Linda M. Blum

Mother-Blame in the Prozac Nation Raising Kids with Invisible Disabilities

Based on in-depth interviews and fieldwork, this article examines mothers raising kids with invisible, social/emotional/behavioral disabilities to refine feminist theories of mother-blame. The mother-valor/mother-blame binary holds mothers responsible for families and future citizens, maintaining this “natural” care at the center of normative femininity. The author explores how mothers raising such burdensome children understand their experiences and makes three arguments: (1) Fewer mothers are blamed for causing their childs troubles in an era of “brain-blame,” but more are blamed as proximate causes if they do not make unrelenting efforts, paralleling “concerted cultivation,” to resolve them; (2) such mothers often exceed concerted cultivation, as they seize authority, as vigilantes, within educational and medical systems in the midst of turf wars, cost containment, and a resulting proliferation of medication treatments; and (3) this maternal speedup holds mothers accountable for feminizing ties to sons, for policing gender boundaries while policing their own feminine care. In sum, mothers raising invisibly disabled kids may represent the model of maternal valor for an era of public stinginess and extensive medicalization.

Gender in the Prozac Nation Popular Discourse and Productive Femininity

Since Prozac emerged on the market at the end of 1987, there has been a dramatic increase in antidepressant use and in its discussion by popular media. Yet there has been little analysis of the gendered character of this phenomenon despite feminist traditions scrutinizing the medical control of women’s bodies. The authors begin to fill this gap through a detailed content analysis of the 83 major articles on Prozac and its “chemical cousins” appearing in large-circulation periodicals in Prozac’s first 12 years. They find that popular talk about Prozac and its competing brands is largely degendered, presented as manifestly gender neutral, yet replete with latent gendered messages. These are about women with neurochemical imbalances but also about the need to discipline elite female bodies, to enhance their productivity and flexibility. This new form of female “fitness” mirrors demands of the New Economy and indicates how psychiatric discourse contributes to the historically specific shaping of gendered bodies.

NEGOTIATING INDEPENDENT MOTHERHOOD Working-Class African American Women Talk about Marriage and Motherhood

The authors examine the experiences and ideals of African American working-class mothers through 20 intensive interviews. They focus on the womens negotiations with racialized norms of motherhood, represented in the assumptions that legal marriage and an exclusively bonded dyadic relationship with ones children are requisite to good mothering. The authors find, as did earlier phenomenological studies, that the mothers draw from distinct ideals of community-based independence to resist each of these assumptions and carve out alternative scripts based on nonmarital relationships with male partners and shared care of children.

Mothers Construct Fathers: Destabilized Patriarchy in La Leche League

This paper examines changing masculine ideals from the point of view of women homemakers through a case study of La Leche League, a maternalist organization dedicated to breastfeeding and mother primacy. We suggest two reasons for studying the League: first, an emerging literature suggests that changing norms are seeping into many such seemingly conservative groups, and second, the League continues to be highly successful among white, middle-class, married women. The paper looks at two aspects of masculinity, examining changes in the League through fieldwork, interviews, and content analysis, and finds that new norms of increased father involvement and decreased rights over womens bodies have both influenced League philosophy. We conclude that while in some respects a measure of the decline of mens patriarchal privileges, the Leagues changes also may contribute to a “restabilization” of male dominance in a modified, partial form.

“Suits To Self-Sufficiency” Dress for Success and Neoliberal Maternalism

In 1997 the women-run nonprofit organization Dress for Success opened its first location with the aim of empowering low-income women by providing gently used suits for job interviews. Drawing on eight months of fieldwork in an affiliate office, we analyze cross-race and cross-class interactions between privileged volunteers and low-income clients to demonstrate the emergence of what we term “neoliberal maternalism.” Historical forms of maternalism—the mother-centric voluntarism aimed at assisting indigent families a century ago—emphasized women’s domesticity and promoted the earliest welfare provisions. We suggest that neoliberal maternalism, instead, works alongside welfare retrenchment by insisting that single mothers become self-sufficient workers. Similar to earlier maternalisms, the benevolence of affluent volunteers serves to reinforce class and race superiority while producing moments of genuine care and connection. We argue that while all forms of maternalism come with a related body politics aimed at disciplining the bodies of othered women, neoliberal maternalism carries a distinct body politics that, rather than regulating the home and reproduction, intrusively enforces ideals of aesthetic labor required for the postindustrial service economy. Finally, we suggest that retaining maternalism as an analytic framework is particularly important for investigating the influence of neoliberalism and the eroding social safety net on interactions between women.

