Charmed Circle of Motherhood: How Discourses of Motherhood Discredit and Empower Young and Low-Income Mothers.

Abstract

Public and political debate blame the childbearing behaviors of young low-income women for their economic struggles while ignoring the role of structural inequality in the negative outcomes they and their children experience. Research showing that without increased access to quality education and living wage jobs, low-income teenaged women experience only slightly worse outcomes than low-income women who wait until their 20s to have children has failed to shift this blame. I argue that this phenomenon is driven by the power and ubiquity of dominant discourses of motherhood which shape the way society understands these mothers as individuals, citizens and parents. Through an analysis of how young low-income mothers negotiate dominant discourses of motherhood as they construct understandings of themselves as mothers, I make visible the discursive dynamics through which they continue to be positioned as bad mothers (e.g., “welfare queens”) and challenge the assumption that young low-income women are inherently flawed mothers. My analysis of thirty-three interviews conducted with both Black and white low-income mothers reveals that they employ the dominant discourse of the good mother to challenge the stigma of the welfare queen; however, their arguments that their love and self-sacrifice are sufficient to prove they are good mothers reproduces the idea that women should be required to give so much of themselves with so little social support in order to be recognized as good mothers. Furthermore, their claims leave invisible the reality that meeting the criteria of good mothering requires a great deal of privilege many women cannot access. I further demonstrate that the lack of alternative images of good mothers in dominant culture obscures the fact that many low-income mothers work as hard and use (appropriately) different parenting logics than those of middle-class mothers. As a result, dominant discourses of motherhood remain unchallenged and policy makers and the public continue to blame the difficulties young low-income mothers and their children experience on their presumed weaknesses as mothers; and so neither the mothers nor policy makers recognize the importance of seeking out/providing resources necessary to remediate the structural barriers that are primarily responsible for those difficulties.