Mobilizing Motherhood: Race, Class, and the Uses of Maternalism in the Welfare Rights Movement

Welfare Rights was a movement of poor women and their supporters who were fighting for the right to basic income support for mothers receiving public assistance. In this essay I will argue that the Welfare Rights Movement provides an example of an intersectional social movement that was somewhat successful in using motherhood as a mobilizing feature. Through a historical case study I explore how middle-class and poor women participated in this movement in Detroit. I present the different experiences and perceptions of motherhood that informed the types of maternalism that emerged and that were subsequently used in this movement. I argue that the specific experiences of the women intersected with their race and class, forming different uses of maternalism that subsequently galvanized their activism in differing ways.

During the 1960s in Detroit, poor African American mothers who were receiving welfare became the key establishers of the Welfare Rights Movement in the city, employing what I refer to as "experiential maternalism." They derived this approach from their experiences in navigating the welfare system and resisting the stigma and the race- and class-based discrimination that was a part of their daily lives. However, they were supported by the many Friends of Welfare Rights groups, primarily made up of white middle-class women in the surrounding suburbs, who employed sentimental maternalism and organized on the issue of welfare rights. Middle-class ideology and values drove the use of maternalism for the Friends and formed, as defined by Molly Ladd-Taylor (1993), sentimental maternalism. Ladd-Taylor identified this form of maternalism through her exploration of the National Congress of Mothers and Parent-Teacher Associations, founded in 1897. She describes this form of maternalism as emphasizing the need for mothers to stay at home with their children and by the reformers' view of their role as "protecting" women and children who did not have male support (110–13).

Maternalist movements began in earnest in different countries in the early nineteenth century. This was an age when women reformers began to organize around society's moral obligations to women and children. These early maternalists structured their social concerns within the context of their difference from men and shifted a moral vision to political action with their attempts at social reform for women and children (Koven and Michel 1993). In her discussion of African American club women and maternalist reformers in the early twentieth century, Eileen Boris (1993) illustrates that although class differences separated these women from the poorer black women they were advocating for, a shared racial status was central to their work. Although the middle-class African American women whom Boris examined shared many of the values and ideology of white maternalists of the time, they understood the racism that was inherent in perceptions of black motherhood versus white motherhood and thus were more successful in their cross-class work (213–45). Early welfare policy was also developed through the activism of white middle-class maternalists during the Progressive Era who advocated for mother's pensions that would allow poor white women and children to be cared for in the event that the mother became widowed or was deserted (Gordon 1994). Linda Gordon and other scholars have argued that from the very beginning welfare policy was framed within racist and classist assumptions and stereotypes, with the early intentions of maternalist reformers being to provide for deserving (white) mothers while structuring the policy so that it provided a minimum amount of support, as well as enough sanctions and stigma, so that poor African American families would not become overly dependent on the state (Gordon 1994; Abramovitz 1996a; Neubeck and Cazenave 2001).

Riva Polatnick's (1966) later study of women's liberation groups from the 1960s provides some insight into the intersection of race and motherhood. Polatnick examined women's views of motherhood and explored how these views related to their activist work and the prioritization of goals for the women's liberation movement overall. Polatnick discovered striking differences in the motivations for the social movement work of poor and working-class African American...