Matriarchs, Moms, and Midcentury Liberalism

Ruth Feldstein. Motherhood in Black and White: Race and Sex in American Liberalism, 1930-1965. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000. ix + 241 pp. Notes, selected bibliography, and index. $47.50 (cloth); $18.95 (paper).

Ruth Feldstein begins with a question about the 1950s: how did liberal ideas about race relations gain strength in the same era that conservative ideas about gender relations seemed so fixed? What was the connection between the assertive and courageous image of Rosa Parks and the Little Rock Nine and the submissive and passive suburban personification of what Betty Friedan labeled the "feminine mystique"? Rather than accept them as ironic coincidences, Feldstein argues that both outwardly contradictory female role models derived from the same source: mid-twentieth-century liberalism. Between the 1930s and the 1960s, Feldstein explains, liberalism was preoccupied with debates about who was a healthy citizen and what was a healthy democracy. Despite disagreements, these debates shared a set of assumptions about families, gender roles, racial difference, and the role of the federal government. The key to understanding the relationship between race and gender, contends Feldstein, is ideas about women as mothers. By highlighting the extent to which liberals made the private sphere of the family the foundation for the public sphere of politics and society, Feldstein offers a provocative and compelling perspective on the rise and fall of modern liberalism.

Feldstein begins by examining the ways in which New Deal liberalism advanced a particular vision of citizenship that was imbued with and dependent on ideas about gender and race. New Deal liberalism, she explains, both generated and sought to resolve a critical tension between the new idea of an activist state with a collectivist bent and an older idea of the sanctity of individual liberty and self-help. Responding to the crisis of masculinity caused by the Great Depression and extensive and sustained unemployment, liberals sought ways to revive families, masculine authority, and the nation. The liberalism of the 1930s negotiated the tension between state activism and individualism by promoting a model of family organization that had a man as its head and a woman and children as his dependents. Recalling the republican motherhood of the revolutionary and early national eras, 1930s liberalism emphasized the role that women as mothers could and should play in raising good citizens. Whereas a good father would provide for his family, a good mother would epitomize restraint, respect for authority, and responsibility for the well being of future citizens. Her indirect participation in the polity would be rewarded by male and state support, upon which she was dependent.

New Deal programs and policies reinforced this approach to women. Although the Fair Labor Standards Act advanced the idea of gender-neutral treatment, the Social Security Act (which Feldstein focuses on) simultaneously codified the portentous distinction between workers' entitlement to old-age pensions and unemployment compensation on the one hand and women's dependence on men for economic support and on the state for assistance in raising children on the other hand. At the same time that liberals expressed anxieties about masculinity, they also reached out to include African American men and to redress a growing concern with racial inequality and repression. Asserting the irrelevance of biologically based theories of race and personality, they emphasized the importance of environment and socialization in shaping adults or citizens. But rather than argue for government intervention to remedy racial discrimination embedded in institutions and organizations, liberals advanced the race-neutral argument that families—and especially women as mothers—were to blame for black men's failure to achieve. In so doing, these race-conscious but antiracist liberals privatized racial identity while publicizing gender identity. Liberalism's inclusiveness on race was popular and acceptable because it made racial difference an individual and private matter and made citizenship an aspect of gender. "Gendered imagery in liberal discourse," Feldstein explains, "helps to explain how and why (paradoxically) a newly activist state remained restrained, and how race, in particular...