JENdA: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies
ISSN: 1530-5686
How Did Feminists Miss This? The Very Public Sphere of Mothering in the United States
| JENdA: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies ISSN: 1530-5686 How Did Feminists Miss This? The Very Public Sphere of Mothering in the United States |
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Felice A. Jones-Lee
Merton’s theory of social structure wherein he delineated the latent and manifest functions of society’s institutions, has served well feminist theorists who have mined the family for all of its latent theoretical meaning for women. Although a women’s movement had rallied around women’s suffrage forged in the nineteenth century-century in the United States, the impact of the family on women has since then been analyzed primarily by feminists privileged by post World War II prosperity. It was not until 1963 that Betty Freidan articulated women’s discontent within the home. But if The Feminine Mystique was indeed an expression of dissatisfaction with postwar affluence, Nancy Chodorow’s, The Reproduction of Mothering (1978), could have been read as a response to the continued prosperity of the 1970’s, because mothering in isolation or in private can only be done from a relative position of privilege. Similarly, Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born (1986), a historiography of motherhood and childbearing, could only have been written from a position of relative freedom from the intrusiveness of the state. Although Chodorow and others have written ad infinitum about the privatization of the home, and abuse issues have been addressed to redress the violence that occurs in relative isolation, feminists have largely ignored the potential public-ness of the home when children are part of the equation. This may be because the state has no place in the homes of the middle class, where theorists tend to dwell. If we have learned anything from the seminal works of feminist theorists, it is that (1) privilege accords privacy, (2) privilege grants sanctity, and (3) privilege allows for inordinate self-reflection and narcissism.
Mothering in the public sphere is a result of the double entendre inherent in poverty; poor mothering has become synonymous with mothering in poverty. And though it has been theorized that the institutionalization of the family has been a source of isolation and danger for women, feminist theorists egotistically or ethnocentrically focused upon themselves, rather than upon the forces outside of the home that so persuasively invaded it during that same period, for the home did indeed become a public venue for women not privileged by class or race. The isolation of the home may have been a pertinent issue for white, middle-class mothers, but an analysis of child-welfare practice in the United States will demonstrate that the intrusion into the home was a not-so-covert attempt to sanction and control poor and/or non-white women. The following review will also provide evidence that the white feminists’ reaction to the dichotomized public and private spheres for mothers and fathers was conditioned by racial and class privilege, because the home has always been a public domain for women not so advantaged.
The white feminist discontent with mothering is to be comprehended within the context of the history of the middle class. The middle class is believed to be the result of mid-nineteenth century industrialization and its concomitant creation of skilled labor, which separated the home and industry. How one is to have affected the other is unclear, however. Most accounts suggest that the progression to industrialization created a middle class and induced a distinct separation between public work and the privatized home. Feminist analyses tend to identify the competition between men, women, and children for skilled work as the causative factor in the relegation of women and children to the home (Sokoloff 1981). Deeply embedded in this debate are black feminists who argue that the domestication of white women began with anti-Puritanical views that redefined white women as virtuous rather than sexual, granting them sanctity rather than contempt (hooks 1981).
More pertinent is that mothering once defined produced two major trajectories: one privatized domain for women privileged by class and/or race, and the other made public by the nature of its relative location outside of the home, for those not so privileged. The two, however, have never been mutually exclusive. Mothering remains what most consider a gendered endeavor so intimately intertwined with child welfare that the survival of one is ultimately dependent on the other (Shorter 1977).
In The Making of the Modern Family (1977), Edward Shorter argues that the modern family made mothering child-centered, resulting in the decrease in infant mortality in the United States during the nineteenth century. Thereafter children were transformed from commodified property into defenseless entities to whom a great deal of care was to be given within the confines of the home. In light of these historical events, feminists have articulated that the dependence of children on women has made both groups vulnerable to men. The isolation of the home is believed to provide men with a private forum for the dominance of women and children and a haven for their masculinity, which they were not always able to express in the world.
The new standard of motherhood could not be realized by those not privileged by class, however. This is relevant to the second trajectory of motherhood undertaken by black women who were not afforded the privilege of mothering in private. No black middle class emerged in the nineteenth century to parallel the white middle class, though one would indeed follow. In fact, most blacks were still enslaved during the mid-nineteenth century, and their emancipation did not end their subordination to whites. Rather it created an intensification of domination and subordination that systematically barred black men from skilled work in the post-emancipation period and that allowed white women to hire black women in domestic service, where they would predominantly remain until the mid-twentieth century (Jones 1985/1995). According to Jacqueline Jones, “To slaveholders and later white employers, the black family offered a steady and reliable source of new laborers; black women reproduced the supply of cheap labor at the same time preserved their own kin groups. Yet women’s attention to family duties represented a drain on their time and physical resources that might have otherwise have been expended in the workforce” (1985/1995:4).
The ambiguity of dual mothering of their own children as well as their employers meant for black mothers the negation of the private home, both pre- and post-emancipation. It did not necessitate the neglect of children, but induced an extended family structure which many believe originated in African cultures (James 1993). This network of kinship ties produced “other-mothers” and extended provisions of care for the children of poorer mothers. For black families, mothering in public became a tangible means of survival. These historical facts have created, however, a hierarchy of motherhood in the United States. Thus, the domesticity that white women were afforded in the nineteenth century and later disparaged in the twentieth century was clearly a phenomenon that could not transcend race or class.
Again, although the middle-class standard of mothering would eventually be applied to all mothers, it was not economically or practically within the reach of all women dissimilarly privileged, although most would eventually ascribe to it. In fact, Herbert Gutman asserts, in his extensive historiography of black families in the U.S., that slave families commonly attempted to emulate the practices of their owners, although this was a nearly impossible task for families whose members were sold individually (Gutman 1976).
