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This chapter evaluates the crisis created by the transformation of women's work, providing a deeper understanding of why women are having such difficulty combining work and family. It looks closely at mothers, asking first if they are really working harder now than in the 1960s—and if so, why, given that the market's takeover of many domestic tasks has created a new pool of free time as well as income. It also explores what the turn to paid employment has meant for black and white mothers of different educational backgrounds, comparing their earnings, hours of work, and overall family income in 1970 and 2000. It concludes that though women's turn to work for wages, like men's earlier move off the land, has given them new legitimation and leverage to realize their own interests, increasing disparities among women themselves threaten such efforts.

This chapter focuses on plays written by Georgia Douglas Johnson in the late 1920s as she hosted a literary salon in her Washington, D.C., home. These texts present the black mother/wife, whose existence is shaped by attempts to delay death. In Blue Blood, she prevents the murder of the men in her family by hiding the fact that she has been raped by a powerful white man. In Safe, she becomes desperate to avoid what she believes to be the inevitable fate of her newborn son: humiliating death at the hands of a mob. In Blue-Eyed Black Boy, she protects her adult son, but ultimately her success in stopping the mob underscores her family's vulnerability. In short, Johnson shows that the black mother/wife must forge romantic and parental bonds in a society that allows white men to rape black women and kill black men with impunity.

This chapter examines how black girls were represented in the earliest extant examples of the black press by focusing on Freedom's Journal, published from 1827 to 1829, and the Colored American (1837–1841). Articles about black girlhood in the early black press offer insights into the everyday struggles of African Americans in the early republic. In a sense, early black newspapers served as conduct manuals as they emphasized the model family, encouraging readers to be temperate, industrious, and pursue intellectual development through literacy and education. Although the ideal black family figured prominently in both Freedom's Journal and the Colored American, this chapter argues that the stories and columns they published reveal stress and struggle in black households in the early decades of the nation. It cites the striking absence of black mothers in these articles in the heyday of the ideal of republican motherhood, an indication that many black mothers were working for wages outside the home.

This chapter shows how the Million Mom March helped parents, especially mothers, heal from the loss of a loved one to gun violence. It compares past maternalist movements to this one and shows the uneasy coexistence of feminism and maternalism. It explores how suburban mothers who were mostly white and urban mothers who were mostly black and Hispanic, came to believe that American society was sick, that all mothers were the antidote, and that together they could get gun control adopted and stop gun violence. While demonstrating the possibilities for coalition this chapter argues that the color-blind approach failed against the National Rifle Association, which evoked images negligent mothers, over-indulgent mothers, bad black mothers and criminal black beast rapists to defeat the anti- gun crusaders.

This chapter explores how ideologies of white motherhood function as sites through which shifts in a nation's sense of the modern is enabled by locating the Diana phenomenon in the social context of 1990s Britain. It also considers how visions of “bad motherhood” became articulated to Blairite policies of cutting welfare for poor families and lone mothers on benefits, and how representations of Princess Diana's motherhood (as well as many other [white] mothers in popular culture in 1990s and early 2000s) signal a neoliberal logic of motherhood, along with the racial implications of such logics. More specifically, the chapter contrasts such white maternal (neoliberal) logics with the conditions of black mothers in Britain during the period by focusing on Doreen Lawrence's 2006 book, And Still I Rise. It argues that models of white motherhood constantly contradict nonwhite motherhood, rendering it deviant and dysfunctional, and that images of a new kind of (white) mother are often needed by the nation to produce a vision of a modern family.

This chapter presents Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's speech on black mothering for Brooklyn women, and incorporates popular cultural artifacts—work and blues songs, poetry, folklore, and short stories—to elicit cross-class perspectives of black womanhood from African American and British West Indian men and women in each particular group. Harper conflates the status of womanhood moving into motherhood as an eventuality. Moreover, she warned mothers to train their daughters and sons against the perils of sex outside of wedlock so that the home, through marriage, would become the “crown” of black female motherhood, “more precious than the diadem of a queen.” Overall, her dialog interrogates how women and men within these cultures responded to debates surrounding issues of privacy that were withheld from women, especially women of color: their bodies, female sexuality, being a “good mother,” and the meaning of motherhood.

This chapter looks at the new voices that began speaking for child care, both in California and across the nation: black mothers in the welfare rights movement and white middle-class women in the feminist movement. While black and white poor mothers organized in CPACC and around welfare rights, a more visible women's movement developed among predominantly the white middle class. In 1966, the National Organization for Women (NOW) emerged out of frustration over the government's unwillingness to enforce Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which made discrimination by sex as well as by race illegal. With seasoned women's rights, labor feminists, and a few black women at its helm, NOW quickly moved to the forefront of the struggle for women's equality.

In “From SuperOther to SuperMother: The Journey toward Liberty,” Nicola Mann studies the character Martha Washington from Frank Miller and Dave Gibbons’ limited series comic Give Me Liberty (1990). A single mother from Chicago’s Cabrini-Green public housing project here rises to the status of lauded war hero. As an African-American woman, argues Mann, Washington not only re-scripts the familiar trope of the white male superhero, but also offers an alternate vision of the children of urban single mothers. Her success story speaks to contemporary real-world political claims-to-agency for young black women. In particular, the chapter explores the formal voyeurism implicit in Give Me Liberty’s panel sequences. Through the “gutter”—the blank white space between comic book panels—the reader becomes a silent accomplice in deciphering and linking the singular moments described in the panels into a series of topological connections, and, eventually, a continuous unified whole.

For many of the mothers we interviewed for this book, it does not matter how talented their daughters are academically, because they believe their daughters’ success will never be certain. The mother whose quote begins this chapter describes a daughter who could read at three years of age, loved educational television, and attended college-based science camps during her summers in high school. Yet, at various points during her daughter’s education, the mother had to advocate on her behalf, seeking the kind of education she deserved. The second mother quoted shares the first mother’s concerns about the obstacles that lie ahead for her daughter, despite her talents. These mothers are representative, we believe, of what many African American mothers, regardless of education or marital status, struggle with in helping their children to achieve. These mothers have to be constantly vigilant, making sure that their daughters receive what they deserve. They also are constantly concerned that someone or something will impede their daughters’ progress because of race or gender. In spite of these obstacles, these mothers work to empower their daughters to succeed against the odds. In this chapter, we look at the stories the mothers tell us about their daughters’ upbringing. It is their voices we hear. We wanted to learn from the “experts” how their daughters came to achieve at such high levels, when so many Black youth do not. We look at the issues of race and gender, and how in both school and the broader society the two are interconnected. We first ask the mothers about their own upbringing. We then focus on how they raised their children. We inquire specifically about how much they helped with homework and how they disciplined their daughters. We delve into their status as African Americans, asking, for example, what they have taught their daughters about growing up Black and female. We also ask if they think their daughters will encounter racism and if they think it will be difficult to find a husband in the future (should they want to marry).