“Not This Big, Huge, Racial-Type Thing, but … ”: Mothering Children of Color with Invisible Disabilities in the Age of Neuroscience

This article, which represents part of a larger ethnographic study, asks how mothers raising children of color understand the medicalization of their children’s issues as they navigate medical and educational systems. While biomedicine and the lens of neuroscience now predominate in defining children’s troubles, the article primarily focuses on schools as sites that organize daily lives, provide services, and hold keys to future opportunities. It analyzes mothers’ reflections on the intersections of race, disability, class, and gender in schools through sixteen oral history interviews. Women of color have long been suspect as mothers whose children are burdensome or costly, and their children have often been labeled with deficiencies. Currently boys and young men of color are disproportionately diagnosed with invisible disabilities and assigned to special education, although they are much less likely to receive psychopharmaceutical treatments than white children. I emphasize two suggestive findings: First, most of the mothers interviewed expressed complex ambivalence toward medicalization, selectively resisting it but also drawing on it to protect the progress of vulnerable children through school. That is, a majority acquiesced to at least some period of medication, yet they remained ambivalent as individual protection from school failure leaves larger cultural images of black male badness unchallenged or even reconfirmed. Second, I show the insights offered by the way some mothers linked race to gender and class, suggesting that medicalization may have a range of meanings according to class privilege (or its lack). Mothers of children of color may have less ambivalence toward medicalization if they can marshal sufficient class resources to supplant images of badness with those of respectability.

POSSIBILITIES AND LIMITS OF THE COMPARABLE WORTH MOVEMENT

The emergence and growth of the comparable worth or pay-equity movement in the United States in the last six years signals a major shift in strategies for womens economic advancement—away from affirmative action strategies aimed at job integration, toward upgrading conditions for gender-segregated work itself. Although much has been written on comparable worth from technical and structural perspectives, my research explores a different set of questions. From qualitative research on two California localities, I ask what the issue represents to those involved and how they perceive their interests. As a political movement, comparable worth overcomes the narrow base of affirmative action. While building on the rising expectations affirmative action encouraged, comparable worth helps improve job conditions without attacking the gendered division of labor. However, comparable worth does not unite all women, it pits women against men of the same class, and may exacerbate the plight of women in the lowest level of the economy. Nevertheless, as an interim strategy, it is a worthy feminist goal, particularly as it addresses the concerns of working-class women.

Mothering with Neuroscience in a Neoliberal Age: Child Disorders and Embodied Brains

The chapter examines the proliferating use of neuroscientific discourse to frame child development through qualitative data from two sources: narratives from mothers of children with invisible social-emotional-behavioral or brain disabilities (such as ADHD) and recent best-selling parenting advice literature – suggesting the phenomenon must be understood in the context of neoliberal privatization. With a critical perspective on the naturalization of invisible child disorders and the inequalities to which they tend to give rise, it is suggested that the explosion of neuroscientific discourse results from the increasing prevalence of such disorders within the neoliberal context in which mothers are held accountable to take personal responsibility to prevent or offset them. These mothers do not represent an exception but are rather becoming the new norm for what is increasingly expected of all “good” mothers, the task of taking personal responsibility for their children’s brains. Further, the authors argue that anxieties are intensified by, and exclusive maternal responsibility used to veil, the lack of public responsibility for economic change and the likelihood of precarious futures for children facing a shrinking middle class and a Walmart economy. In this sense, the new discursive focus on the child’s embodied brain and mothers’ building such brain power may evidence a reconfigured ideal of the child who will build the nation’s future productivity in an innovation and information-based economy.

