Reclaiming “good motherhood”: US mothers’ critical resistance in family homeless shelters

Abstract

Unhoused mothers not only contend with housing precarity and economic hardship but also intersecting classist, racist, and sexist stereotypes that position them as unfit mothers. Classed, raced, and gendered conceptualizations of “good” and “bad” motherhood are reified in US shelter regulations (e.g. strict rules governing parent and child behavior, curfews, mandatory participation in parenting classes) that seek to “reform” homeless mothers. To gain a better understanding of perceptions of and responses to shelter regulations, we interviewed 28 formerly unhoused US mothers about their experiences in family shelters. Participants overwhelmingly rejected “bad mother” stereotypes that equated lack of material resources with inadequate parenting and engaged in a range of overt (e.g. strategic recounting of life histories) and covert (e.g. subverting paternalistic rules) strategies to reclaim “good motherhood” and negotiate daily shelter life. Instrumental, discursive, covert, and overt critical resistance strategies were used to maintain parental authority, preserve one’s self-image as a “good” mother and obtain needed resources from shelter staff. Our findings highlight the complexity of critical resistance to class, race, and gender oppression and call for greater interrogation of how seemingly well-intentioned shelter rules and policies reinforce status hierarchies.