My Mother/Myself: Constraint and Agency in Incarcerated Women's Views of Mothering

• In Event: Women, Crime and Justice: Gendered Experiences and Perceptions

Abstract

Recent sociological research underscores the complex interplay between motherhood and mothering, documenting the varying and unequal resources women bring to mothering. According to this literature, “doing mothering” requires considering the structural, experiential, and situational constraints women face in their decisions about parenting children. Many women in prison come from disadvantaged backgrounds, with family histories of poverty, abuse, neglect, and chemical dependency, and they have faced many of the same issues in adulthood. Thus, women’s family histories have implications for their mothering of their children. We examine identity narratives written by women on the brink of reentering society from prison to explore the women's understandings of the shared constraints faced by themselves and their mothers, particularly as they apply to raising children. Given that imprisonment separates women from their children, we focus on women's discussions of their own and their mothers’ absences from their children’s lives. A consistent strategy that the women employ in these narratives is to shift from discussing their mothers as active agents in abandoning them to discussing their abandonment of their own children as responses to the constraints of disadvantage, abuse, and dependency. Specifically, the women discuss how their own mothers chose to leave them behind in pursuit of men, dreams, or drugs. By contrast, they discuss their own absences from their children (often prior to the incarceration experience) by pointing to constraints led to the loss or departure of their children. We maintain that this shift in focus from choice to constraint is a tool used by women to construct more positive images of themselves as mothers while simultaneously using their own mothers’ failures to show that they recognize hegemonic cultural ideals of motherhood.

Authors

• Stacy De Coster, North Carolina State University

• Karen Heimer, University of Iowa