Mothering While Black. Dawn Marie Dow
settings but did not have the same inclination to ensure that their children felt comfortable in poor African American communities. Border policers defined African American racial identity as largely disentangled from firsthand knowledge of economic struggle. They made efforts for their children to have access to middle-class African American peers and families and social, cultural, and political organizations. For these mothers, being authentically African American meant understanding the cultural, political, and historical contributions of the African American community, but they were less concerned with providing their children with direct contact with economic struggle, in part because it was less relevant to their daily lives. Border policers were often raised in middle-class households in which at least one parent had a college degree. Often their families had been middle class for several generations and connected to middle-class or elite social, economic, and political institutions within the African American community and the broader mainstream white middle-class community.
Chapter 4, “Border Transcenders: Challenging Traditional Notions of Racial Authenticity,” describes mothers who wanted their children to be free to embark on lives that were not principally defined by racial identity. These mothers did not want to push a particular way of identifying on their children. Border transcenders worked to ensure their children’s access to diverse groups of middle-class peers in which no racial, ethnic, and/or religious group dominated. Border transcenders came from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds but shared a common experience of now belonging to racially diverse communities because of romantic relationships, their extended families, or peer groups. Many of these mothers also had gained exposure to different ways of thinking about racial identity through regular travel to predominately black countries in the Caribbean or through travel to African or European countries during formative periods of their lives.
Part II, “Beyond Separate Spheres and the Cult of Domesticity,” shifts the focus to how African American middle-class mothers approach combining work, family, and childcare. It also examines the social, cultural, legal, and economic forces that influence these mothers’ beliefs, experiences, and practices. Its three chapters examine the differing cultural expectations these mothers confront in the African American community and the white mainstream society. These chapters show how African American middle-class and upper-middle-class mothers encounter different societal receptions and cultural expectations that influence their decision-making on combining work and family.
Chapter 5, “The Market-Family Matrix: The Social Construction of Integrated and Conflicted Frameworks of Work–Life Balance,” describes the social and historical construction of dominant ideologies of “good” motherhood and how African American women have been culturally, economically, legally, and socially excluded from their scope. I present a new framework, the market-family matrix, to analyze work and family. This matrix describes different possible characteristics of the family and the marketplace and, thus, different possible relationships between the two. I argue that the specific characteristics and configurations of the family and the marketplace can produce a market_family matrix in which mothers who work outside the home experience conflict or integration.
Chapter 6, “Racial Histories of Family and Work: Paid Employment Is a Mother’s Duty,” examines the default cultural expectations that African American middle- and upper-middle-class mothers describe navigating when making decisions about combining work and motherhood. It also explores the meanings these mothers attach to their decisions. Their accounts underscore that these cultural expectations related to work and family derive from both the broader, predominately white society and the African American community. Such expectations create different pushes and pulls that encourage African American mothers to combine work and family and to stigmatize those who do not. When participants made the decision to reduce their commitment to work to spend more time with their children or to be exclusively stay-at-home mothers, they encountered assumptions about their class status—that they were poor—in their interactions with the broader mainstream white society. They also described encountering attitudes from the African American community that they should be engaged in paid employment to contribute to the economic resources of their family and to retain their self-reliance. These participants’ decisions to reduce their commitment to work were radical acts that challenged the expectations of their families and communities.
Chapter 7, “Alternative Configurations of Child-Rearing: Supporting Mothers’ Public-Sphere Activities through Extended-Family Parenting,” describes a different orientation to, and configuration of, the family. Raising children continues to be a mother-centered activity, but kin and community members also serve as important support systems. Ideally, extended family and community members were regular and continuous participants in the lives of my respondents’ children. In addition, kin and community members were viewed as the preferred source of childcare in the absence of mothers. Although one might assume using kin and community members for childcare is primarily related to a mother’s economic resources, my data suggest that it was also influenced by cultural motivations and expectations within families and cultural and social constraints in the broader society. Kin and community caregivers were also key sources of advice to mothers on raising their children. Indeed, rather than primarily optimizing their caregiving abilities through studying the advice of experts in the latest parenting books, these mothers often sought out the experience-based knowledge and wisdom from other mothers in their families and communities.
The final chapter, “Conclusion and Implications: Navigating Race, Class, and Gender in Motherhood, Parenting, and Work,” synthesizes parts 1 and 2 of the book, as presenting a series of departures from dominant discourses of middle-class mothers to discuss the intersections of racial identity, class, and gender and how they connect to societal institutions. Through several contemporary news stories, I revisit topics discussed in the chapters and explore their theoretical and practical significance. In doing so, I uncover the assumptions and normative expectations regarding parenting and family functioning that undergird these discussions. Although it would be easy to think of African American middle-class mothers as an exception to the norm, I argue that these findings make a more significant impact on how scholars should approach research on the family. Rather than explaining an exception to the norm, the norm itself becomes particularized as something that has been produced by a specific set of circumstances and societal reception, not something shared by all mothers and families. The appendix provides a more detailed description of how I conducted the study, an explanation of my research methodology, and the overall characteristics of the sample.
Ultimately, through analyzing the accounts of these African American middle- and upper-middle-class mothers, this research offers a crucial corrective to the understandings of the formation of cultural ideals of parenting and motherhood by challenging the idea that all middle-class families can be viewed as largely interchangeable based on their resources. It expands on and revises existing theories related to middle-class parenting, racial identity formation, and family and work conflict/integration by demonstrating that the frameworks typically deployed in research on (mostly white) middle-class mothers and their families do not adequately capture the beliefs and experiences of African American middle- and upper-middle-class mothers. Instead, these mothers’ approaches to work, family, and parenting are influenced by distinct cultural expectations, derived from both inside and outside of their immediate families and communities, which are supported by specific social, economic, and structural circumstances. These mothers’ accounts provide additional evidence of the racially uneven acceptance of these ideologies of motherhood and parenting by exploring the different cultural, economic, and structural pushes and pulls that African American middle- and upper-middle-class mothers experience when making work, family, and parenting decisions. Indeed, African American families that are characterized by different intersections of racial identity, gender, and class encounter a different societal reception that requires distinct strategies to achieve similar aims as compared with white middle-class families.
PART I Cultivating Consciousness
Part I of this book examines how African American middle-class mothers approach parenting their children and how their approaches are complicated by concerns related to intersections of race, class, and gender. Further, these four chapters explore how these mothers’ approaches to parenting are informed not only by factors that are internal to