Surprise! Nothing's New

I recently wrote a paper on the use of maternalist rhetoric in ecofeminist theory and the environmental justice movement. Tonight, while reading a book on pronatalism in the Progressive era, I was overwhelmed by the sense of how little things change. What kinds of things? you ask. Well, it turns out that 100 years ago, women who wanted to get involved in politics, hell, in any endeavor outside the home, had to manufacture needs for their maternal "instincts" beyond the hearth fires. So when women began to enter the political arena, their work was dubbed "municipal housecleaning." Pronatalist policies at the last turn of the century in fact do not appear to have been all that much more coercive than they are today. 100 years ago, women were pressured to reproduce for the "preservation of the race." While nativism is still fairly pervasive in the U.S., it lacks the legitimacy it once had. Yet women still often find themselves compelled to attribute their involvement in the political as an extension of the work they do at home.

Take the environmental justice movement. Women active in the environmental justice movement also often employ the metaphor of housekeeping--they're "cleaning up the environmental mess." They often emphasize the importance of their work to secure the health of their children and their family. While it is certainly true that today, women still do the majority of care labor in the U.S. (and most other places), reiterating that any work we do outside the home is simply an extension of our "natural" mothering and caring obfuscates the enormous amount of time and energy most women spend caring, while it also coercively universalizes women as mothers.

What does it mean that so often and for so long women have embraced maternalism? Defeatism? Expediency? Can women be political subjects without their mothering (or lack of) appropriating center stage?

As long as I can remember I've told my family I don't want kids. Yet that hasn't stopped anyone from continuously asking me when I'm going to pop one out. The message sent by this kind of badgering is that I am not a whole or complete woman until I've had a baby, despite any other accomplishments I might have under my belt. It seems we have not yet moved past the social imperative for women to reproduce. What is at stake when women refuse to have children? Why is this act (or non-act) so threatening?