How Racism Forced Women to Choose Between Personhood and Motherhood
and raged a motherhood civil war that pits us all against each other
I’m sitting in a coffee shop right now, staring at the blinking cursor on this blank page. It feels as if it’s mocking me, pressuring me to come up with a witty beginning to this article that would qualify my writing as something worthy of others laying their eyes on. With each blink, the pressure intensifies. My heart rate increases. “Come on, Caroline. Say something. Prove that you’re a good writer. Write something so profound that everyone will realize what talent and inspiration they are missing out on. Write something that will make them rave about you.”
Nothing. I’ve got nothing. I continue to stare at the blank screen, questioning my ability to call myself a writer. Sure, I’ve written an entire book. Sure, I’ve written other articles that do provoke that rave that I hope for, but more often than not, when I’m finally able to show up to my writing platforms, I have nothing to say. And, of course, when I anxiously scroll social media, it seems as though everyone has not only something to say but also the perfect words for every circumstance we are facing as humans. “That’s supposed to be me,” I think to myself. “I’m supposed to be the one with the words that bring about transformation and healing to everyone who reads them.”
But, I still have nothing.
I don’t spend most of my days using the brain cells required to think critically, write profoundly, engage in intellectual dialogue, and the like. I spend most of my days getting screamed at by my 5-year-old daughter any time she doesn’t get her way, holding her back from kicking her 7-year-old sister when she’s on one of her dysregulated rage tirades. I spend most of my days preparing food, giving food, getting complaints about said food, and cleaning up said food. I spend most of my days teaching addition, subtraction, phonics, the water cycle, and the truthful, decolonized history of the origins of our country. I spend most of my days begging my darling daughters to get dressed for the 5th time in 5 minutes so we can make it to their co-op on time. I spend most of my days wiping tears and butts, hugging, kissing, disciplining, guiding, aiding, nurturing, and loving the heck out of two little girls. And, as frustrating, sometimes miserably lonely, and overstimulating it is to be with my kids all day every day, I wouldn’t trade it for the world. We chose to homeschool our kids because we believed it was the best option for their education. Their growth, love for learning, and closeness to each other have proven that we were correct in our decision. Plus, they love it, too. And I love that for them.
However, the result of this equally privileged and sacrificial choice is that my brain has very little, if any, room for cultivating awe-inspiring thoughts and ideas that I can turn into little works of word art that can be a part of the competitive and saturated, yet brilliant, think-piece market. I cannot operate in both of my brains at the same time. When I’m momming, I am forever on the brink of an overstimulated meltdown as I try to figure out which fire to put out next. Even when all of the fires are seemingly extinguished for the time being, my daughters demand my constant attention whether I’m teaching them a new concept, helping them spread hummus on their sandwich, or being asked for the umpteenth time to watch them perform a new skill they learned in gymnastics. It is only when my kids are in the full care of another adult that I can make a run for it to my desk and attempt to turn my mom-brain off and my intellectual, creative, adult writer-brain on. Keyword: attempt. Will it work? It’s a toss-up. By the time the opportunity arises, I’m often too overstimulated to think clearly, and both of my brains power down, leaving me in a mind-numbing, Tik-Tok scrolling trance.
And, of course, that Tik-Tok scrolling trance sends me to the perfect-mom side of social media that makes me question my every thought, move, and very existence as a mother, a woman, and overall human. How the algorithm knows just how to kick you when you’re down, I’ll never know.
“It shouldn’t be this way,” I can’t help but think to myself. It shouldn’t be this hard to be a functioning adult who can carry out the dreams she dreamt of when she was a little girl while providing the environment for my daughters to dream their big dreams, too. I would never tell my daughters that they only have until they become mothers (should they choose to) to realize their dreams, yet that seems to be not only my reality but the reality of many mothers in the U.S. I know I’m not the only one experiencing these difficulties. Mothers everywhere are making the difficult choice between that dream career, a second income, and a sense of self, and providing childcare and education to their children. And the pressure to make the perfect choice is imminent. Even more so if you are a Black mother.
It’s Women’s History Month — what honest progress can we say we’ve made in the lives of American women, especially American mothers?
