Mothers and Sons: Feminist Parenting and the Conundrums of Raising Males

Abstract

Within Eurocentric feminism, motherhood has a contested history.1 In critiquing the role of mother, feminism faces an imposing social structure built to reinforce ties between women, mothering, gender, race, and economic status. Within the United States, for example, as women won the right to vote in 1920, an image of the New Woman capable of choosing a career rather than mothering swirled in public discourse. However, this celebratory rhetoric belied the racial and economic realities for many nonwhite or immigrant women who had long combined mothering and waged labor. When the Great Depression of the 1930s undercut jobs, working women were scorned and the waged labor often performed by nonwhite, immigrant, or rural women was not included in new programs such as Social Security. Then, as war began in the 1940s, women were ushered into the factories to do their duties for the war effort as mothers, sisters, wives. Still, racial segregation and inequalities of pay and opportunity plagued women’s work. When male soldiers returned from the war, female workers were directly told to go home through employer directives, government propaganda, sermons, and Hollywood movies. For nonwhite women, this often meant returning to lower paid work—including domestic labor in a white woman’s home. In these and many other ways, tensions abounded between gen-