Mothers and Sons: Feminist Parenting and the Conundrums of Raising Males

I am thankful that one of my children is male, since that helps to keep me honest. Every line I write shrieks there are no easy solutions.

—Audre Lorde

Within Eurocentric feminism, motherhood has a contested history.¹ In critiquing the role of mother, feminism faces an imposing social structure built to reinforce ties between women, mothering, gender, race, and economic status. Within the United States, for example, as women won the right to vote in 1920, an image of the New Woman capable of choosing a career rather than mothering swirled in public discourse. However, this celebratory rhetoric belied the racial and economic realities for many nonwhite or immigrant women who had long combined mothering and waged labor. When the Great Depression of the 1930s undercut jobs, working women were scorned and the waged labor often performed by nonwhite, immigrant, or rural women was not included in new programs such as Social Security. Then, as war began in the 1940s, women were ushered into the factories to do their duties for the war effort as mothers, sisters, wives. Still, racial segregation and inequalities of pay and opportunity plagued women's work. When male soldiers returned from the war, female workers were directly told to go home through employer directives, government propaganda, sermons, and Hollywood movies. For nonwhite women, this often meant returning to lower paid work—including domestic labor in a white woman's home. In these and many other ways, tensions abounded between gender, race, sexuality, economic status, and mothering in the decades preceding the 1970s feminist movement.²

Scholars within feminist studies in religion have weighed in before about mothering. Yet, feminist mothers continue to struggle with raising children in a gendered and racialized world—often buttressed by religious beliefs and practices. For this reason, addressing feminist parenting within feminist studies in religion remains deeply relevant. Yet, current conversations on feminist parenting inevitably are marked by the legacy of earlier critiques, defenses, and debates of mothering. Thus, I first present an admittedly incomplete discussion of feminist critiques of and debates about mothering. In entitling the opening section "Notes on a Contested History," I indicate that this brief recapping of debates only gestures towards a more complex history. In recounting a handful of key thinkers, questions, and debates, this section also helps to situate the continued conversations on feminist parenting. Both feminist thought and the world in which mothers/parents raise sons/children continue to change. In this lead-in, I offer my own questions about raising a male-gendered child as I invite others to share their own. In examining the dynamics of mothers and sons, significant questions arise regarding theorizing gender, sexuality, race, economic status, and religious belief. By conjoining these questions with critical reflections on the experiences of parenting, this essay also asks what it means to teach gender/sexuality/race/class/religion through word, attitude, and deed to the next generation.

Notes on a Contested History

In critiquing the notion of mother, mid-twentieth-century white feminist discourse primarily addressed inequalities of gender—or, as described at the time, "sex." In the 1952 (U.S.) edition of The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir delivers the often quoted line, "One is not born, but becomes a woman." In rejecting that a woman's destiny is tied to her biological (in)capacity to procreate, Beauvoir turns the focus to their situation as women. By situation, Beauvoir turns a critical eye to legacies of social expectations and cultural norms that have linked women to their "natural" roles as mothers. While Beauvoir does not explicitly reject motherhood, she does comment that maternity is the "one feminine function that is actually almost impossible to perform in complete liberty."³ For Beauvoir, women are not free in their maternity because women cannot freely choose when and if to become a mother due to limited options of birth control. Furthermore, conflicts between a professional life and child care make it such that a woman "can go on working only if she abandons [the child] to relatives, friends, or servants."⁴ As...