Book reviews: The Ann Oakley Reader: Gender, Women, and Social Science – Ann Oakley Hard Labour: The Sociology of Parenthood – Caroline Gatrell

Pairing the above two books for this review – my own bright idea – has proved to be more unwieldy and perhaps more unfair than I had anticipated. Hard Labour appears to be Caroline Gatrell’s first major piece of sociological research. A clumsily written book, it examines transitions to parenthood among twenty highly educated, primarily white, married or cohabiting British heterosexual couples. The Ann Oakley Reader, in contrast, represents a culmination, offering a thoughtfully self-edited retrospective of the author’s thirty-year career building feminist sociology. It begins from the earliest distinction of social-construct ‘gender’ from biological ‘sex’, through discussions of methodology, to a critique of postmodernism. Selections from each of Oakley’s path-breaking empirical projects are included as well. The asymmetry of these two works, if unfair, does allow for useful reflection on the lifespan of feminist sociology. Hard Labour is oddly subtitled with the gender-neutral parenthood. Gatrell claims, in contrast to her title, that her primary focus is on mothers, noting that, ‘when writers and governments talk with authority about “parenting,” they are by implication (especially in the case of very young children) talking about mothers’ (p. 3). I could not help but think of Ann Oakley’s explicit titles: Becoming a Mother, Women Confined, Subject Women, Social Support and Motherhood; and of her ironic 1998 observation of the changing field, ‘This is also the sense in which women’s studies became gender studies and “gender” was substituted for “women” in research grant applications because it was

Which Woman? Which Bodies?Am I Still a Woman?: Hysterectomy and Gender Identity, by ElsonJean. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2004. 254 pp.

book, important to women’s health and to the sociology of the body, on the experience of elective hysterectomy. Surgical removal of the uterus for benign conditions (sometimes with partial or full removal of the ovaries, technically, oophorectomy) might seem to be a relic of past eras in which men’s patriarchal control dominated medicine and devalued women’s bodies. I certainly was under that false impression, supposing that much had changed since 1969 when my mother had an elective hysterectomy at the age of 36. (Of course, I used to think just about everything would be different for my generation of women.) How wrong I was—the prevalence of hysterectomy has changed only modestly, with the uterus of one out of three women today eventually surgically removed (p. 3). A full 25 percent of us will reach menopause surgically (p. 31), with hysterectomy second only to cesarean-section birth among surgeries in the United States today. Only 10 percent of hysterectomies, out of over 600,000 per year, are for cancer treatment. The remaining 90 percent are for serious but almost ordinary conditions that cause persistent pain and bleeding, including benign fibroid tumors and cysts, endometriosis, pelvic inflammatory disease, and chronic pain and bleeding (p. 5). Elson uses the tools of symbolic interactionism to explore the subjective experiences of her 44 respondents and the impact of hysterectomy on gender identity, observing that only a crisis forces us to consider the meanings of our sexual reproductive organs. That is, only the threatened loss of these organs makes us reflect on our taken-for-granted sense of embodied femaleness. Using the vocabulary of biographical work and repair, Elson finds that hysterectomy causes disruption of core gender identity among many of her respondents. For most this reaction is unanticipated, and for some it is also traumatic (p. 156). Though hysterectomy may solve real physical problems, the procedure removes organs whose symbolic and cultural meaning as the essence of womanhood persists well into our postfeminist era. In fact, Elson finds a “hormonal hierarchy” in which respondents cling to their “preserved” ovaries (p. 31); if both can remain this is considered best, but retaining one or even a fragment is considered better than complete removal. In this case, symbolic meaning is attributed to hormones to retain normative gender identity and sexuality far beyond any biological effect. Considering recent findings on the risks of the combined hormone and estrogen replacement therapies used by nearly all her respondents postsurgery, Elson is right to press for both better patient education and improved treatment options. As she concludes, “Perhaps if medical researchers, practitioners, and insurance companies understood the potential significance of sexual reproductive organs” to women’s gender identity, they might more aggressively push for alternatives (p. 197). In raising two key limitations in Elson’s work, I do not want to detract from the intelligence and overall contribution of Am I Still a Woman? Personally, I tend to discount reviews that do not evaluate projects on their own terms. Elson and I come from similar