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Ms.CELLANEOUS:
*What?
*Women
to Watch
*Word: United
* Just the
Facts
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**Sisters
Spin Talk
on Hip-hop**
Two
feminists who came of age with the music and the culture
take a long, hard look at its impact--for better and
worse--on young women, and reassess its importance in
their lives. > by Tara Roberts and Eisa Nefertari
Ulen
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**The
Mommy Wars**
How the media pits one group of
mothers against another. It all boils down to the Haves
versus the Have-Nots. > by Susan Douglas and Meredith
Michaels |
**Going
Underground**
One woman's moving account of the painful decision to
give up family, friends, and identity, and flee with her
daughter to a safer life > by Anonymous Plus:
Information about hiding in plain sight > by
Hagar Scher |
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YOUR
WORK:
*Road Scholar: Women in Academia
* Women's Work: Police Officer
* Worknotes
ARTS:
*Indie Filmmaker Christine Vachon
* It's Schapiro's Time
*Artswatch
BOOKS:
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* Reviews
*Bold Type: Maureen Holohan
*Editor's
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*Letters
*Uppity
Women: Wynona Ward
* Women Organizing Worldwide
* Fiction: Bravo America
Columns
> by
Patricia Smith and Gloria Steinem
*Making Waves
*No Comment
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**Turning
the Tables on "Science"**
When Natalie Angier wrote Woman: An Intimate Geography,
she took on accepted truths about women, poked holes in
them, and offered an exciting revisionist view of our
bodies. Oh boy, did she ruffle some feathers! > by Marilyn
Milloy
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NEWS:
*Ten Laws That Will Make Your
Blood Boil
*Epithets Deleted: French Women Demand Respect
*Women in the House
*Free Kosovar Albanian Activist-Poet Flora Brovina
*Madrid's Back Alleys
*Newsmaker:
Dawn Riley *Reviving the ERA
*Opinion: Count Me In
*Amazon Bookstore Update: Beware the Lesbians!
*Pakistan's Turning Point
*A New Law for Unmarried Couples in France
*Recognition for African Women Farmers
*Clippings
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*3*
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<cont'd
Ah, but you could be worse. What
about media motherhood on the other side of the tracks?
Celebrity mom profiles place us on the outside looking
in; stories about welfare mothers invite us to look
down from on high. Welfare mothers have not been the
subject of honey-hued profiles in glossy magazines.
They are not the subjects of their own lives, but objects
of journalistic scrutiny. We don't hear about these
women's maternal practices--what they do with their
kids to nurture them, educate them, soothe them, or
keep them happy. It is simply assumed that these women
don't have inner lives. Emotions are not ascribed to
them; we don't hear them laugh or see their eyes well
up with tears. One of the most frequent verbs used to
describe them is "complain," as when they complain about
losing health care for their kids when they go off welfare.
When they are quoted, it is not their feelings about
the transformative powers of motherhood to which we
are made privy. Rather, we hear their relentless complaints
about "the system." In many articles about welfare,
we don't hear from the mothers at all, but instead from
academic experts who study them, or from politicians
whose careers are devoted to bashing them. The iconography
of the welfare mother is completely different, too--she's
not photographed holding her child up in the air, whizzing
her about. In fact, she's rarely, if ever, shown smiling
at all. It's as if the photographer yelled "scowl" just
before clicking the shutter.
These
mothers are shown as sphinx-like, monolithic, part of
a pathetic historical pattern known, familiarly, as
"the cycle of dependency." In a major article in Newsweek
in August 1993 titled "The Endangered Family," we learned
that "For many African Americans, marriage and childbearing
do not go together." Not to mention the 25 percent of
white women for whom they don't go together either,
or the celebrity single mothers like Jodie Foster, Madonna,
and Farah Fawcett.
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It
isn't just that the conservative right has succeeded
in stereotyping welfare mothers as lazy, promiscuous
parasites; the media in which these mothers appear
provide no point of identification with them. At
best, these mothers are pitiable. At worst, they
are reprehensible opposites of the other mothers
we see so much of, the new standard-bearers of ideal
motherhood--the doting, conscientious celebrities
for whom motherhood is a gateway to heaven. During
the height of welfare bashing in the Reagan, Bush,
and Clinton administrations, the stereotype of the
"welfare queen" gained mythological status. But
there were other, less obvious, journalistic devices
that served equally well to dehumanize poor mothers
and their children. Unsavory designations proliferated
with a vengeance: "chronic dependents," "the chronically
jobless," "welfare mothers in training," "hardcore
welfare recipients," "never-married mothers," "welfare
careerists," and "welfare recidivists" became characters
in a distinctly American political melodrama. Poor
women weren't individuals; instead their life stories
became case-studies of moral decay, giving substance
to the inevitable barrage of statistics peppering
the media's presentation of "Life on the Dole."
In publications everywhere, we met the poster mother
for welfare reform. She only had a first name, she
lived in the urban decay of New York, Chicago, or
Detroit, she was not married, she had a pile of
kids each with a different absent father, and she
spent her day painting her nails, smoking cigarettes,
and feeding Pepsi to her baby. |
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As
sociologists have pointed out, even though there consistently
have been more white people than black on welfare, the
news media began, in the mid-1960s, to rely almost exclusively
on pictures of African Americans to illustrate stories
about welfare, reinforcing the stereotype that most
welfare recipients are black. Occasionally readers are
introduced to the runner-up in the poster competition:
the white welfare mother, whose story varies only in
that she lives in a trailer in some godforsaken place
we have never heard of and is really, really fat.
For
example, in a 1995 edition of CBS's 48 Hours, titled
"The Rage Over Welfare," we met two overweight white
women who live on welfare in New Hampshire. The very
first shots--just to let us know the kind of lazy, selfish
mothers we are in for--are close-ups of hands shuffling
a deck of playing cards and, next, a mom lighting a
cigarette. The white male journalist badgers one of
the women, who says she can't work because she has epilepsy
and arthritis in both knees. "People with epilepsy work.
People with bad knees work. People do," he scolds. As
she answers, "I don't know what kind of a job I could
find," the camera again cuts to her hands shuffling
the cards, suggesting, perhaps, a bright future in the
casino industry if she'd only apply herself.
Or
there's Denise B., one of the "True Faces of Welfare,"
age 29, with five daughters, from ages one to 13. "All,
after the first, were conceived on welfare--conceived
perhaps deliberately," Reader's Digest sniffs, conjuring
up the image of Denise doing some quick math calculations,
saying to herself, Oh boy, an extra 60 bucks a month,
and then running out to find someone to get her pregnant.
The other thing we learn about Denise is that she's
a leech. Why not get a job, even though she has toddlers?
Because she's lazy. "To get a good job, she would first
have to go to school, then earn her way up to a high
salary," Reader's Digest reminds us, and then lets the
ingrate, Denise, speak. "'That's going to take time,'
she says, 'It's a lot of work and I ain't guaranteed
to get nothing.'" What we learn of Denise's inner life
is that she's a calculating cynic. Her kids don't make
her feel like every day is Christmas; no, we're supposed
to think she uses her kids to get something for nothing.
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