The Power of Motherhood: Black and White Activist Women Redefine the “Political”

This chapter focuses on the African-American women&s;s club movement to illuminate both the texts and contexts of motherhood as a political platform. It explores the potential compatibility of equality with difference. The chapter discusses the use of motherhood by white women reformers who also sought to better the homes of working-class women. It argues that white women shared less with their "clients," a social group distinguishable from themselves by class and ethnicity, than black club women did with masses of African Americans. The chapter considers how the feminist discourse on motherhood, even as it redefined the subjects and objects of politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, never escaped legal definitions of motherhood, as seen in labor legislation which sought to protect mothers, but excluded the paid labor of African -American women. Recognizing that the mothers of their race often had to leave their children to work, the club women accepted the working mother as a worthy mother.