A third trajectory that emerged was a black middle class that produced a population of educated Negro women who politicized black issues. Perhaps the earliest group formed by black Negro women, or “club women” was the Women’s Loyal Union, in support of Ida B. Wells’ anti-lynching campaign (Davis 1981). Though their values and relative privatization from state intrusion closely paralleled those of white middle class women, they remained stigmatized by race and so shared problems common to lesser privileged people of color. These women effectively bridged gaps across class lines by reaching out to the black community through the formation of support networks for working mothers, girls clubs, and educational institutions. Debate continues as to whether the clubs that existed roughly between 1890 and 1940 originated to advance women’s issues or the issues of all blacks (hooks 1984). The safest assumption is that they were women’s organizations that worked in tandem with other black organizations to advance the causes of blacks in general, and black women in particular. This movement has been historically documented to have intervened in the lives of less fortunate women in profound ways; perhaps to the extent of addressing certain social problems within the black community into which the state chose not to intervene (Gordon 1991).
The distinctions between mothers has been made because when the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDA) reports the maltreatment of 879,000 children (2000 figures), the statistic does not acknowledge that the majority of the perpetrators (60%) are women (2000 figures for parents and caretakers reported) who have come under the surveillance of the state and whose lives are a matter of public record. The women represented in these figures are most frequently not privileged by race and/or class, and their mothering is not protected from the intrusive glare of social service workers. They are women whose lives are made public to social welfare workers who feel they must protect their children. These women, therefore, do their mothering in public, and do not enjoy the sanctity of the home. Their mothering becomes informed by the social service agencies that often impose ideologies on women who choose not to ascribe to them or are financially unable to do so.
There is no body of literature that adequately captures the way in which child welfare is ideologically informed. There is rather a body of literature that addresses child welfare and its consequences. This review will focus on the state’s intrusion into the home for the sake of child welfare. An examination of the literature will reveal two points of discourse: How, with the exceptions of physical and sexual abuse, which require physical substantiation, children are removed for the more conspicuous issues of poverty that veil less conspicuous issues of sexuality and morality, and how the “bad” mother has become a diversion from ineffectual policy. Feminists have not only identified the disparate public and private spheres of home and work for men and women, but have described the dilemmas of the home, namely, women’s isolation and susceptibility to abuse. But before there was discourse on women, there was discourse on children. The following review will examine the varying methods - historical analysis, positivistic approaches, policy evaluation, and the case study - as they pertain to child welfare work, and inherent themes of the sexualized and immoral mother that have made public the private affairs of the home.
Phillipe Aries was perhaps the first to articulate the genesis of modern childhood in Europe, which he traced to the seventeenth century (1962). Prior to this period, Aries reasons, conditions were such that no intimate attachments were made with children, who were regularly lost in infancy, although he acknowledges that sacralization of children preceded declines in infant mortality. Aries traces the genesis of childhood through European iconography and argues that “although demographic conditions did not greatly change between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, and although child mortality remained at a very high level, a new sensibility granted these fragile, threatened creatures a characteristic which the world had hitherto failed to recognize in them: as if it were only then that the common conscience had discovered that the child’s soul too was immortal” (1962:43). Prior to this period children were considered soulless, sometimes evil entities who commingled with adults in adult affairs. The modern European family was, as in the U.S., a middle-class and aristocratic phenomenon before it was evidenced in poorer populations. Shorter’s analysis of the modern family in America, however, pays closer attention to the role of mothers in child well-being in the formation of the family, which is in accord with most accounts of the origins of the nuclear family in America (1977).
Historical evidence show that prior to the late nineteenth century, the father served as the moral standard for children (Chesler, 1986). According to Phyllis Chesler in Mother’s on Trial, the industrialization of the United states demarcated a period that created a “cult of motherhood” and consequently resulted in a symbiotic relationship between “good” mothers and “sanctified” children that had not yet been witnessed in the United States. Chelser’s work, a compilation of case studies that delineate the “state’s appropriation of a mother’s child,” traces the legal and social dimensions of the state’s power to remove children, often on the basis of moral issues, in the interest of child welfare. This is in accord with other findings that have shown that the morality of parents has traditionally been grounds for the removal of children by the state (Ashby 1997, Crenson, 1998). Though feminist theorists like Chesler attribute the preoccupation with the mother’s sexuality to patriarchy, child welfare practices have also been interpreted as a capitalistic endeavor that arose with the sacralization of childhood (Zelizer, 1985).
But both poor mothers and fathers were vulnerable to the involuntary removal of their children as early as the seventeenth century (Levine and Levine 1970, Crenson 1998). According to LeRoy Ashby, the practice of indenturing the children of the poor was borne out of the colonies’ attempt to reduce the dependency of children on the state. Ashby’s critical historiography of social agencies also demarcates the history of child welfare practices that began much earlier than industrialization with “orphan courts” that existed as early as the sixteenth century in Virginia and Maryland. The genesis of orphan courts was the state’s response to children orphaned upon arrival in the colonies. Definitions of orphans would eventually expand to include not only children who lacked parents, but the children of the destitute, as well as children who were “moral orphans” (1997: 31). In the stead of absent or negligent fathers, the state retained custody of orphaned children under the doctrine of parens patriae, which granted the state the authority to remove children from the homes of parents who were considered by state officials to be inadequate as determined (Levine and Levine 1970, Best 1990, Ashby 1997).
Adequacy appears at this time to have been defined by a middle-class constituency, as the earliest child welfare policy was based on English Poor Law. Ashby asserts that the state’s intervention in the removal of children has been largely a capitalistic pursuit that has resulted in sanctions against the poor. This was perhaps due to customary beliefs of the period that parental adequacy was wholly contingent upon the parents’ economic ability to sustain their children as well as their own morality (Ashby 1997, Crenson, 1998).
