Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University Institute for Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Theses Studies 5-2-2018 Our Sacrifice Shall Not Be Required: Examining Maternal Ambivalence and Refusal in Black Motherhood Candice J. Merritt Georgia State University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/wsi_theses Recommended Citation Merritt, Candice J., "Our Sacrifice Shall Not Be Required: Examining Maternal Ambivalence and Refusal in Black Motherhood." Thesis, Georgia State University, 2018. https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/wsi_theses/66 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Institute for Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Theses by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. OUR SACRIFICE SHALL NOT BE REQUIRED: EXAMINING MATERNAL AMBIVALENCE AND REFUSAL IN BLACK MOTHERHOOD by CANDICE J. MERRITT Under the Direction of Tiffany King, PhD ABSTRACT This thesis articulates motherhood as both a liberal and black humanist formation that conditions black women to mother and attempts to untether maternity from the black female body. By centering maternal ambivalence—the desire and distaste for motherhood—in selected works by black women, this thesis argues that black motherhood is an ambivalent site for some black women. Motherhood can be a site of joy and displeasure; sacrifice and refusal; life and death. INDEX WORDS: Black Motherhood, Maternal Ambivalence, Black Feminism OUR SACRIFICE SHALL NOT BE REQUIRED: EXAMINING MATERNAL AMBIVALENCE AND REFUSAL IN BLACK MOTHERHOOD by Candice J. Merritt A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Masters of Art in the College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University 2018 Copyright by Candice Janelle Merritt 2018 Our Sacrifice Shall Not Be Required: Examining Maternal Ambivalence and Refusal in Black Motherhood by Candice J. Merritt Committee Chair: Tiffany King Committee: Susan Talburt Susana Morris Electronic Version Approved: Office of Graduate Studies College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University May 2018 iv DEDICATION To My Self—the Mother and Daughter— I Am, Try-ing to Save. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my committee members, Dr. Tiffany King, Dr. Susan Talburt, and Dr. Susana Morris for their valuable feedback, and my partner, Kaitlin Commiskey, for reading and catching errors my eyes could not see. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................ V 1 INTRODUCTION THE SEARCH FOR BLACK MATERNAL AMBIVALENCE AND CLAIMING BLACK FEMALE MONSTROSITY .......................... 1 1.1 Literature Review ........................................................................................... 14 1.1.1 Motherhood, Capitalism, and Patriarchy: Traditional Feminist Criticism .. 14 1.1.2 Black Feminist Theories of Motherhood ....................................................... 21 1.1.3 Visiting the Black Feminist Theoretical Archive of Motherhood ................. 32 1.2 Research Questions ......................................................................................... 45 1.3 Methodology .................................................................................................... 45 2 CHAPTER ONE : “I THINK I MADE A MISTAKE”: EXAMINING BLACK MATERNAL AMBIVALENCE IN JOANNA CLARK’S “MOTHERHOOD” .................. 56 3 CHAPTER TWO: WHEN YOU LOSE YOUR MOTHER: PEARL CLEAGE’S HOSPICE AND THEORIZING BLACK MATERNAL ABSENCE ............... 80 4 CHAPTER THREE: “NO, GODDAMAIR”: THEORIZING BLACK MOTHERHOOD AS A SITE OF BLACK WOMEN’S DEATH ...................................... 1000 5 CONCLUSION ................................................................................................... 1311 1 1 INTRODUCTION THE SEARCH FOR BLACK MATERNAL AMBIVALENCE AND CLAIMING BLACK FEMALE MONSTROSITY More than a decade ago, I left my home and child in the Midwest to attend a private university in the South. I took guilt and resentment with me—but, mainly guilt. Although my own mother encouraged me to go anywhere for school while she and my father agreed to take care of my child, I never really forgave myself for my absence. It was even harder to forgive myself for having the desire to leave in the first place. What kind of black mother would leave her child, especially when given the option to stay and raise her family with the support of loved ones? The question raked me. That desire for leaving home felt illicit. That desire meant leaving the child and forgoing the possibility of becoming an enduring black mother who worked hard to support herself and her family. In more personal terms, it