Working-Class Mothers

There is no single accepted definition of working class: typically, it is defined in opposition to the middle class by characteristics such as employment in a trade or semi-skilled occupation and coming from a family where college was not an expectation for every child. For women, working-class occupations include low-level white collar jobs such as clerks and secretaries (because of the low wages and lack of autonomy), as well as “pink collar” occupations like cosmetology and blue-collar occupations such as factory work. Most working-class families have less income and social capital at their disposal than middle-class families.

Mothering is frequently framed in terms of a middle-class motherhood and lifestyle. A milestone text of North American feminism, Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963) has been blamed for universalizing white upper-middle-class mothering experience. Patricia Hill Collins and bell hooks have argued for the inadequacy of its analysis to African American women, who, as opposed to white, middle-class mothers, have never had the choice between employment and motherhood, but were instead forced to try and remain in paid work in order to respond to their own and their families' economic needs.

Furthermore, they have been challenging the upper-middle-class ideology of motherhood by living according to different values, thus resisting the dominant ideology. Research on working-class women has pointed out their multiple resistance strategies, whereby the employment sector is invested with practices ultimately subverting workplace hierarchies. As for the relationship between motherhood and employment, in the 1990s, for instance, differences were shown between the Chicana and Mexican immigrants' notions of motherhood, bearing on opposite ideological constructs. The Chicana tend to see their paid work as an obstacle to proper child rearing, while Mexican immigrant working-class mothers relate to their employments as part of good mothering itself, and a natural material extension of it.

The life patterns of working-class mothers vary according to spatiotemporal differences and the alternative contemporary meanings and social positions accorded to motherhood and working-class women. In spite of the differences, motherhood within regular marriages is socially valued, although for some feminists, it is really children who are the valued subjects, as opposed to mothers themselves or motherhood as such. Nevertheless, working-class families may also take forms other than heterosexual marriage. In the West, single motherhood appears much less valued or even largely undervalued—particularly in the case of [Page 1283]single motherhood. Such family forms have been and are more common among the working-class population. As a consequence of their marginalization, single mothers have more often faced severe poverty. To reinforce the social sanction for such reproductive behaviors, stigmatization would often extend to children growing up without a father, once a common reason for discrimination.

Such approaches indicate the underlying characteristic of the socially approved idea of motherhood, namely its reliance on the framework of formal fatherhood. The development of the welfare state's assistance, which single working-class mothers and their children use to survive—and not always above the poverty line—is at the origin of a specific moral reprobation of these groups as welfare dependents.