Scholar examines role of mothers

By Erica Miller, Online Forty-Niner

Thursday, November 19, 1998

Mae Henderson, a sociology major at Cal State Long Beach, is a McNair Scholar who has conducted research on women who have given up their roles as mothers, even though they have children.

She became interested in this subject after realizing her own disconnection with motherhood.

Henderson said that the concept of non-mothering mothers is a phenomenon that has gone basically uninvestigated by researchers, yet is not uncommon or restricted to a certain group of women.

"These are women who give birth but who are not intricately involved in the raising or nurturing of their children," Henderson said. "They are not necessarily women who have given their children up for adoption, but they may be."

Several who attended Henderson's lecture Tuesday afternoon in the Women's Resource Center said that African American and Latino women who live at or below the poverty line with a minimal amount of education were some of the stereotypes of those who do not mother their children.

"The fact is she may be just like you and me," Henderson said. "She is someone who has had her life set up and prescribed, and has been forced to live up to expectations that she has no allegiance to, by a society that does not care about what she wants or who she is as an individual."

Henderson pointed to groups of women who relinquish the responsibilities of the mothering process to someone else.

"There are affluent people who pay their way out of mothering with nannies or live-in baby sitters," Henderson said. "But the stigma is only attached to unmarried, young women in the inner city."

Henderson's hypothesis is that "mothering is socially constructed and it is not instinctive. It is not automatic and there are women with no innate desire to mother."

"My whole life has been about being a mother and it was engrained before I was actually conceived," Marilyn Jackson, a sociology and black studies major, said. "It's not natural. It's something you do and you learn along the way."

Lethia Cobbs, an English major, said that her first messages of mothering came from playing with dolls by making clothes and feeding them.

According to Henderson, the majority of the literature written about women and motherhood states even though a woman may not give birth, "motherhood is central to the way others define them and the way they perceive themselves."

"You are supposed to sacrifice yourself and sacrifice your individuality," Sarah Lim, an anthropology and women's studies major, said. "It was not welcome to motherhood but welcome to guilthood."

Other information Henderson found stated that motherhood demonstrates a woman's physical and psychological adequacy and gives them an identifiable social function. Normal women desire a child and those who reject motherhood reject femininity.