Until the nineteenth century both enslaved and indentured children were sold at auction. The Progressive era, (1890 and 1920), a period of social reform following industrialization, placed a higher value on children’s bonds within the family. However, the newly idealized child was more a product of the middle class, as reformers of this period were burdened with class biases that evoked “a class-based propensity to find parents, typically working-class mothers, culpable of lifestyles and poor methods of childrearing” (Ashby 1997:82). The juvenile court originating in Illinois in 1899 was charged with the disposition of neglected, delinquent, and otherwise abandoned children. Thus, government intervention clearly originated in the late nineteenth century as a response to both colonial morality and poverty.
Though it can be argued that these problems can be defined within situational or psychological contexts historically, the state has found parents unfit for two reasons: immorality and poverty (Chesler 1986, Crenson, 1998). Crenson further asserts that the American response to child welfare has been both reactionary and punitive toward poor women.
The tendency to pathologize poverty and women has been overtly constructed into historical accounts of social welfare. A Social History of Helping Services (Levine and Levine 1970), in which post-industrial social reform is historicized, demarcates the period between 1890 and 1920 as a period of industrialization, mass immigration, and migration, resulting in high rates of poverty and delinquency. The authors propose two models of helping services historically used: the situational approach, which has been used during periods of social reformation, and the intra-psychic approach, which is used during periods of conservatism. Levine and Levine differentiated the two to explain the motivation of social programs that placed an emphasis on societal problems or individual responsibility, respectively. Juvenile courts, almhouses, and schools were found to be products of social reformation programs aimed at socially controlling poverty and the children of the impoverished.
The goal of this historiography, however, was not merely to record history, but to explain how the country’s failure to sustain social welfare programs resulted in crisis for the poor and non-white: “When we think of the degree of family disorganization in lower-income Negro groups, when we think of the lower-class person’s reluctance to deal with authority, and when we think of the requirements most clinics have that at least one, if not both parents, participate in treatment, it is not surprising that lower-income families are systematically screened out of existing child guidance services” (15). The period following social reformation of the early twentieth century is defined by the authors as an era of conservatism that would eventually lead to the aforementioned discord in low-income and Negro families.
The approach to maltreatment appears to have been defined not only by the historical contexts of particular periods, but by the political climate. This has been exhibited by the creation of almhouses, children’s asylums, and orphanages. In Building the Invisible Orphange, A Prehistory of the American Welfare System, Crenson discusses how the definition of “orphan” had been broadened by the late nineteenth century to include not only children who lacked parents, but impoverished children and those who had morally irresponsible parents. Juvenile asylums of the period were similarly instituted to care for the children of “degraded women.”
Crenson reports that one of the most common practices of the nineteenth century was the “placing-out” of poor children to families who took them on as a means of securing additional laborers in their homes. The contradiction in this practice was the romanticization of children that privileged the children of the middle class to a period of idleness now defined by childhood. The practice of placing-out was a form of poverty management and child welfare. In fact, they were not so much altruistic endeavors as what was seen as a necessary form of social control.
Organized response to the cruelty to children began in 1874 in New York when a child by the name of Mary Ellen was brought to the attention of the courts. The child was removed from the custody of her caregiver and consequently taken into the care of the American Society for the Protection of Animals. That year the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children was formed, but its scope would broaden with that of other agencies that followed, to include other offenses of maltreatment, including neglect and abandonment (Hankerson 1979). Thus, child protection coalesced and became subsumed by child welfare.
When the American response to child welfare began, however, is not as critically important as the fact that the country’s response to it has been an intrusive endeavor. Joel Best in Threatened Children (1990), posits that child welfare paradigms are ideologically informed and politically mutable. These subtle changes are reflected in the language used to describe needy children, e.g., the battered child evolved into the maltreated child and eventually the neglected child. Best posits that decriminalization of child abuse and transforming it into a social welfare issue "granted child-protection workers extraordinary powers to investigate cases, separate children from their parents and the like" (1990: 70).
Other critical analyses of the child welfare system such as Susan Janko's, Vulnerable Children, Vulnerable Families (1994), describe the consequences of intrusive child welfare practices that objectify families, upon reports of abuse and neglect. Support for the state’s intrusiveness into the home is felt to be a reaction to pathological images induced in the American psyche in response to child victims (Eberle & Eberle 1986, Janko 1994). The overwhelming response to child victimization that Janko chronicles has in turn produced an entire industry of professionals with no personal allegiance to the children whom they service. An analysis of the existing child welfare system, In the Best Interest of the Child (Goldstein, et al, 1986) has shown that children’s welfare is presently entrusted to agents of the state who often conflate personal beliefs with professional roles. The authors assert that the varied professional roles and the roles of the varied professionals who work with children include psychologists who act as lawyers, lawyers who act as psychologists and judges who act as counselors, each driven by personal beliefs that practically affect outcomes (Goldstein, et al, 1986).
Feminist accounts of the state agency within the homes of private citizens have been anthologized in Bad Mothers (Ladd-Taylor and Umansky, 1998) which consists of contemporary case histories of mothers sanctioned for various innocuous forms of neglect. Though historically both men and women have been at the mercy of the state in matters concerning the welfare of their children, the fact is that there are currently over 12,000,000 reported female headed households. The increase in single-parenting after WWII has been attributed to a number of sociological variables that generally pathologize poor families and women. Regardless of its cause, the effect has been a larger number of children living in homes headed by women. The most significant result of this finding is that it makes women vulnerable to state intrusion.
