H-Women Maternal Feminism Discussion Page published by Kolt Ewing on Thursday, June 12, 2014 Maternal Feminism Discussion July, August 1996 Original Query for Info from Heather L. [email protected] 15 July 1996 I am revising a paper for publication and have been asked to include a more critical discussion of maternal feminism that reflects the kinds of questions feminist historians have posed regarding this idea. In this paper I am looking at the Needlework Guild of Canada. This is a voluntary organization that originated in England and then emerged in Canada in 1892. The women in this group collected clothing and goods to meet the needs of state-operated orphanages, hospitals, homes, and charities. Does anyone know of any work, preferably Canadian, with a contemporary discussion of maternal feminism which goes beyond the class critique and/or identifies the debates surrounding the use of this concept? I would appreciate any sources you could suggest, as I am unfamiliar with this literature. [Editor Note: For bibliography on Maternal Feminism, see bibliography section on H-Women home page at http://h-net2.msu.edu/~women/bibs Responses: >From Eileen Boris [email protected] 17 July 1996 ...The question remains, though, is maternal feminism the proper term? Is maternalism feminism? Is mother-talk strategy, discourse, or political position? >From Karen Offen [email protected] 17 July 1996 ...But first, it would be good to know more about the work of your Needlework Guild and the organization's perspective. Was there a "feminist" component of any kind, i.e. a feminist critique of prevailing male-female relations in society, or is the group strictly philanthropic in the charitable sense? >From Heather L. Garrett [email protected] 18 July 1996 Re: Karen Offen's question: The group was philanthropic rather than feminist. I am arguing that the Citation: Kolt Ewing. Maternal Feminism Discussion. H-Women. 07-15-2015. https://networks.h-net.org/node/24029/pages/31324/maternal-feminism-discussion Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Women group provided the women with opportunities to meet others, learn new things they may not have learned in the home. I do not argue that the women were trying to break down class barriers or forms of patriarchal powers. Re: Eileen Borris' question: If maternal feminism is not the term, my problem is that I do not know what the proper term is. >From Eileen Borris [email protected] 22 July 1996 On the question of what term to use for women who base philanthropic work on their identities as mothers and on the aid of mothers and children, why not call them feminists? Not all activist women are feminists. Why not just call them maternalists? or philanthropists? or reinforcers of class (race, ethnic, etc) hegemony? What did they call themselves? What did observers at the time call them? >From Don Soucy (CSPACE) [email protected] 22 July 1996 >Re: Eileen Borris' question: If maternal feminism is not the term my problem is that I do not >know what the proper term is. Any reactions to the term "municipal housekeeping"? >From Debra Michals NYU History 29 July 1996 I have to say I agree with Eileen Borris about using another term. Maternal feminism reminds me of domestic feminism--and in either case it is an uncomfortable blending of terms. Phyllis Schlafly in the 1970s used similar arguments against feminism and the ERA, nothing that women's empowerment came from their traditional roles broadly conceived as wife and mother; narrowly conceived via their power to reproduce. Schlafly tried to label this "the power of positive woman" (she wrote a book of the same title), but I would hardly call her a feminist in any Western sense of the word (and context is important, after all). The history of feminism or of women's activism in any public sense has in fact always been as much a debate among women about the source of female power--feminists, I would argue via the history of second wave feminism and to some degree its advocates all the way back to the 19th century, has in some way or another been about self-determination (as human beings, as political citizens, etc.) Traditionalists, like those you want to call maternal feminists, may agitate publicly, may be involved in movements for betterment or social change, but they do so from within social prescriptions about women's roles and nature. Therefore, while it may be fine to call them social activists, moral/social purity crusaders, it is hardly ok to use the word feminism to describe them. They are not about letting women decide for themselves individually what shape their lives should take but rather rely on prescribed roles as the source of their authority. One caveat: many of these women, typically, find such social work/activism transformative--that is, once publicly active, they cannot fully return to the very prescriptions that enabled their work in the first place. If you look at them after, then you may indeed be able to find some early stage feminism taking shape in their lives. Either way, though, I am uncomfortable with projecting back onto a group a term they would never have used to describe themselves or what they thought they were doing. Good luck and regards. Citation: Kolt Ewing. Maternal Feminism Discussion. H-Women. 07-15-2015. https://networks.h-net.org/node/24029/pages/31324/maternal-feminism-discussion Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-Women >From Sue Schrems [email protected] 29 July 1996 The discussion on defining Feminism has confused me about my own research on conservative women in the 1920s. For instance, what term do we use for women who used the political process to fight for issues that covered a broad spectrum of women's concerns? Many of their concerns were maternal, such as the child-labor amendment, care of orphans, the Sheppard-Towner Bill, continuation of the children's bureau, the creation of a women's bureau in the Department of Labor, the establishment of a federal department of education, etc. In Oklahoma, after the legislature passed women's' suffrage in 1918, women became politically active and by 1920 elected women to the state senate and house, and sent the second woman to the United States Congress. After women were elected to state and national office, women's organizations in Oklahoma, from the National Women's Party, to the Legislative Council, to the DAR and the LWV, lobbied for legislation that concerned women and children. So, would we classify these women, as we do Alice Paul, as feminist, or would they fall in line with those women we call domestic or maternal feminists? >From Jeanette Keith [email protected] 31 July 1996 To Sue Schrem' inquiry...Why not just "activists?" If we call any woman who is politically active in behalf of what she defines as a women's issue a feminist, then the word loses meaning. >From Heather L. Garrett [email protected] 31 July 1996 In my search for the debates surrounding the use of maternal feminism, I have come across Naomi Black's (1989) Social Feminism. In this book in chapters on defining feminism and categorizing feminism, she distinguishes between social feminism and equity feminism. She discusses exactly what you describe re: the vote and the aftermath once the vote passed. She would consider maternal and domestic feminists to be social feminists. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who responded to my query re: maternal feminism. I have learned a lot from the discussion and now am a little more critical of the term. >From Cynthia Harrison [email protected] 31 July 1996 It is my view that we reserve the term "feminism" to refer to the post-1966 phenomenon, which was the first women's movement to assert that women's biology did not *necessarily* bind her to a special role with respect to children. (Even Charlotte Perkins Gilman assumed that some women would be doing childcare --just not her.) It's hard enough to distinguish among all the modern variations of the term without taking on the burden of re-labeling and then offering new explanations for the label for groups who would never have used such a label for themselves. Even for the National Woman's Party, feminism meant something different from its contemporary meaning--it was much narrower in significant ways and didn't really challenge the nexus between women and childcare. The question is why we want to use a label if it confuses rather than illuminates. If we describe activists on behalf of women with a specific term that refers to their specific brand of activism (e.g. "advocates of protective labor laws," versus "E.R.A. proponents"), we don't get into this fix. Such a strategy obviously does not preclude our discussing in other contexts what "feminism" really means Citation: Kolt Ewing. Maternal Feminism Discussion. H-Women. 07-15-2015. https://networks.h-net.org/node/24029/pages/31324/maternal-feminism-discussion Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 3 H-Women and whether an older ideology can rightly be described in that way (although I do think that such discussions can easily lapse into anachronism). >From Karen Offen [email protected] 02 Aug 1996 Apropos Cynthia Harrison's suggestion that we "reserve the term 'feminism' to refer to the post-1966 phenomenon...", I absolutely disagree.