meant not becoming the maternal figure that my mother came to function and represent in my lifetime—a black mother who is a pinnacle of strength and self-sacrifice. Naturally, guilt tucked away my desire inside my throat; my tongue struggled to admit its existence. I still attended school like I wanted. But, when someone would ask after knowing that I had a small child back home, the only verbal admissions that felt socially permissive were, “Yes, I miss home” and “Yes, I do miss my son very much.” But, I knew inside I felt otherwise. The desire for leaving became less forbidden after sharing with a white feminist professor that I struggled with feelings around being a mother away from home. She recommended that I read works by Adrienne Rich and Anne Lamont. I got my hands on a copy of Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born. I read the introduction and her chapter on Tenderness and Anger. In that 2 moment, I felt the meaning of the word groundbreaking. I had found diary entries much like my own. Select excerpts reminded me of my personal corpus of pages filled with unspeakable words about being a mother buried away in old shoeboxes in my closet. Those pages were meant for my eyes, and my eyes only. Yet, Rich openly shared hers which were joined by powerful reflections such as: Unexamined assumptions: First, that a “natural” mother is a person without further identity, one who can find her chief gratification in being all day with small children, living at a pace tuned to theirs; that the isolation of mothers and children together in the home must be taken for granted; that maternal love is, and should be, quite literally selfless; that children and mothers are the “causes” of each others’ suffering. I was haunted by the stereotype of the mother whose love is “unconditional”; and by the visual and literary images of motherhood as a single-minded identity. If I knew parts of myself existed that would never cohere to those images, weren’t those parts then abnormal, monstrous? (22-23) I had always felt like an unforgivable creature for not wanting to mother. I certainly wanted my son to be taken care of and to be happy, but I had never really wanted to be mother— the all sacrificing and nourishing figure my mother tried to groom me to become. I have often attributed my maternal aberration to becoming pregnant at a young age. Yet, Rich struggled with her maternal ambivalence—her love and her hate of mothering—as a married, adult woman living in a middle-class neighborhood in Northeastern United States. She even had hired help. By normative cultural standards, she followed the correct script. I was the one who strayed the path and, as a result, suffered from abhorrent thoughts and feelings. Reading Rich’s personal and theoretical writings, however, showed me that my maternal feelings did not occur in a social 3 vacuum. My desires for wanting more than motherhood felt connected to other mothers, and a whole book existed with a mother writing from her personal I perspective while also discussing history and political ideologies surrounding gender and sexuality. The publication felt sacred. Yet, deep down I still wished that the mother who wrote those words were of a darker complexion. I yearned for my mother’s voice, her own history, and writings. I also yearned for my own. As I have envisioned and cultivated this project over the last several years, I have searched for the black woman’s equivalent to Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born. A black mother’s oeuvre on maternal ambivalence in the form of collected essays has still felt personally necessary. My yearning for the form, however, has only provided me with a dearth of results—a large gap, in fact. I have gone through a number of black women’s writings collections: The Black Woman: An Anthology, All the Women are White, All the Men are Black, But Some of Us Are Brave, In Search of Our Mothers’ Garden, Double Stitch: Black Women Write on Mothers and Daughters, Flat Footed Truths: Telling Black Women’s Lives, Words of Fire, Still Brave: The Evolution of Black Women’s Studies, Black Motherhood(s): Contours, Contexts and Considerations, Life Notes: Personal Writings by Contemporary Black Women, and Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines. Essays predominate these notable collections, but rarely do they feature a black woman writing from the perspective of a black mother who expresses maternal desires away from family and child(ren) nor a concrete experience-driven personal essay that problematize assumptions that desire motherhood altogether for black women. I turned to black feminist theoretical works, hoping to find “true”