Martha Minow in “We, The Family: Constitutional Rights and American Families” argues that the Progressive era of reform broadened the scope of the state’s power into the affairs of the family with the advent of state societies to prevent abuse and neglect. The increase in the state’s power has conversely limited parents’ agency in respect to their own children. Policy analysis appears henceforth to reflect these changes. An evaluation of welfare policy analysis has demonstrated that analysis is often as biased as the policy it intends to inform. The Washington Conference of 1909, presided over by President Roosevelt, introduced the idea of affording “fit” widowed mothers financial aid in the form of a mother’s pension. This evolved into Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) in 1935 as Title V of the Social Security Act, which similarly had a “suitable mother” requirement. The relegation of the administration of ADC to the states made consistency of allotments and criteria impossible. Anti-ADC sentiment of the 1950’s spurred by the increasing number of non-white, poor single mothers, eventually led to close scrutiny of single women who failed to meet the suitable home requirement (Ashby 1997). It has been noted that the original plan developed at the White House Conference of 1909 was to assist “worthy” mothers, but a degree of political correctness for the time determined that the wording should reflect the belief that even if monies were spent on mothers of illegitimate children, this would effectively save the mother “from a life of immorality” (Crenson 1998:14).
The White House Conference on Child Health and Protection held in 1930 was presided over by President Hoover. The country’s preoccupation with delinquent and neglected children had shifted to “an increasing awareness of the critical role of adults who, in one manner or another, are directing, nurturing, treating, and educating the child” (Frank 1931: 1008). In his evaluation of proposed policy for children’s welfare, Lawrence Frank noted that there had been a significant shift in the age distribution of women bearing children as well as a consequent shift in “the focus of family life” (1931:1004). It was believed that these dynamic conditions would greatly affect the welfare of children. Frank described a vision of broadened emphasis on the child that would encompass the practices of medicine, federal, state, local governments, and the community. The impetus for the conference was in fact “wholesome childhood”, as childhood had by now become definitively constructed as a separate stage in development.
The impact of the conference was believed to be an opportunity for the government to integrate every aspect of child welfare into the lives of American children. Frank was actually describing a burgeoning bureaucracy of child welfare services that would nullify the sanctity of the home, as he wrote, “Perhaps the most generally significant aspect of the conference is the evidence it gives that child welfare is ceasing to be a program of specific activities and services for a group of disadvantaged children and is emerging as a goal of social endeavor, to be sought through many complex changes and adjustments. This point appears in the discussion of questions far removed from actual, direct contact with children” (1931:1006). The White House Conference of 1930 appears to have demarcated a paradigmatic shift in child welfare policy from children necessitating state services to a broader universe encompassing all American children. The increased preoccupation with child welfare was to be demonstrated by an increase in state agency that would presumably afford all children a wholesome childhood.
It appears that nearly thirty years later the focus remained on poor and minority children. In a 1959 article published in The Journal of Negro Education, Rose Thomas wrote of black mothers receiving Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), “Moreover, basic research now in progress weakens stereotyped thinking in regard to “the Negro mother” in view of conclusive data which reveals that the middle class Negro working mother desires and expects to work while assuming responsibility for household duties and child-rearing – socio-cultural component of American life” [author’s italics] (1959:302). The position that mothers should work however, conflicted with ideology of theorists who reported that poor children’s state dependency was predominantly due to women’s independence following the war. Therefore the “socio-cultural component of American life” should have, in fact, been read as a component of American life for all men and black women. The contradictions between hegemonic ideals of mothering had not yet filtered into how black women should mother, if they were expected to work and not stay at home with their children. According to Duncan Lindsey, the largest number of reports on file for the NYS Central Register for Reports of Child Abuse (1974-1990) note: “child left unattended” (1994). Furthermore, the intrusion into the affairs of private citizens, specifically mothers has been historically accepted under the auspices of child welfare. Although “Family and Child Welfare Agencies and Juvenile Delinquency Prevention” was written as exploration for the necessity of ADC funds for the prevention of delinquency, the tenets of the agency were that children needed protection from “persons whose preparation for responsible parenthood has been inadequate” (1959:302). Although eloquently worded as to refer to both male and female parents, the report characterizes ADC families as being largely fatherless. Thomas’ analysis also defined the legitimacy of the state’s power to “offer protective services unsolicited, to neglecting parents, but in the interest of children” (302).
The categorization of services into protective and preventive allowed state intervention not only with families who did not seek help, but also with those who were deemed by the agency to be in need. In this article Thomas answers a conservative constituency that categorized mothers receiving services thusly, “To the ADC mother who has been the target of so much criticism because she has permitted herself to be involved in several irresponsible relationships, we say frankly that the agency and community know that this is not good for children. Can she do something more responsible? Does she want to? … It is when the agency is firm and clear about this and holds parents to their responsibility as parents that something does happen” (1959:302).
In this description of the social worker’s duty to the adult care-giver, is that the mother needing services is profiled as sexually irresponsible. The state, serving as disciplinarian, is granted and exercises the economic power of ADC to assign blame to mothers whom it is in the business of assisting. Implicit in Thomas’ comment is a judgment about the sexuality of a woman who raises fatherless children, and who is then economically monitored at the expense of her children’s livelihood.
Henry Hankerson was particularly critical of the White House Conferences that he asserted had not yet adequately addressed abuse. His analysis of current child welfare services delineated the constituents of abuse and neglect by current standards and described how practice had been driven by the ideology of their definition. Hankerson contended that although abuse and neglect had traditionally been categorized as issues of the lower-class, these problems transcended class boundaries; and further, psychological abuse was more likely to occur in higher-income families. His assertion that poor families were more prone to public scrutiny was not common among most theorists at that time. Although Hankerson espoused a very critical view of the existent child welfare system which he described as fragmented, he argued conclusively for a broadening of state intervention, on behalf of children.
Although most policy analysts were empathetic to the plight of the poor, their compassion for children and their welfare appears to have been ideologically informed. Again, the state’s increasing agency is assumed to be an effective means by which child welfare is to be addressed. As Minow asserted in her work on the rights of the American family, children’s rights were originally instituted to place limits on adult behavior (1987). The insistence of analysts that child welfare practices broaden to include the federal and state governments was undermining parental agency within the home.
