The Elusive Romance of Motherhood

Abstract

This paper explores the social contexts of reproductive decision making among poor African-American women in inner-city distressed households by focusing on women's narratives of their reproductive and maternal experiences. We explore the hidden agendas and motivations that underpin women's reproductive decisions and perceived choices within the turmoil of poverty, domestic instability, economic uncertainty, and addiction. The political economy of reproduction, within which birthing and motherhood in distressed inner-city households take place, generates the conditions for absent fathers, brittle unions, and a highly skewed gendered division of parenting. Locally constituted notions of gender, agency and autonomy are key dimensions in the cultural constructions of motherhood in these female headed households. Woven into the local maternal experiences is also the desire to ‘give and receive love’. By focusing on women's own formulations of responsibility and agency in their reproductive decisions, we can see how they make sense of their reproductive histories and maternal experiences amidst the constraints of poverty, class, race, and substance abuse.