Motherhood and protest in the United States since the sixties
Focusing on Women Strike for Peace, the welfare rights struggle, the battle against busing and the anti-abortion movement, this thesis highlights the integral role ideologies of motherhood played in shaping womenâs activism during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. In doing so, it challenges conventional understandings of maternalism, social protest since the sixties, and second-wave feminism in important ways. Indeed, the activists in this study, most of them mothers, many of them middle-aged, do not fit with popular images of the 1960s â centred, as they often are, on youth protests, student movements and a vibrant, colourful counterculture. Meanwhile, studies of mothersâ movements tend to focus disproportionately on white, middle-class womenâs reform work during the early twentieth century, eliding maternalism with progressivism, the politics of respectability and nonviolence. However, by revealing the persistence of this political tradition into the 1960s and beyond, and exploring how motherhood was used by activists across the political spectrum during this turbulent era, this study underscores the flexibility, malleability and lasting appeal of maternalism. Within all of these movements, women shared
Denton, Georgina
Motherhood and protest in the United States since the sixties. Focusing on Women Strike for Peace, the welfare rights struggle, the battle against busing and the anti-abortion movement, this thesis highlights the integral role ideologies of motherhood played in shaping womenâs activism during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. In doing so, it challenges conventional understandings of maternalism, social protest since the sixties, and second-wave feminism in important ways. Indeed, the activists in this study, most of them mothers, many of them middle-aged, do not fit with popular images of the 1960s â centred, as they often are, on youth protests, student movements and a vibrant, colourful counterculture. Meanwhile, studies of mothersâ movements tend to focus disproportionately on white, middle-class womenâs reform work during the early twentieth century, eliding maternalism with progressivism, the politics of respectability and nonviolence. However, by revealing the persistence of this political tradition into the 1960s and beyond, and exploring how motherhood was used by activists across the political spectrum during this turbulent era, this study underscores the flexibility, malleability and lasting appeal of maternalism. Within all of these movements, women shared
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