectives on Dependency charts some major historical shifts in definitions of this term.¹² In my view their essay should be compulsory reading for anyone interested in these issues. Their genealogical approach aims to “defamiliarize taken-for-granted beliefs about dependency in order to render them susceptible to critique and to illuminate present day conflicts” (15). They are particularly successful in achieving this aim. Their starting point is the proposition that dependency (as a term and an idea) is a keyword in U.S. welfare discourse. The authors map the preindustrial usage of the term, highlighting that dependency was viewed as a “normal,” not a “deviant condition” (17). In the seventeenth century all but the very few were dependent on someone else for their livelihood, safety, shelter, and social status. Correspondingly, dependency was perceived as a social reality rather than an individual state or condition. While it denoted a social hierarchy, it was neither a particularly gendered term—most men and women were dependent—nor did it have pejorative associations. In some respects it even had a positive meaning and was linked to being “dependable.” By contrast, the term independence was at first only applied to aggregate entities such as the church, not to individuals. Referring to the English Civil War and the Putney Debates of 1647, Fraser and Gordon note the suspicion with which certain forms of independence were viewed. Hired help or “out-of-doors” servants, not attached to households and independently selling their labor, were seen as figures of “social disorder” (18). Fraser and Gordon’s pointed inclusion of such details really does succeed in shaking up our contemporary assumptions about independence as always being a sign of autonomy, freedom, and an indisputable cultural value.

Of course, as Fraser and Gordon document, everything changed with the birth of capitalism. As wage labor became normative, those people in forms of political subjugation, bondage, or those excluded from selling their labor came to personify a form of dependency with a strong “negative charge.” The authors dramatically show how the dependency of the “colonial native,” the “slave,” and the “pauper” was given a new moral and psychological register at this time. Gender also came into play in complicated ways, with some dependencies “shameful” in men but not so in “women.” While Fraser and Gordon’s genealogy of this term spans a wide historical period and carefully categorizes iconic forms of dependency in industrial and postindustrial times, it is their analysis of the strong emotive and moral connotations now attached to the idea that is of most interest here. To summarize, they show how dependency became feminized and associated with excessive emotional neediness. They also depict the ways in which dependency became defined as an individual character trait denoting a failure of will. Today, in its current increasingly individualized form, all types of dependency are considered avoidable, and all according to Fraser and Gordon are considered blameworthy. In addition, a new meaning is attached to the term, likening so-called welfare dependency and other dependencies to a form of addiction (26–27).

These shifting definitions rely on a complex process of cultura...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Unmothering
• 2. Feminist Reminiscence
• 3. Memory and Modernity
• 4. Maternalism Reconfigured?
• Conclusion: Toward a New Feminist Maternalism
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index