Jenna Andersen's List: Gwendolyn Brooks

• • "othermorthering" and "symbolic kinship"
    
    "fluid and changing boundaries often distinguish biological mothers from other women who care for children ... othermothers--women who assist bloodmothers by sharing mothering responsibilities-traditionally have been central to the institution of Black motherhood... In African-American communities these women-centered networks of community-based child care often exted beyond the boundaries of biologically related individuals and include 'fictive kin'.

• • A common thread in the stories of each generation was the support they received
    from their community of women. Lily, from Generation 2, gave a positive description of growing up in the
    projects:
    In addition to my mother there were women in the
    community who all had six or more [children], they
    were all beautiful women who worked hard. In each
    family, there was a father and mother. . .. So I had those
    older girls and their mothers as influences, everybody
    was very respectful.
    Stories from each generation of women described ways
    in which they offer support through community networks such as churches and schools

• • Some women considered it normal for men to roam, and relied on other women for their companionship, assistance, and advice. A few even reported a preference for this distant relationship with the men. "Addie," a grandmother and also a new mother, discussed men and the family:
    
    
    
    
     
    "We black women got to understand that our men are gonna play. They're more like boys than men. They don't like to settle down in one place too long. They ain't gonna stick with one lady. They're just born like that and they can't help themselves. I think women should take the most care of children, 'specially the hands-on stuff. All my life the only people I could depend on is women, and the men always took off. It's the women that want to stay together. That is more natural to me."
• • Seventeen year-old "Tosha" said,
    
    
    
    
     
    "It feels hard. I don't know a lot of things about babies...I didn't think it would be this hard. I helped out with my cousins...and I thought it was easy but it's not the same when it's your own baby..."
     
    Responsibility, caring, and love for the child were perceived to be the keys to successful motherhood. 
• • Preparing for motherhood was found to be an early childhood practice, involving siblings and younger kin and was sometimes initiated by older female relatives. "Nona" described her maternal preparation:
    
    
    
    
     
    "I raised my cousin's children, too. I used to take them for their shots and WIC and stuff. They would sleep over sometime for 3 or 4 nights while she was out running around. I was already a mother a long time ago. All I needed was my own baby. I practiced on my cousin's children. I always liked babies even when I was a little girl."
     
• • Checking would follow after the girl had some experience observing other mothers, including her own, and could then modify her own mothering ideas. "Tia" had a difficult childhood and checked her mother's practices:
    
    
    
    
     
    "My family wasn't the kind to worry about things too much. My mother was always drunk or drinking and she didn't worry too much about what we told her."
• • Becoming was a transitional stage, beginning prior to or concurrent with the decision to have a baby and extending through the initial period of infant care and responsibility. "June," a first-time mother, talked about becoming a mother:
    
    
    
    
     
    "I was on the pill before I got pregnant with her. I stopped [using contraceptives] so I could get pregnant....I want more children, but far in the future. I'm still young yet and I want to spend time with my baby. I really want to know her well."
     
• • Evaluating was the period after the new mother actually assumed responsibility for the infant's care. Reflecting on her activities as a mother, she listened to the comments of family and close friends about her success in the role, then used those comments to judge her own mothering ability. "Reba," mother of two children, evaluated her maternal role fulfillment:
    
    
    
    
     
    "I know I can do it. I just need to adjust to all the changes in my life. My mother doesn't think I can do it [her first child lived with her mother], but I know I can. She always comes to get her [the baby] and take her over to her house. She says she's giving me a break, but I feel like she's trying to turn my baby to her."
• • Analysis of the family structures and comparison between the family of origin and new family revealed similarities between the two (see Table 2). The mothers emulated patterns for family structure established by the significant women in their own childhood. Many of the women were single, young teenagers at the birth of their first child, and some reported similar situations for their mothers. Indeed, they were not mothers by default, but by long-term practice and social design.

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• • The criminalization movement accelerated during the 1860s, and by 1900 abortion was largely illegal in every state. Some states did include provisions allowing for abortion in limited circumstances, generally to protect the woman's life or pregnancies due to rape or incest. Abortions continued to occur, however, and increasingly became readily available. In the 1930s, licensed physicians performed an estimate 800,000 abortions a year.[5] Illegal abortions were often unsafe, sometimes resulting in death, as in the case of Gerri Santoro of Connecticut in 1964.
• • Abortion rates are much more common among minority women in the U.S. In 2000-2001, the rates among black and Hispanic women were 49 per 1,000 and 33 per 1,000, respectively, vs. 13 per 1,000 among non-Hispanic white women. Note that this figure includes all women of reproductive age, including women that are not pregnant. In other words, these abortion rates reflect the rate at which U.S. women of reproductive age have an abortion each year.[41] While White women obtain 60% of all abortions, African American women are three times more likely to have an abortion

• • A report released this past fall by the Guttmacher Institute, 
    a research group that supports abortion rights, found that 
    African-American women have abortions at a rate five times 
    that of non-Hispanic  white women and three times that of 
    Hispanic women. While abortion rates have been declining 
    for all women, nonwhite women have had a higher rate of 
    abortions since the procedure was legalized in the 1970s. B
• • F
    ormer Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders, who became 
    controversial for speaking frankly about such issues, 
    thinks the country should stop obsessing about abortion, stop trying to legislate morals and instead focus 
    on promoting sexual health and preventing unplanned 
    pregnancies. “There’s never been a woman who needed an 
    abortion who was not alrea

• • Another form of expression of the group reproductive tendency
    is in the fear of increased immorality which might result from
    popular knowledge of contraceptive measures. 
• • Under present conditions, the more intelligent individuals in any group, and the more intelligent races
    generally, practice contraception, and the very Avorst eugenic
    results are obtained. As a merely negative means, extending the
    information to the lower races and to the less intelligent members
    of the group would seem requisite.

• • Blacks were significantly more likely to seek an abortion in the event
    of an unwanted pregnancy than subjects in the
    main sample (p < .OS). While a large portion of
    the main sample indicated that they would use "the
    pill" for contraception, the figures are lower for
    the blacks and the predominantly Catholic Chicanos.

• • This is the first time that the records of specialists in illegal abortion have been made available to the medical world, Dr. Tietza indicated. Little has been known of such cases except through the medium of gossip and the suspicion that they are very numerous. 

• • Page 167
    
    The gratification of the sexual impulse is not a crime, and the mere fact that an effort is made to prevent the coitus from resulting in a pregnancy that may endanger the mother's life does not constitute an immoral act. There has been much prudery and prejudice in the views of Americans on this subject.

• • AlthouOne of the most interesting findings of our analysis pertins to religion. Himmelstein (1986) has argued that church attendance is an important determinant of involvement in religious networks. His work finds that religious networks are the overriding factor in shaping women's gender outlooks. Following this explanation, we would expect that church attendance woudl be associate with Black women's abortion attitudes. Although attendance is significant in the initial models, our analysis of the full models for both time periods shows that attendance has a minimal impact. Moreover, because our measures of sex and family values remove the effect of church attendance, Himmelstein's hypothesized relationship is shows to operate in a reversed direction for Black women; that is, sex and family values appear to shape church attendance behaviors among the Black women in our sample.

  • The abortion attitudes of Black women have remained relatively consistent across the past two decades. 
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  • • Women whose lives are centered around the role of wife and mother with minimal attachments to wage labor are thought to hold pro--family attitudes and to champion policies that promote the continuance of traditional family and gender values. Thus the more women depend on tradition nuclear family arrangement, the more likely they will oppose legalized abortion.