The conflation of the issues of financial welfare and the general well-being of children was a direct result of the White House Conference of 1909 (Crenson 1998). As noted above, there were stirrings of discussions of the morality of unwed mothers, but it was the Social Security Act of 1935 (subchapter IV, Part A. 49, Statute 620), that appears to have definitively denied poor mothers the protection from government intervention within the home. The Supreme Court’s 1971 decision to uphold the right of the New York State Welfare Department to make home visits was evaluated by Nanette Dembitz, who was at the time a justice in the New York State Family Court. In response to a decision by the lower court to uphold a welfare mother’s refusal of home visits under Fourth Amendment Rights, the Supreme Court ruled that home-visits were not unreasonable, in light of the child’s needs. Although it has frequently been asserted that the home visit was necessary to discern the welfare of children, it has also been noted that these visits are just as often used to evaluate the morality of mothers (Ashby 1997, Brush 1997).
In her analysis of the states right to entry into the home of dependent families, Dembitz wrote that “As a judge of the New York State Family Court, I am concerned with the child welfare, rather than the fiscal, aspect of the home visit.” She continues, “Some child neglect or abuse cases have been brought to the family court as a result of the discovery during welfare home-visits of various difficulties: for example, the mother’s invalidism, alcoholism or heroin addiction; abnormal or unsafe housekeeping, such as never removing garbage or burning rags in dishes around the apartment; sharing the apartment with a psychotic or assaultive male or with homosexuals of the child’s sex” (391). In light of her own assertions, Dembitz felt that the interests of child welfare warranted more frequent home visits. Dembitz further argued that the child’s right to safety superceded the mother’s right to privacy. She additionally noted that governmental searches for a working male in the home were constitutional on the basis of fraud (1971), (yet entitlement to welfare was found to have no legal basis). Dembitz’ position may have indeed been a structural artifact of what Martha Minow asserts was the granting of adult rights to children. Minow’s discussion of constitutional rights as they pertain to families identifies the 1960’s and 1970’s as a period of rhetoric played out in the courts that advanced the rights of a number of groups, including children.
Lindsey’s critical analysis of the child welfare system, The Welfare of Children (1994) appears to be the least informed by ideological practice in his examination of child welfare policy. Lindsey posits that early child welfare services were more appropriately focused on intervention to help families, but historical analyses of the child welfare system have shown that policy has always been punitive toward the poor, unwed and/or immoral. He writes, “From the outset, the approach taken by agencies in investigating child abuse reports was accusatory. That is, the caseworker’s responsibility was to collect information that might eventually be used to build a case against the accused parent in order to protect the affected child. Whereas previously the welfare worker might have been viewed as coming forward to help a troubled family, the worker now was unmistakably cast in the role of the inquisitor prying into and judging the affairs of the family, with predictably adverse effects on the family” (1994:98). Decreasing financial support for the child welfare system resulted in what Lindsey called a “residual approach to child welfare” (1994:98) that could no longer sustain preventative programs aimed at reducing problems within the parent-child relationship. He asserts that the residual approach merely “polices” the poorest mothers and intervenes in only the most blatant cases of abuse. During the 1950’s most accounts substantiate a public backlash to Aid to Dependent Children which was now supporting more illegitimate, non-white children. This provided yet another contradictory element in that while conservatives felt that monies were meant to support suitable, moral mothers, the highest number of abuse reports was for children left unattended while their mothers worked. Lindsey cites divorce, the use of oral contraceptives, and illegitimacy as reasons for the increasing dependency on the social welfare system, though he never explains how oral contraceptives increase the number of dependent children. Lindsey concludes that the problems facing children were predominantly due to the inherent elements of the existent social structure, such as racism, and that further intrusiveness by the state would be futile.
More recently, policy evaluation has focused on monetary sanctions for women receiving AFDC benefits. Although the acronym AFDC implies financial assistance for the care and welfare of children, Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) evolved out of the widows’ pensions programs originally proposed at the 1930 White House Conference. The goal of ADC at the time was to keep families together by providing for dependent children within their own homes. In 1962, ADC was modified to include services to impoverished families with the goal of decreasing financial dependency through “rehabilitative services” to parents (Ashby 1997). Backlashes against the use of federal and state monies for the care of children have, as we have seen, historically targeted mothers who receive such aid. As of 1995, it was reported that approximately 5,000,000 families in the United States received aid in the form of cash allotments, medical benefits, housing assistance and food entitlements (Donovan 1995). The over-representation of blacks in welfare dependency has aided in the perpetuation of the stereotypical welfare mother who reproduces irresponsibly and bears children at the expense of the state (Jones 1985, Collins 1990/2000).
Levine and Levine’s assertion was that psychological approaches to child welfare are contingent upon the conservatism of the period that personalizes the impersonal issues of poverty. The Reagan era (1981-1989), a period of both prosperity and conservatism, spurred a decrease in services to dependent women and children which directly targeted black women (Collins 1990/2000). Proposed legislation to cap welfare benefits to children was perhaps the greatest point of contention amongst several proposals to decrease welfare spending. At the time of Patricia Donovan’s (1995) special report that examined the goals, rules, and the outcomes of the family cap, there was little or no evidence that the “illegitimacy ratio” had decreased in New Jersey, the first state to pilot caps on benefits. Although Donovan adequately raised legitimate concerns of the plan’s opponents, such as the veritable negative effects on child welfare, the issue of coerced financial “sterilization” was not Donovan’s point of contention. The family cap is perhaps the most explicit form of reproductive control of poor women with the exception of forced medical sterilization. The goal of the proposal introduced in 1992 by Congress was to decrease the number of dependent children by denying monetary benefits to mothers for any children born after implementation. According to Donovan, a provision by the federal government allows states to quickly by-pass certain requirements in enforcing the “cap.” This has resulted in the early adoption of the policy in several states.
