Violence in Working-Class Motherhood

Motherhood is difficult enough to begin with. In heterosexual partnerships, mothers usually end up bearing most of the burden of child rearing. This is not only because they are the ones that house the child for 10 months, but also because society has dubbed women the caretakers. Fathers are rarely held to the same standard mothers are and yet often given twice the praise for simply parenting.

Even looking beyond the social pressure, to care for a child takes time, energy, and money. All three of these things are often scarce for working-class women. A lot of working-class women spend all of their waking hours and energy trying to make money. Adding a child into the mix either means reallocating some of the time you spend making money to time you will spend physically watching the child or taking some of the money you make to pay someone else to watch the child. Either way, children add financial burdens and seem to contribute to the already established lack of control most working-class women feel.

Being poor removes a certain amount of autonomy. You have less choices about what kind of work you can do, what kind of house you can live in, what kind of transportation you have. Opportunities are limited for working-class people and if you are on government assistance, you have even less autonomy because you are required to make a budget and submit to drug tests and inspections of your daily life if you wish to continue receiving that government aid.

Because of this removal of autonomy, working-class motherhood can be violent. Feeling powerless in one’s own life creates a lot of rage and sometimes it seems a mother’s children are the only outlet for this rage. The victims of a violent system that make their lives incredibly difficult, working-class women feel they have no choice but to lean into the violence of motherhood.

In the novel Under the Feet of Jesus, there are references to La Llorona, the woman who had to kill her children because she was too poor to feed them (Viramontes 11).

In the film Precious, Precious was physically and verbally abused by her mother daily.

The mothers in both of these texts were poor women who did not have the means to give their children a desirable life. Women whose children would have lived a violent existence even if it had not come directly from the mothers. The mothers just decided to participate in it because of the rage they felt at their own powerlessness but also because that is the form their love took. While their actions are inexcusable and unconscionable, recognition of patterns like these pushes us to ask better questions, such as: What kind of conditions created a situation in which a mother had to mercy kill her children or stay with her and her daughter’s abuser? What are we doing wrong as a society to have created the space for these things to happen? Because it seems that if Precious’s mother had the opportunity to leave her husband and know she would survive on her own, or if La Llorona had the ability to feed and house her children somewhere, then both narratives would be completely different.