Rhetorics of Motherhood

Preface

xvii Preface Discourses about mothers, mothering, and motherhood permeate U.S. political culture and are employed by both women and men in order to advance themselves and their agendas within the public realm. These discourses, however, prove to be slippery rhetorical terrain for women, on the one hand, affording them authority and credibility but, on the other, positioning them disadvantageously within the gendered status quo. Rhetorics of Motherhood examines that paradox by detailing the cultural construction and persuasive operations of the Mother within American public discourse; tracing its use and impact in three case studies; and theorizing how, when, and why maternal discourse works to women’s benefit or detriment. Chapter 1, “Theorizing Motherhood in Public Discourse,” explores historic, semiotic, ideological, and rhetorical dimensions of the Mother, a construct that encodes dominant beliefs, values, and assumptions about the role. Given its entrenchment within systems of gender, knowledge, and power and its familiarity to cultural insiders, the Mother is easily invoked but difficult to resist in rhetorical situations. I present a framework that explains the construct’s current signification as well as its capacity both to aid and to undermine women. The code of motherhood circulates widely in American culture, at once influencing social expectations of and ignoring critical differences among women and their mothering practices. The chapter, therefore, also addresses how subjects’ intersectional identities and social locations inform maternal goals and performances and investigates the reciprocal influence of practice upon constructs of motherhood and vice versa. Chapter 1, then, prepares the ground for the project by detailing how motherhood invokes a shared cultural code and generates powerful persuasive resources that reinforce gender stereotypes and diminish women’s complexity, dimensions, and opportunities. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 present case studies that explore these tensions. Spanning the early twentieth to the early twenty-first century, they focus respectively on the issues of birth control, civil rights, and reproductive choice and track how motherhood Preface xviii has been employed rhetorically to advance feminist, resistant, and conservative ends. These cases illustrate the diverse forms that maternal appeals can take—whether physically embodied through pregnancy and progeny or communicated verbally, visually, or performatively—and trace their impact on women’s political goals and civic standing. Chapter 2, “From ‘Wild Woman Writer’ to ‘Mother of Two’: Margaret Sanger, Birth Control, and Ethos Repair,” examines the controversial activist at the start of her rhetorical career (1914–17), focusing on her appropriation of motherhood to repair damaged ethos and develop a widespread movement for contraception. While working as a maternity nurse in New York’s Lower East Side, Sanger first encountered the constraints imposed by the Comstock laws, which prohibited medical professionals from discussing (much less providing patients with) birth control. Convinced that working-class women desperately needed such information, she began to publish accessible explanations of human anatomy, reproduction, and pregnancy prevention, efforts that led to her eventual indictment on “obscenity” charges and flight from the country to escape prosecution. After her return from exile, Sanger devoted herself to repairing her tarnished ethos, to establishing a strong base of support for challenging the Comstock laws, and to placing the issue of birth control on the national agenda. Maternal rhetoric enabled her to accomplish each of these objectives. It afforded her means for reformulating her public image, encouraging women’s identification, creating exigency for contraception, and inspiring action to change its legal, medical, and social standing. Motherhood enabled the rhetor to reposition herself and her cause from “the radical margins to mainstream respectability” and to forward the feminist agenda of giving women reproductive control (Katz xxiii). At the same time, Sanger’s maternal framework foregrounded the interests of white, married, elite women and elided those of immigrant women, women of color, and unmarried women. Aligning birth control with motherhood, then, came at a cost—sacrificing the contraceptive needs and objectives of far too many women for far too long. The strategy’s results, however, were also substantial, contributing to the creation of a legal and social environment that respected women’s regulation of their own fertility. Both aspects of maternal rhetoric—its sights and blindnesses , its advantages and shortcomings—are at the heart of this chapter. Chapter 3, “Motherhood, Civil Rights, and Remembrance: Recuperating Diane Nash,” centers on a neglected leader of the early civil-rights movement who, while still in her early twenties, guided the Nashville Preface xix student sit-ins to a successful conclusion...