The Radicalizing Impact of Children on Mothers' Activism

Abstract

This article focuses largely on the trajectory of mothers' activism and how it effects their personal and collective identities. The research derives from follow-up with women activists in Palestine/Israel after initial oral history research at the height of the Intifada. The controversial area of children's possibly radicalizing impact on mothers' pre-existing activism is explored, and possible directions of influence of the mothers' activism on their children are indicated. Evidence was found in women's life stories to contradict traditional stereotypical notions that women having children is an impediment to political activism, making them conservative out of territoriality in the interest of protection of the home. Stronger evidence exists of the social construction of protest stemming directly from the mothering role. That is, the need to protect their children from impending danger, through induction into the army, for example, might radicalize women to increase and intensify their pre-existing levels of activism. They might organize with other mothers in their immediate locus of community, and even nationally as both the women studied and the Argentine mothers did previously when they felt the need to demand information on the disappearance of their children. This impetus to a grassroots mothers' radicalism might even extend to mobilizing other women and to expression of public opinion, and to having an impact on national and international life as women and as feminists. Evidence also suggested that children might benefit by exposure to other possible roles of women leading to a sense of normalizing women's agency. Furthermore, children's mothers' activism might even stimulate them to engage in political activism of their own, particularly as mothers create events that include other young people as well as their own children. Thus, either having children or being a child of an activist can become a basis for cognitive liberation, or a transformational consciousness that propels participants into collective action.