Laura Briggs,
"Adoption, Immigration, and Privatization: Transnational Transformations in Family"
(page 2 of 3)
In the last two decades, growing numbers of middle-class households
in the U.S. have included domestic workers, mostly of Latin American
origin or ancestry.[7]
This has contributed to a downward economic shift
in Hothschild's crisis of reproductive labor, bringing the "who's
watching the kids?" question to a greater number working-class
households in the U.S. and across national boundaries, as mothers leave
young children in their home countries to support them by doing
domestic work elsewhere. This is a "cost of reproductive labor" issue.
If an increasing number of middle-class households in the U.S. are
relying on labor from elsewhere (i.e., from Latin American women hired
for lower wages to work in their homes), then it is also true that
migrant women who leave their children in home countries are relying on
the lower cost of reproductive labor outside of the
U.S.[8] It is a form
of "offshore reproduction" that has been, at once, crucial to other
forms of globalization, including the superheating of the U.S. economy
before the crash of 2008, and, to a significant extent, ignored in
discussions of neoliberal globalization.
While there was never a golden age in the U.S. when domestic labor
was understood to be a common, social concern supported by the state and a wider
community, there were still moments that offered a promise of something
different. In the 1960s and '70s, feminism and the welfare rights
movement advocated wages for motherhood, housework, and daycare centers.
Jimmy Carter's administration even acknowledged some obligation to help
families with young children since, for the first time, a majority of
mothers of children under six were working for
wages.[9] Reagan changed
all of that. Beginning with the 1980 campaign focus on "welfare cheats,"
it was high on the agenda of Reagan's people to shut this space down.
How they did this was a textbook case for neoliberalism: they began by
demonizing working-class black, Latina, and Native women and children as
irresponsible, immoral, and unworthy of help. Then, they moved on to
white middle-class families, which they claimed were potentially just
like these awful working-class families of color—or that they would
become like them if government gave them support. In place of this,
neoliberals offered personal responsibility and security. I am thinking,
here, of how "crack babies," fetal alcohol syndrome, and child car seats
and bike helmets became major public policy issues.
I have written about the invention of the crack baby in the 1980s and
how it was part and parcel of the civic disenfranchisement and
sanctioned impoverishment of black and Latino people in the
U.S.[10]
Here, I want to talk about fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) because it
caused double damage: it first demonized Native American mothers and then turned
on (usually white) middle-class mothers. Together, "crack babies" and
FAS provided a cover story for neoliberal decimation of the social
contract between the state and its most vulnerable citizens, essentially
claiming that personal irresponsibility was illegitimately making
outrageous claims on the public fisc.
In 1989, Michael Dorris published The Broken Cord, an
influential account of Fetal Alcohol
Syndrome.[11] While fetal alcohol
syndrome had been identified in the research literature as early as 1973
and had received passing mention in the media and in court cases,
Dorris's book put it on the map as a public health emergency. The first
half of Broken Cord is a tremendously compelling, novelistic
account of the adoption of his son, a toddler with developmental delays,
and the crashing to earth of Dorris's hopes that environment was
everything, as his son continued to exhibit growing health problems and
learning disabilities. By the end of the book, Dorris insists that as
many as one in three Native children may have been irredeemably harmed
by maternal drinking during pregnancy. What followed was hysteria about
pregnant women drinking, culminating in warning labels on alcoholic
beverages and in bars. Media stories decried child abuse and even
"genocide" by Native American women who drank. Women, mostly Native, went to
jail to "protect" their fetuses, despite appalling pregnancy outcomes
for women in prison, and some lost children to foster care. Native
children with developmental disabilities were automatically assumed to
have FAS, although a 1994 genetic study on reservations in Arizona found
that more than half the children diagnosed with FAS didn't have it,
suffering instead from Down's syndrome or something
similar.[12]
The entire debate also terrified middle-class women who didn't drink
much. Fetal alcohol syndrome went from being a problem of the children
of alcoholic women to a warning to all pregnant women not to drink at
all. Uncertainty about how much alcohol caused fetal defects
emboldened public health officials and the media to claim that any
alcohol use at all during pregnancy constituted fetal child
abuse.[13]
Dorris's partner, Louise Erdrich, summed it up when she said that
"one-glass-of-wine-a-day permissiveness of first-time yuppie mothers is
still sufficient to cause brain damage in the
fetus."[14] No one has the
slightest idea if that is true.
Yuppie mothers in the '80s were never demonized the way that black or
Native mothers were. Still, for them, the '80s was a period of
intensifying anxiety about their vulnerable children. Child advice books
turned mean.[15]
In contrast to the reassuring Dr. Spock, who told
mothers that if they listened to their children and their own common
sense, all would be fine, mothers in the '80s got Richard Ferber and T.
Berry Brazelton. The new advice books warned of the dangers of bad
parenting, urged disciplined approaches to bedtime and potty-training,
and insisted that parents attend to developmental guideposts. The 1980s
also marked the emergence of a host of new anxieties about child death
and disability (ironically as rates of both declined). There were
countless news stories about threats to children, including
SIDS,[16]
unverifiable reports of poisoned Halloween candy, drunk driving,
stranger kidnapping, and sexual abuse. States passed new laws requiring
bicycle helmets for children,[17]
seat belts, and expensive child safety
seats.[18]
At exactly the moment when middle-class U.S. American mothers
most needed them, sturdy, self-reliant children
disappeared.[19] At a
time when there might have been a widespread demand for publicly-funded
daycare, daycare became seen as a dangerous place where children were
routinely sexually abused. The 1980s expansion of the private was
at once an attack on feminism and the incursion of neoliberalism,
replacing belief in public services with private, familial labor.
Page: 1 | 2 | 3
Next page
|