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Article Excerpt
WESTERN NORMS CONCERNING MOTHERHOOD AND FEMINITY offer women a tightrope upon which to balance dependency and nurturance. On the one hand, these norms imply that good women should be dependent, so long as that dependency is evidenced through a relationship with a male provider (Fraser and Gordon, 1994). On the other hand, women are meant to provide nurturance both to the men in their lives, through emotional support, and to the children in their lives, through active, involved and expert mothering (Hays, 1996; McMahon, 1995; Ruddick, 1989; Hays, 1996). The tightrope of nurturance/dependency is particularly difficult to negotiate for women with disabilities. Women with disabilities are typically more embedded in relations of dependency than many women, in part because of their impairments, but also because hostile social policies and practices relating to disability force women into dependency on others for material and social support (Asch, Rousso and Jefferies, 2001; Asch and Fine, 1992; Statistics Canada, 2002). Restrictive environments control disabled women's access to public spaces, and hegemonic ideas about femininity, attractiveness and dependency make disabled women vulnerable to social isolation or sexual and emotional exploitation. Moreover, social constructions of disability as synonymous with incompetence keep disabled women from accessing equal educational and occupational opportunities. These barriers in turn increase disabled women's chances of living in poverty and/or inadequate housing and contribute to social marginalization (Asch, Rousso and Jefferies, 2001). In this article, I examine how dilemmas of nurturance and dependency are highlighted when disabled women engage in motherhood.
Drawing on qualitative interviews with 43 Canadian mothers with disabilities, the paper focuses on the dilemmas these particular women faced in reconciling their own position of dependency against their children's dependence upon them in both public and private spheres.
Women with Disabilities and "Dependency"
Feminists have argued that hegemonic femininity has the dual effect of placing women on pedestals for their purportedly "natural" qualities of being personable, intuitive, gentle and nurturant while at the same time sidelining them because of presumptions about women's "natural" tendencies to compliance, passivity and dependency. In a pivotal paper on dependency and femininity, Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon (1994) have argued that dependency is normative for women, so long as it is enacted within a framework of heterosexual, traditional marriage. Conversely, women who are independent from menor who depend for their livelihood on institutions other than heterosexual marriage (such as social assistance) are characterized as moral and economic failures (Fraser and Gordon, 1994). These women are likely to be closely scrutinized and harshly judged by the social institutions upon which they depend.
Dependency is a more complex problem for women with disabilities than for most other women, both in the public arena and the private sphere. In the public arena, women with disabilities experience more challenges in achieving independence than do those who are non-disabled. Women with disabilities are more likely to experience dependency on institutional supports as a result of their unequal access to education, their difficulties in obtaining adequate employment and their higher likelihood of living in poverty (Asch, Rousso and Jefferies, 2001; Blackford, 1993; Doe and Kimpson, 1999; Doe, Rajan and Abbott, 2003; Prince, 2004; Raphael, 2004). Further complicating matters, disabled women's dependency is likely to be experienced outside of normative femininity in terms of dependency within the bonds of heterosexual marriage. This is because women with disabilities are often perceived as falling short of cultural ideals of attractiveness and suitability for heterosexual love and motherhood, both highly normative roles for all women under hegemonic femininity (Asch and Fine, 1997; Chance, 2002; Dotson, Stinson and Christian, 2003). Indeed, women with disabilities are likely to marry less often, marry later in life, have fewer children, and divorce more frequently than are non-disabled women (Asch and Fine, 1997; Asch, Rousso and Jefferies, 2001; Canadian Centre on Social Development, 2003). Thus, it has been argued that women with disabilities experience heightened gendered oppression without experiencing the advantages of the heteronormative "pedestal" that non-disabled women are able to access (Asch, Rousso and Jefferies, 2001).
Women with Disabilities anal "Nurturance"
The challenges women with disabilities face in terms of femininity and dependency are further complicated when disabled women become mothers since motherhood positions women ideally as depended upon by vulnerable children. Sara Ruddick has noted that mothering involves the tasks of "protection, nurturance, training," and a readiness to respond to the needs of children with "care and respect," qualities that are stereotyped as core attributes of hegemonic femininity (Ruddick, 1989). Similarly, Martha McMahon has argued that women undergo resocialization when they become mothers in the process transforming themselves into women who are "loving, caring, responsible" people, linking femininity and responsibility to female adulthood (McMahon, 1995: 130). Thus, mothers in modern Western societies are idealized as "natural" caregivers for children and are held fully responsible for the good and bad that befalls their children. They are also liable for the moral reproduction of society through the nurturing of physically, emotionally and morally healthy children (Caplan, 1989; Knowles, 1996; Ladd-Taylor and Umansky, 1998). While mothers and mothering may be idealized, "failed" mothers (including mothers who do not live in traditional nuclear families, mothers whose children "go wrong" or mothers who cannot provide what is perceived to be adequate care and protection to their children) are subject to intense scrutiny, judgment, and intervention (Abramowitz, 1996; Appell, 1998; Boyd, 1999; Coll, Surrey, Buccio-Notaro and Molla, 1998; Malacrida, 2000; 2003; Roberts, 1999).
