Mother guilt as a luxury item

Where are all the black mother bloggers? Or any mother bloggers apart from the white ones? Not on the big mother blogging sites, as Veronica I. Arreola points out here in a piece for Bitch magazine. I don’t read sites like Alpha Mom so I’m not all that familiar with them, but I can see from a quick browse that the writers and images are all very homogeneous, preeeetty white and affluent too. Stepping just outside the mainstream and big parenting blogs like Offsprung have a little more diversity but still nothing like equal coverage. What are we missing by having such a homogeneous group of bloggers on the big sites? Arreola makes the point that –

When Mommy Blogger A waxes rhapsodic over the $5-a-pound local, organic heirloom tomatoes she picked up at Whole Foods, does that resonate with readers (or other mommy bloggers) who struggle to put an entire dinner on the table for $5? If Mommy Blogger B brilliantly paints the picture of how she had to fire her nanny over religious differences, can a working-class mom of color feel that story after her own 10-hour workday? This cross-cultural division extends to the comments section of blogs: What does it say to writers in a community when someone’s snarky post about nanny stealing gets a ton of responses and another’s post about explaining sexism and racism in the presidential race to her 10-year-old daughter gets not a peep? 


Deesha Philyaw has also written a really terrific piece in the same magazine about the absence of books about motherhood by women of colour. Philyaw notes that much of the subject matter of ‘mummy memoirs’ is reserved for unpacking the guilt experienced by mothers in deciding whether to combine paid work with their motherhood, a guilt which can seem luxurious if you’ve never had a choice about whether to work or not.

That black mothers were not among the combatants on the fake battlefield of the mommy wars is not coincidental. This simply wasn’t our fight. In her book Having It All: Black Women and Success, Veronica Chambers notes, “Guilt just isn’t a currency in our lives the way it is in the lives of white women.” Further, as economist Julianne Malveaux observed in USA Today, “Some African-American women want to yawn at the angst about shouldering multiple burdens and juggling multiple roles. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt so long ago that I recycled it.” Since the 1940s, black women have outnumbered white women in the labor force. According to some reports, the black middle class owes its existence to black women’s presence in the workplace. 


While she also discusses the hollow nature of certain mummy memoirs, for the most part Philyaw has bigger fish to fry. She revisits US history and the failure to include black women properly in the struggle for women’s rights, a flaw, she argues compellingly, which carries through to the current struggle for mothers’ rights. There is strong potential for the campaign for mothers’ rights to be dominated by relatively privileged middle-class women, and while the work of these women is and has been terribly important, Philyaw’s piece sums up the problem of privilege very nicely.

Although, I hesitate at little at the following two points. 

Maybe we look at our girlfriends—working women who aren’t mothers—and are reminded that it’s not all about the mommies. Maybe we realize that mommy-centrism lets employers and policy-makers off the hook with regard to family-friendly workplace changes that would allow mothers and fathers to work more flexible hours without sacrificing their careers in the process.

I don’t like the term “mommy-centrism”, though it isn’t the writer’s intention, it reminds me of this. I think it is a silencing term. (I’ve discussed this previously here and here and I don’t wish to clutter this post so I’ll be brief on this point). I think, if anything, it is long past time for some mummy-centrism. Motherhood is probably the most productive activity on the planet, the greatest contributor to economic output, and yet it is almost entirely unaccounted for, which makes motherhood a very vulnerable state for women to enter. While Philyaw is right to warn against the crowding out of black voices, I still don’t consider motherhood to be a subject which has suffered from excessive focus.  

And I’m split on this other one, because I have some reservations about the idea that petitioning for workplace policies for mothers necessarily exacerbates the gender inequity of caring work. Caring work, parenting work, and domestic work are all done largely by women, and little has changed in the last twenty years, it is terribly gendered and to tackle it otherwise can seem to me a little disingenuous. For example, talking about ‘parental leave’ in referring to the first months of a baby’s life, as we currently are in Australia, when we don’t have any kind of universal paid maternity leave scheme seems to be missing a big issue. Women still aren’t granted paid time off from work to recover from birth and to establish a bond with their tiny infant in Australia and the United States. That’s insane. 

Anyway, I really don’t wish to labour these points and detract from Philyaw’s terrific article. And speaking broadly about the politics of motherhood, if you’re feeling charged on the subject you might enjoy this review of the brand new book The Maternal is Political in Feministing… and also the reviewer’s interview with the book’s editor.