The eugenics movement has been most closely related to the coerced sterilization of poor and minority women in the United States. In perhaps the most appropriately focused discussions on coerced sterilization, and family caps, Susan L. Thomas argued, “parallels exist between eugenic sterilization and proposals involving ‘voluntary’ birth control and benefit caps for indigent women on welfare, that current reforms are racially motivated, and that fertility regulation is a form of racism” (1998:420). Thomas traces how sterilization legislation, originally written to prevent the mentally disabled from reproducing, eventually led to a more diverse set of identifiable traits to be excised from the population. Traits that were based on women’s sexual proclivity, such as “gross sexual delinquency” (422), were eventually added, which resulted in the permanent sterilization of “many poor women and women on welfare” (422) prior to reform between the 1930’s and 1940’s. Thomas implicates recent events such as the introduction and widespread use of the Depo-Provera injection and Norplant device within minority communities as the reformulation of a new eugenics movement. It is further believed to be a diversion from the state’s resistance to providing appropriate services to dependent women and children.
In 1996, AFDC became Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF). Though it did not structurally differ from AFDC, its new name emphasized that it was a temporary means of financial assistance to poor families with definitive time allotments. Janice Peterson’s evaluation of the most recent goals of TANF outlines the key issues facing congressional reauthorization of the current welfare program. Amongst the issues addressed, the most relevant for discussion here are of the elimination of welfare entitlements and compulsory work and its consequent sanctions. Peterson states, “Under the AFDC program, states were required to aid all families eligible under state income standards; this is no longer the case. It is now left up to the states to determine when and under what conditions they will provide cash public assistance to poor families. Although the federal law prohibits states from using TANF funds to assist certain categories of individuals or families, there is no requirement that a state provide assistance to any individual or family” (2002:4). Because welfare policy appears to be ideologically informed, this issue is key to how the state may distinguish the worthiness of groups and individuals. Patricia Hill Collins (1990, 2000) has asserted that stereotypes of welfare queens that predominated the 1980’s created a backlash against black women who have been implicated in their own poverty. Further, Peterson suggests that blacks and other minorities may receive differential treatment as a result of this policy that does not legally provide for state accountability.
The compulsory work requirement is the result of legislation passed in 1996 that requires mothers to work within two years of the receipt of benefits. The power of the individual states to determine their own policy for allotments has led to inconsistency, so that individuals from state to state are not afforded the same rights or limits. According to Peterson, by 1999 28 states had imposed immediate work requirements. Sanctions for not meeting work requirements also vary between states; Peterson reports that 19 of the states impose cessation of food stamps, 12 states impose the elimination of Medicaid benefits, while most of the states (38) invoke financial sanctions that eliminate all financial benefits to needy families.
The most provocative issues in this analysis are the government’s strategy to reduce dependency. The family formation goal is guided by a list of incentives to the states to reduce illegitimacy by “giving states more flexibility to serve more two-parent families, rewarding states with highest reduction in their non-marital birth ratio who have also reduced their abortion rate, the denial of assistance to some minor parents, the establishment of federal funding for ‘abstinence only’ sex education” (5). Peterson notes feminist arguments against compulsory marriage requirements as realistic conditions for the financial well-being of poor women. Additionally, she insists that the structural goals of TANF reform will not necessarily meet the needs of poor women and children who may indeed become even poorer as a result. Peterson insists that an increase in programs that provide financial safety nets, adequate day care, and educational programs are the only manners under which poor women and children will thrive in the context of current reform policy.
Peterson’s feminist treatment of welfare policy provides the most focused analysis of issues pertinent to welfare. However, she fails to address the relevance of the states’ intervention and the moral basis of compulsory marriage. Unlike many analysts Peterson acknowledges the Western feminist argument relevant to the inherent dangers that women living with abusive men face. Like most policy analysts, however, Peterson’s call for more social programs ignores the obtrusiveness of state agencies.
Empirical studies that pathologized the single-headed households followed the publication of the The Negro Family: the Case for National Action (1965), wherein Senator Patrick Moynihan declared a ‘crisis’ in the black family. By describing the black, female-headed household as pathological, Moynihan had effectively opened the Negro family up for discourse on its inherent pathology (hooks 1981, Collins 1990). In a 1966 study of the pathological characteristics of welfare mothers, Parker and Kleiner reported that the manifested pathology in dependent Negro women was due in part, to the absence of the male in the home. However, the import of the study, the authors asserted was to child-welfare and how this pathology is trans-generationally perpetuated. Parker and Kleiner further argued that these findings “may have some serious consequences for children raised in these homes” (1966:512). The authors compared male-headed, two-parent Negro families to female-headed single- parent families to discern the effects of the mothers’ mental status (coded as neurotic symptoms, discrepancy between mother’s ideal and actual self-image, reference group discrepancy, aspirations for a hypothetical son, and aspirations for herself). In Characteristics of Negro Mothers in Single-Headed Households, the authors define poor black mothers as pathological, displaying their inherent bias. Findings that suggest that poor, single mothers experience more psychological distress and self-esteem have more recently been replicated in works that correlate self-esteem, or relative lack thereof, to the effects of state dependency. (Cole and Lejeune 1972, Seccombe, et al, 1998).
A discussion of Parker and Kleiner’s sampling methods is beyond the scope of this paper; however, its relevance to the reported findings warrants mention. The authors state that they sampled 1489 residents of a Philadelphia Negro community and 1423 mentally ill residents within the same community. A smaller sample of 389 male-headed households and 115 female-headed households was drawn from both larger community samples. The authors never distinguished findings between the reported sample of mentally ill residents from which the smaller sample was reportedly drawn. As a result, the results may indeed reflect the pathology of the pre-diagnosed sample of mentally ill respondents and not those of financially dependent women as reported. However, their argument was that pathology was a condition of single-mothering and that its effects were a detriment to child welfare.