Just as women with disabilities have difficulties negotiating dependency and femininity, they face challenges in achieving idealized mothering. Women with disabilities often engage in mothering with fewer resources and more barriers in the public and private spheres than do women without disabilities.
In the public sphere, disabled women's mothering is often constrained by poverty, inadequate housing and the inaccessibility of public spaces (Blackford, 1999; Grue and Laerum, 2002; Thomas, 1997). In addition to barriers in the economy and the built environment, mothers with disabilities face stigmatizing public perceptions of them as inadequate or inappropriate in the role of mothering. Helping professionals and family members often discourage women with disabilities from becoming pregnant, expressing concerns that they will not be competent mothers and reflecting eugenic concerns that their disabilities will be passed on to their children (Gerodetti, 2003; Killoran, 1994; O'Toole and Doe, 2002; Patterson and Satz, 2002). Once disabled women become mothers, they face challenges in assuring the public of their appropriateness as parents and their capacity to mother adequately (Fitzmaurice, 2002; Grue and Laerum, 2002; Reinelt and Fried, 1993). There is evidence that presumptions about deficiencies in mothers with disabilities not only extend into the public sphere of schools, shops, streets and communities, but that disabled mothers' relations with helping professionals are also coloured by the myth of the "upside-down family." This myth presumes that disabled mothers not only fall short of ideal mothering, but that they depend on their children for care and services, exploiting these "young carers" and robbing them of their childhood (Booth and Booth, 1998). These assumptions about the inadequacy and inappropriateness of disabled mothers are likely to be heightened for those with intellectual disabilities, as evidenced by the lack of information for such women about sexuality and birth control and by active attempts to discourage these women from becoming pregnant through surgical and social interventions (Carlson, Taylor and Wilson, 2000; Dotson, Stinson and Christian, 2003; Nelson, 1999).
Women with disabilities face systematic challenges to nurturing their children in the private sphere as well. Here, disabled women's mothering can be made difficult by an increased likelihood of mothering without a partner (Asch and Fine, 1992), by heightened vulnerability to sexual, physical and psychological abuse (Saxton, Curry, Powers, Maley, Eckels and Gross, 2001), and by embodied differences that are not accommodated through policies and supports for mothers who provide care and nurturance to their children (Blackford, 1993; 1999). In sum, mothers with disabilities face economic, social and environmental barriers to their mothering in the public sphere while at the same time bearing particular burdens in the private sphere.
Methodological and Theoretical Issues
This paper examines tensions between dependency and nurturance of mothers with disabilities. The analysis draws on qualitative, semi-structured interviews conducted with 43 women with disabilities in Alberta, Canada, who are currently mothers to children who are less than eighteen years of age. This cut-off age is purposeful since it is the age of adulthood in Alberta in terms of caregiving responsibilities, child support and government funding for dependent children. The study includes mothers who have a variety of custody arrangements with their children because mothers with disabilities are at higher risk than average to experience child apprehension or disrupted parenting (Ashe, Rousso and Jefferies, 2001). It was thus important to include the experiences of mothers who have been unable to live up to normative notions of "good enough" mothering, so both custodial and noncustodial mothers were included in the study.
Sampling Considerations
Interview participants were recruited in a variety of ways. Calls for participants were posted through multiple on-line support and service groups that serve women with disabilities and through mail-outs to disability and family-related agencies across the province. Flyers were posted in multiple disability-specific sites in all major cities and most of the smaller centres across the province. Flyers were also posted in family-oriented public sites such as playgroup centres, schools, shopping centres and clinics. Finally, snowball sampling was used to contact participants.
The study participants included women with a wide range of impairments, including physical impairments such as multiple sclerosis and spinal cord injuries (20), disabling mental health conditions such as schizophrenia or bi-polar disorder (7), cognitive impairments including brain injuries (5), pervasive developmental delays (7), and sensory impairments such as blindness and deafness (4). The inclusion of women with a variety of impairments in the study has been important for several reasons. First, much research on women with disabilities operates as an essentializing discourse, presuming women with disabilities share similar problems and experiences regardless of their social attributes (Asch, Rousso and Jefferies, 2001; Wendell, 1996). In actuality, women with disabilities have varied experiences, depending on social factors such as their marital status, sexuality, socioeconomic status, geographical location, and their access to cultural, social and symbolic capital. Thus, while women with disabilities as a group are more likely than other women to experience poverty, discrimination, violence, lack of reproductive freedom and social isolation (Morris, 1996), women who...
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