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Motherhood, Social Policies and Women's Activism in Latin America pp 39–67Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

“Taking the Nature Out of Mother”: From Politics of Exclusion to Feminisms of Difference and Recognition of Rights

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Abstract

This study presents examples of people and institutions that used maternalism to frame political projects and defined motherhood as a biologically determined, natural, and universalist category. Benevolent maternalist elite women reached out to working-class women; both women and men employed secular and religious discourses of motherhood for leftist or right-wing political causes. These examples supply evidence of the multifaceted, complex characteristics of the uses of motherhood that make maternal mobilization unsuitable for feminist activism in the twenty-first century.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For an excellent discussion about the wide range of reactions to assisted reproduction and about matters of life and kinship, see Roberts (2012).

  2. 2.

    On competitions between FECHIF and MEMCh, see Rosemblatt (2000: 243–247).

  3. 3.

    Some have argued that the early mothers’ centers in fact supported and encouraged the political participation of women. Women in mothers’ centers often actively endorsed women’s suffrage and participated in the FECHIF (Covarrubias 1981: 20–25).

  4. 4.

    Under the UP government, mothers’ centers became the Confederación de Centros de Madres (COCEMA) in 1971 under the auspices of the new First Lady, Hortensia Bussi de Allende (Confederación Nacional de Centros de Madres (Chile) 1972).

  5. 5.

    Power asserts that a key reason for women’s support of the Pinochet dictatorship was their effort to affirm their notions of womanhood and their conservative ideas about motherhood and sexuality (Power 2002b).

  6. 6.

    Ley 19.023 Art. 2, 1991. https://www.leychile.cl/Navegar?idNorma=30390.

  7. 7.

    El Mercurio 22 July 2006; 16 Aug. 2006, 13/14. http://www.irb-cisr.gc.ca/en/research/ndp/ref/?action=view&doc=chl102427fe.

  8. 8.

    El Mercurio 16 Aug. 2006, 12. http://www.irb-cisr.gc.ca/en/research/ndp/ref/?action=view&doc=chl102427fe.

  9. 9.

    https://www.leychile.cl/Navegar?idNorma=1021343.

  10. 10.

    For an analysis that situates the case of the Mapuche at the intersection of recognition and redistribution, see Richards and Gardner (2013).

  11. 11.

    For references to multiple positions on the relation between motherhood and religious/spiritual aspects, see Stuven and Fermandois (2011).

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  1. University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

    Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney

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  1. Department of Sociology, University of Valparaíso, Valparaíso, Chile

    Alejandra Ramm

  2. Department of Geography, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK

    Jasmine Gideon

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I would like to thank the editors, as well as Sandra Deutsch and Lisa Munro, for their insightful comments and for the constructive critique of earlier drafts of this chapter.

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Pieper Mooney, J.E. (2020). “Taking the Nature Out of Mother”: From Politics of Exclusion to Feminisms of Difference and Recognition of Rights. In: Ramm, A., Gideon, J. (eds) Motherhood, Social Policies and Women's Activism in Latin America. Studies of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21402-9_3

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