To answer this question, we must be honest about the direct correlation between white supremacy and womanhood and motherhood in the United States. More specifically, white supremacy and white womanhood/motherhood, and white supremacy and Black womanhood/motherhood. White womanhood and Black womanhood (and, of course, motherhood) are not the same.
First, let me remind you that this is just an article. I can’t include an entire book’s worth of research in something that should only take you 7-10 minutes to read. I can’t cover everything. That should go without saying, but we all know how these internet streets can be.
In our present-day society, choosing between stay-at-home motherhood and working motherhood is looked at as both a privilege and a choice that will define not only your motherhood but society’s assigned worth to you as a woman for the rest of your life. And, whatever choice you make will be the wrong one. Should you choose stay-at-home motherhood, you are now a drain to society and your spouse. Not only that, everything should be your responsibility — help is frowned upon, to put it nicely. Should you choose working motherhood, you are now abandoning your children, leaving them to the wild wild west to be raised, rather than the home. You cannot win. Society pits mothers against each other with these roles. The “feminist” mothers are pushing the Girl Boss movement from the top of their privileged platforms, which mirrors the Feminist Movement of the ‘60s that began discouraging white suburban housewives from their mundane, dependent, and childlike lives. Then we have the opposite — “crunchy” moms who believe a woman’s natural role is to be a caretaker to their children, and that careers and independence were never a part of the original feminine design. Then we have those of us who are somewhere in the middle (oh, hey!) who don’t want our identities to be solely in the mothering of our children, but also feel compelled to sacrifice some of our aspirations to ensure our children’s needs are also met.
These three worlds sit at the intersection of a society that believes that women and children are solely responsible for themselves — the United States invests far less in childcare and education than any other so-called developed nation, forcing mothers to often give up those underpaying careers that they spent their formative years working towards because they cannot afford privatized childcare. That same lack of investment often forces mothers to continue with decisions about education they did not foresee having to make, desperately pulling children out of traditional classrooms that do not cater to the needs of their children. What is a mother to do when she sees her childcare and education options are either harmful to her children or out of financial reach? Of course, these decisions are privileged, as there are many, many women, especially Black and brown ones, who cannot fathom making such a choice as they continue existing in the sector of the labor market that is underpaid, overworked, and overrepresented by racial disparities. Many of those mothers would so desperately want to make a choice that would afford their children the best environment for their learning and development, but cannot.
Enter: the dichotomy of white and Black womanhood.
White women have always had the privilege to make choices that embrace their “womanhood” and personhood. The idea of entering the workforce came from a place of empowerment and self-actualization. Not necessarily financial need. And the ability to do so? Not a problem when your children are cared for by your low-wage Black woman domestic worker. Society has always devalued Black women as mothers to their own children, demanding they take on roles as domestic workers and caretakers of the children of white women, often resulting in Black mothers seeing the white children they cared for more than their own. This participation in the labor market resulted out of necessity, as Black men were not paid comparative wages to their white male counterparts and were also limited in the types of jobs they were allotted. This often forced Black women to take on low-wage domestic or agricultural work to make ends meet. There was no self-actualization in regards to a Black woman’s role in the labor market — just sheer necessity and good ol’ racism. When white women began entering the labor market in the ‘60s and ‘70s, Black women often continued with the caretaking and keeping of their children and their homes, as well as other subservient positions within society.
The irony of the newfound movement of white mothers returning to their “natural feminine design” to be the caretakers of their families is…well…ironic. I’m not saying that white women did not take care of their children or perform other domestic roles. And, of course, the access to domestic help would have varied greatly between poor and elite white families. But, historically, white women have had an overwhelming amount of help caring for their families because society’s assigned help for white mothers was Black women. The privilege of choice, be it crunchy homesteader or feminist worker has historically been available for white women because child and domestic care was usually taken care of, or, at the very least, assisted with. This doesn’t negate the patriarchal, sexist, and often abusive nature of the white women’s workforce or the fact that once women became pregnant, regardless of race, were still disregarded by society faster than you can blink three times. But, it’s not until recent decades that hired help in the form of Black and minority women hasn’t been widely available, and expected, for white mothers.
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