Parental Activism and the Maintenance of the Public: Countering Neoliberal Privatization With Reproductive Labor

• In Event: 26.067 - Reproductive Labor: Work, Gender, and Contemporary Schooling

Abstract

When Arne Duncan dismissed criticism of the Common Core’s assessment regime as coming from “White suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were (sic),” he drew on a long discursive tradition of excluding mothers’ political work from the public sphere. This paper contests that dismissal of maternal political engagement by exploring the reasons mothers involved in educational activism give for their involvement in public life. Although such activists are, as in Duncan’s words, usually considered to be acting only out of concern for their own children, their accounts evidence politically-charged concern for social justice and community welfare. This paper’s objective is to present the political and ethical dimensions of their reasoning As Susan Moller Okin traces in Women in Western Political Thought, political theory from Aristotle through the Enlightenment delegitimized mothers-as-citizens by construing women and family as a “private” domain in which self-interest prevails. Although women have made substantial gains in politics and political philosophy in recent decades, it remains the case that maternal work is conceptually (as well as practically) privatized – relegated in common parlance and philosophical discourse to a private, amoral and apolitical, domain.

The paper is based on a philosophical-empirical study of Chicago area parent education activists, as well as on two philosophical conversations: feminist scholarship on the gendered binarization of private and public and recent philosophical work on the public. Drawing on interviews with mothers engaged in activism on behalf of public schooling, the paper puts their analyses of why they do the work they do into conversation with philosophical literature on the publicity of public schooling. The “public” dimensions of public schooling, and school privatization, are important topics in contemporary philosophy of education, but feminist theory’s contestation of the private/public dichotomy is often left out of the conversation, an oversight this paper aims to redress. Based on initial inquiry, I expect the paper to expand philosophical understanding of “the public” by illustrating the part parents’ educational activism plays in maintaining the public that supports public schooling. Parents’ educational activism, that is, is a significant form of reproductive labor, which policy-makers and political theorists alike are mistaken to disregard.

Several important scholarly conversations overlap in this paper, and I expect it would appeal to diverse audiences. To conversation in political philosophy and cultural studies about public schooling and the impact of neo-liberal privatization, this paper offers a feminist perspective. To conversation about how philosophical and empirical inquiry can be combined, this paper provides an example of how inter-disciplinary research can be carried out. Finally, to scholars from a variety of fields interested in gender, the paper provides a renewed utilization of the concept of reproductive labor.

Author

• Amy B. Shuffelton, Loyola University Chicago