Abstract
Mothering While Black engages a distinctive form of storytelling in its accounting for and theorizing about motherhood from the point of view of contemporary African American mothers. It reminds me of the intersectionality and heterogeneity of this role, especially as it is mediated by race/ethnicity, class, and gender politics. The text is illustrative, rooted in narratives from her sample, and reflexive in the organization and development of these narratives. Taken together, the author successfully intervenes in scholarship about mothering and work–family experiences, adding to established perspectives the experience of middle-class African American women.
Through an exploratory framework designed to establish how these women enact and strategically negotiate mothering, the author develops a conceptual language that constitutes these women’s proactive response to their roles and functions as mothers. In two parts, Dow articulates her analysis as a crucial corrective to the understandings of the formation of cultural ideals of parenting and motherhood by challenging the idea that all middle-class families can be viewed as largely interchangeable based on their resources…and expands on and revises existing theories related to middle-class parenting, racial identity formation, and family and work conflict/integration. (p. 19)
Though a contemplative confrontation with race and class in her storytelling, Dow’s exploration of women’s deliberate action in the interests of building the best communities for their children and the best outcomes for their futures could have benefited from a more developed conversation with established literature from social work, gender studies, child and adolescent development, Caribbean and African American studies, and the social sciences. However, Dow’s discussion is extremely valuable in its development of a language of middle-class African American women’s experience of mothering, work, and family life, both in the private and public spheres. She elaborates the ontological significance of this group of women and situates their actions as motivated and motivating, with a unique deployment of agency even when confronting sociopolitical mechanisms that challenge that agency. She not only gives these mothers visibility but she explains their influences, processes, and decisions that connect them to significant communities that affect their mothering. In so doing, she enhances the legibility of their mothering strategies and establishes their contention with race, class, and gender and the impact of these on their selfhood and on their children’s selves.
Mothering While Black is a revealing exploration of boundaries and boundary making that makes the invisible visible and shifts the framework of middle-class mothering from the Eurocentric to account for the “other”—African American mothers. She reveals the moments of pain and triumph that these mothers experience as they seek the best interests of their children, and she also clarifies the complexity of the difficult decision-making process they engage in as part of their everyday lives.
