Motherhood ideology, individualism, and mothers in prison
“I’m gonna miss being a mom, I wanted to be a mom, I wanted to be there. I want to see my first grandchild, and I want to watch my daughters grow up, go to school…” – Mary, mother of four
The high standard to which mothers are held exists outside the material reality of our lives
Because mothers are widely believed to play a critical role in the organization of social life, everyone has a stake in how motherhood is defined and evaluated. The American ideology of motherhood is a set of interlocking ideas about what it means to be a mother and to perform mothering. Among these are notions of ideal mothering attitudes and practices, including limitless empathy, complete immersion in the care of children and needy others, and subordination of the mother’s own needs and desires to those of others. When we become mothers, we are held (often solely) responsible for the development of our children into healthy, competent, moral citizens and productive workers. When our children do not themselves become ideal members of society, it is assumed that we mothers have failed to live up to our natural responsibilities. Mothers are blamed for everything, from criminal behavior, to mental illness, to father-daughter abuse and incest.
The ideology of motherhood is hegemonic. In other words, those who receive it take it for granted; they understand it as the way things are or should be. The ideal mother is something that women are supposed to naturally become, yet her mothering practices are defined outside the social and material conditions of women’s lives. The kind of mother we think we are supposed to be is entirely irrelevant and indifferent to the real world we inhabit. The ideal mother is an arbitrary and oppressive social construction, and its violence is most evident on the bodies and lives of women of color and poor women, and their children.
Individualism creates material conditions that are hostile to good mothering, let alone ideal mothering
Motherhood is but one ideological form among others that work together to shape the context of American women’s mothering. The cult of American individualism paradoxically results in social and material conditions that prevent mothering, while at the same time reinforcing the ideology of motherhood. For example, individualism has given rise to the “war on crime” in the past two decades, which has redirected the public discourse away from the correlation between crime rates and social problems like poverty (and the institutions and social policies that cause poverty), and has placed the phenomenon of crime squarely and solely on the shoulders of individuals, leading to a meteoric rise in incarceration rates. This is especially true for women, whose numbers in prison have increased 6.3 times since 1980 (Bureau of Justice, 2002).
Poor women and women of color, and their children are most vulnerable
Poor people are much more likely to go to prison than anyone else, and women are more likely to be poor than men. U.S. public policies, contorted by the interdependent ideologies of individualism and motherhood, perpetuate women’s poverty by expecting them to bear most of the costs of child care and social reproduction, and to do so with diminished access to higher education; jobs that pay a living wage; quality daycare; health care; and safe, affordable housing, thanks most recently to so-called welfare reform. Under strict surveillance to successfully meet these hopelessly contradictory ideological expectations, poor women are sanctioned for their failure to become both self-made men and selfless mothers, thus continuing their impoverishment and increasing their risk of incarceration.
Criminal justice brings torturous ideological contradictions into clarity
Women’s status as mothers upon whom others are dependent is held irrelevant at almost all stages of the criminal justice process, from arrest to judgment and sentencing to incarceration. This is especially true for women of color, who are more likely to be arrested and indicted than white women, to receive longer sentences than whites, and to serve longer before being paroled. Incarcerated women are physically removed from their children while at the same time, little policy or programming is offered to enable them to care for their vulnerable children left behind. When children of incarcerated women exhibit troublesome behaviors, the most likely causes of their problems — the collective traumas of a history of poverty, parental substance abuse and mental illness, and family violence and instability; disrupted caregiving; exposure to danger as a result of not having a parent there to protect them; and separation from their primary caregivers — are not considered. Rather, it is deemed the sole failure of incarcerated women themselves to be good mothers. There is an assumption among practitioners, academics, public policy-makers and in the larger society that incarcerated mothers are simply incompetent to provide adequately for their children. However, in several studies incarcerated women have been found to exhibit appropriate maternal attitudes and behaviors, similar to their non-criminal counterparts.
I did my dissertation research in a women’s penitentiary in Texas. Because women comprise a relatively small portion of the total prison population, there are only a few women’s prisons in the state. Given that Texas is so large, and that prisons ordinarily are located away from major population centers, it was not uncommon for prisoners to reside four or more hours’ drive from their families. For families in poverty–and this was the case for almost every inmate I ever met–these women may have lived on the moon. Many women inmates had never received a visit from their children while in prison; some saw their children once a year. In Texas, prison inmates typically are not allowed to use the telephone so women’s only opportunity to communicate with their kids was through the mail. Most inmates are school dropouts, and the average educational achievement level is about 8 – meaning that on average, inmates test as if they have an 8th grade education. Twenty-eight percent are reading below 6th grade level. Their ability to build a meaningful connection with their children by exchanging letters is limited not only by their children’s literacy levels, but also their own.
These ideological contradictions are as good as violent attacks on women
In the U.S., we expect mothers to have limitless capacity to care for their children while withholding the material means for them to provide even minimal care. This has grave effects for mothers and children in poverty, especially those who commit crimes and become acquainted with criminal justice. Incarceration brings the problem into stark relief, by simultaneously placing the full responsibility for childrens’ upbringing on their mothers, while preventing those mothers from interacting with their children on any kind of regular basis.
The correspondences and contradictions of the ideologies of individualism and motherhood conspire to bring about the separation of mothers in poverty from their children (and the traumas associated with it) while providing rationale for this separation. Only in the realm of ideas do perpetual motion machines exist, to carry out the work of preserving social immobility. This immobility is torture, plain and simple, not only for the women who are separated from their children by time and space, but also for the 1.5 million children in the U.S. who have a parent in prison.
Some further reading.