Similarly, Martin and Walters’ study (1982), which sampled 489 cases of substantiated child maltreatment in Nashville’s and Savannah’s protective services, used caseworkers’ subjective and inconsistent definitions of family types to discern parental propensity for maltreatment. Subjective definitions on the part of the caseworkers appear to be inextricable from the variables used to discern parental effects on various forms of maltreatment, particularly with the variable “Mother shows evidence of sexual promiscuity/alcohol abuse.” The primary problem with this variable is the conflation of promiscuity and alcoholism, which (1) should be mutually exclusive by their very definitions and (2) is subjectively defined by the caseworker’s sexual attitudes and mores. Its cohort, “parent single -- living with man”, is similarly subject to pre-defined assumptions on the part of the caseworker that probably more readily address the caseworker’s ideology than that of the mother.
More provocative is Martin and Walters reported finding that “Mothers who evidenced sexual promiscuity and/or alcoholism, temporary financial problems, and relative health, were the most likely to abandon their biological children even though the children did not evidence any major problems themselves” (1982:269). The authors explain how the aforementioned financial problems may induce mothers to abandon their children, but an explanation as to how sexual promiscuity might induce a mother to abandon her child is blatantly lacking. When empiricism lends itself to ideology, the result is often the reliance on variables that describe the mothers’ sexuality and morality.
It is not surprising that none of these factors was found to be a determinant of emotional abuse. Temporary financial problems and parent intellectual inadequacies were found to be significant predictors of neglect. No significant relationships were found between the predictors and sexual abuse. The goal of understanding the causes of maltreatment is indeed an honorable one. Again, the problem with studies that attempt to uncover causative agents is with the primary assumptions of the researcher. The truth may never be discerned when child welfare officials focus on the sexual predilection of women who are defined by their income and relative social status.
Though reports have negated the low-income family’s propensity for abuse (Hankerson 1979) empirical studies that attempt to discern the causative factors of abuse have generally focused on the latent aspects of low-income women’s sexuality, that is, fertility and family planning in low-income. This is inherent in the selection of the variables that, if proven, significantly affect the dependent variable (abuse or neglect), that would indeed have grave implications on child welfare policy. A 1991 study on the relationship between unplanned childbearing and family size sampled 292 AFDC families from Baltimore in order to discern the effects of unplanned childbearing and family size on abuse and neglect (Zuravin 1991). The findings only substantiate that abuse, neglect and impoverishment are artifacts of ideology that conflates poverty with pathology.
On the issue of neglect, unplanned childbearing was found to have no significant effect. There was a significant correlation between the family size and neglect, however. Zuravin conclusively states that these findings indicate that [child welfare] “caseworkers need to help such families prevent the birth of more children” (1991:159). Marital status was not addressed in this study, and although it is evident that men do not bear children, women were the only participants in a study of “families.” Poverty was built into the study, which assumes that large families and irresponsible childbearing are conditions for abuse and neglect. The problem was not so much with the findings as it was with the variables. Further, the selection criteria that focused on poor families assume poverty as an a priori condition of abuse and neglect. Findings suggested that large family size significantly affects both abuse and neglect, whereas unplanned childbearing had no significant effect on neglect. The author concludes that unplanned childbearing significantly affects abuse. Perhaps more important is the implication for policy as a result of studies of this nature. The objectivity attributed to empirical studies implies unbiased results which cannot be obtained from variables that are inextricable from an ideology that conflates the issues of maternal sexuality with neglect and abuse.
But facts are facts and indisputably, a biological fact is that women possess the physical capacity to nourish children, whereas men do not. The state’s agency to intervene in breastfeeding has been a point of contention between white women, who claimed the right to do so (after centuries of delegation of the chore to black women), and a government that has discouraged the practice through “indecent exposure” legislation as well as through reports of its relative detrimental effects. Laura Umansky’s “Breastfeeding in the 1990’s” provides contemporary evidence of the state’s ability to intervene on behalf of children. The resultant removal of Karen Carter’s child was based on her own self report of sexual arousal during breastfeeding. It is worth noting that Carter had called a central volunteer hotline to ask if sexual arousal during breastfeeding was normal. She was consequently referred to local law authorities and charged with sexual abuse of her infant. Like many other women who have been investigated by the state, the subject was seeking help. It appears that overwhelmingly, state intervention on the behalf of children occurs out of parental need. Thus, the high incidence of black children removed for neglect may indeed be an artifact of structural conditions that have sustained poverty for certain groups.
Dr. C. Henry Kempe and colleagues are commonly cited as the “discoverers” of child abuse after their publication in the American Journal of Medicine. In response to the discovery by radiologists in 1962 who had observed atypical fractures in small children, Kempe et al coined the term “battered child syndrome” (Pfohl 1977, Best 1990), introducing a new pathology. Child abuse however remained a problem of the lower-class, as doctors were often reticent to report its incidence among private, paying patients. Thus the common definition of the abusive parent was imposed upon the poor whose medical care was frequently sought in public venues (Hankerson 1979). Critics of the American response to children’s welfare have, in fact, faulted the system with the secondary victimization of children (Eberle & Eberle 1984, Janko). The fact is that whenever the auspices of child welfare are sought, needed or evoked, the home becomes an arena for public discourse and intervention.
