Motherhood And Suicide Summary

In her article “Reimagining Disability and Gender Through Feminist Studies”, Kim Hall provides a quote from Licia Carlson: “Does the existence of those who can be defined as complete women and mothers demand the existence of others who cannot be granted womanhood and motherhood?” (Hall 4) This question outlines a well understood distinction: that womanhood, and particularly motherhood, are not evenly applied across the board. While some women are encouraged and expected to bear children, many others are discouraged, and even denied the right to motherhood. I argue that distinguishing between those who should be mothers and those who should not is a form of othering that results in the punishment of marginalized groups. To write about othering …show more content…
According to “Racism, Birth Control and Reproductive Rights” by Angela Davis, the result of this fear was the idea that white women had a moral obligation to have children. President Theodore Roosevelt embraced this idea, and addressed it in the 1906 State of the Union: “Roosevelt admonished the well-born white women who engaged in ‘willful sterility’- the one sin for which the penalty is national death, race suicide” (Davis 209). With this quote, the division between who should and should not be mothers moves from the personal to the national scale. Not having children is, for white women, characterized as a sin leading to the death of the nation. White women have a responsibility to bear children. The other side of this coin is that if white women obliged to have more children, women of color were obliged to have fewer. Davis quotes Linda Gordon, who frames the question as one of class, although the poor and working class were and are disproportionately Black. “...feminists began to popularize the idea that poor people had a moral obligation to restrict the size of their families, because large families create a drain on the taxes and charity expenditures of the wealthy ” (Davis 209-210). The dichotomy is clearly and …show more content…
The logical next step from considering the right to motherhood is to think about the right not to become a mother: deciding not to have children, ending a pregnancy, or giving one’s children up for adoption. In the same way that the privilege of motherhood is not evenly applied across all groups, so surely must be the right to not be a mother. Although the decision to have children is often characterized as an intensely personal one, due to extreme state intervention as well as other institutional factors, motherhood and childbearing become public, political