Though the actions of the state against poor minority women can be explicated by their relative reliance on public agencies to solve private problems, the state retains the power to intervene on behalf of children when aide is neither sought nor requested. White women have been sanctioned for racial transgressions against their white children. Renee Romano has documented that “Between 1945 and 1985, approximately twenty-five child custody disputes arose on the state appeals court level after local trial courts had denied white women who had married black men custody of their white children from previous marriages” (1989: 230). The ground for removal in all cases was the “unfitness” of the mothers. Because women and children have historically been the “property” of their husbands, the welfare of white children is considered at risk whenever a child is transferred to a black-headed household. As late as 1980, the Supreme Court of Iowa decided that Sandra Ann Kramer was “subjecting [of] the children to a biracial relationship and allowing such a relationship to exist in the presence of the children is not in their best interest and is going to make their lives in the future more difficult.” Although the court was explicit in deciding that the race of Kramer’s boyfriend was not a causal factor in their findings, she was consequently denied custody. Kramer had been found emotionally unstable and “had behaved immorally in the presence of her children” (Romano 1998: 238). In another case it was found that Sheila Schexnayder should lose custody of her children because “the mother’s conduct here was particularly scandalous and offensive to the sensibilities of the local community in that her lover was of another race” (241). The mother, who could not be sanctioned under earlier anti-miscegenation laws, did not lose custody of children on the basis of race. The decision was eventually overturned and the mother lost custody of her children because “By having an affair with a black man, Schexnayder [the mother] had shown a lack of “love and consideration for her children, as well as a disregard for generally accepted moral principals” (241).
Interestingly, Romano notes that the same considerations for child welfare are not afforded to biracial children whose white mothers seek custody. She suggests that this relative lack of attention from the state is actually a punitive action against the mother, who will always be publicly branded with black off-spring. The contradiction, of course, is that white privilege is a condition for the welfare of white children, whose rights supercede the sexuality of their mothers, whereas black children serve as symbols of their mother’s aberrant sexuality, and therefore racially supercede the sexuality of their white mothers. It is likely that white women’s issues are more often based upon concerns that make explicit their sexuality, while there is a standard assumption of implicit sexuality among black and/or poor women. None of these issues, however, affect child welfare, although they do illustrate that the state perceives white privilege to be a central tenet in the welfare of white children.
Perhaps, one of the most deliberately discriminatory practices of the state pertaining to child welfare is the sanctioning of lesbian mothers. Sanctioning by the state in the form of children’s removal from the home is akin to those sanctioning white mothers who marry black men. Chesler’s accounts of lesbian mothers delineate the similarities between lesbian and non-lesbian mothers, who generally mother their children in the same manner. She finds that overwhelmingly lesbians lose custody of their children to their husband due to the perceived victimization of their children. Chesler’s interpretation of this sanctioning is that men are psychologically threatened by women who act like men. Christine Allison’s “The Making of a ‘Bad’ Mother, A Lesbian Mother and her Daughters” is a case study that elucidates the personal account of a lesbian mother subjected to state intervention one behalf of her ex-husband. The court’s decision to remove her children was an overt act against the mother’s sexuality, as the court ruled that “the active practice of a homosexual life style is so antithetical to a heterosexual one that the introduction of the children into its actual practice will inevitably cause severe conflicts and turmoil within the children” (1997: 252). It was noted, however, that the children requested to live with their mother, who eventually lost custody. Allison also notes that the mother’s sexuality was the only argument made against her in her trial.
Norman and Mancuso suggest that the precariousness of the lesbian mother in a patriarchal society makes her particularly vulnerable to state intervention. Because the lesbian mother is “condemned by law, religion, educational institutions, their own families, and until recently, the entire medical profession, for their sexual orientation” (1980: 157), the lesbian mother (until recently) was probably more blatantly subjected to state intervention on behalf of her children than even black women. These statistics, however, are sorely lacking, because lesbianism or sexual orientation is more readily concealed than perhaps race or class. In the aforementioned case, the mother refused to appeal for fear that she and her children would be twice victimized. Furthermore, state interventions in these case studies that have focused on white women, appear to have been executed against the explicitness of maternal sexuality and morality. Conversely, state intervention against poor and/or minority women always assumes the implicit sexuality of the mother. Patricia Hill Collins attributes the sexualization of the black mother to stereotyping that has its origins in the idealized “breeder woman” of slavery (1990). Perhaps the inherent association of black women’s sexuality to deviance has made them more vulnerable to moral scrutiny, hence the lack of relative interest on the subject by feminists, who are only subjected to the state’s scrutiny when they are explicit in their sexuality. When ideology informs social problems such as child welfare, the latent issues of good and bad mothering tend to divert our attention from necessary reform beneficial to all women and children.
That the very basis of child welfare policy intervention has depended upon the sexuality of mothers or their propensity to engage in sex outside of marriage is a problem of deep concern. This analysis has demonstrated that child welfare workers in the U.S. have historically concerned themselves with the morality of women, though poor women have been found historically to be the most vulnerable. Most historical analysis has succumbed to the ideology of particular eras. The 1980’s marked a particular period in the annals of child welfare literature. A precipitous increase in reported abuse cases appears to have resulted in an increase in discourse that began to trace the historical roots of child welfare. This body of literature, however, was conspicuously silent in its appraisals of the system. It was merely reporting. Following publicized failings of the child welfare system, the 1990’s produced an onslaught of literature that criticized a system that was found to be obtrusive and finally, sexist and punitive. The literature of policy analysis appears to have followed a similar pattern, as analysts tend to the execution of policy while refusing to critically examine the latent effects of institutionalized racism, classism, and sexism that only subject particular populations to their rigors. This unintentional participation perpetuates itself through analysts’ responses to problems that have historically been defined by ideology found to be most punitive toward women, the poor, and non-white populations.
The larger issues of the state’s power to define morality as it pertains to mothers and their children has largely been ignored by Western feminists because ideology is not only sexist, but classist and racist. The relativity of privacy is often ignored because the poor have historically been subjected to state intervention out of necessity. Feminist theory that discounts the intersections of race, class, and gender privileges the lived experience of particular groups over others. Finally, the potential for objectivity in empiricism is effectively nullified by the ideological constraints of the social scientists who create variables that define the mother as deviant. Objectivity and thus substantive issues of neglect and abuse may be better discerned when researchers look for determinants outside of impoverished, minority homes, and the homes of sexual white women.
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Citation Format
JENdA: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies: Issue 5, 2004.