Abstract
Drawing on in-depth interviews with mothers who were abused by intimate partners, we argue that mothering can be a source of empowerment that helps battered women both care for their children and survive and assert themselves. Women in the study sample described a violation of some aspect of their mothering as the reason they left their partners. However, narrative analysis exposed contradictions in participants’ stories, revealing multiple factors that shaped their decisions to leave. Although motherhood was significant for the women who participated in the study, it was not their only motivation for ending their relationships with abusive partners.
Introduction
Motherhood holds multiple and contradictory meanings for women who mother. The experience of motherhood often involves fulfillment, joy, and a sense of accomplishment as well as a sense of inadequacy, resentment, and anger—sometimes simultaneously, sometimes at different points in time. However, motherhood is rarely presented in its full complexity. Instead, two dichotomous and coherent images of mothers dominate in our culture: the good mother and the bad mother. On one hand, there is the idealized mother, the nurturing, self-sacrificing mother who reaches ultimate fulfillment by faithfully taking care of all of her children’s physical and emotional needs. On the other hand, there is the demonized mother who resents the burdens of motherhood, and who may neglect or abuse her children.
A modified version of this dichotomy appears in characterizations of mothers who are battered by male intimate partners. Sometimes they are presented as good mothers in bad circumstances, as helpless victims of abuse who are not able to protect themselves, let alone their children (Loseke, 1992). More common is the image of the bad mother who fails to protect her children by staying with the man who abuses her (Roberts, 1999). This focus on the negative impact of intimate partner abuse “has led to an emphasis on women’s ‘deficiencies’ and ‘failures’ as mothers” and has excluded abusive fathers from the discussion (Lapierre, 2008, p. 456). These conceptions of battered mothers are simplistic and moralistic, and they fail to capture the complicated and multiple relationships battered women have to their children and to the men who batter them.
Mothers who are being battered are often coerced by their intimate partners into providing the majority of child care (Radford & Hester, 2006). Women who are abused by their intimate partners are not, however, simply victims; rather, they respond to domestic violence as agents who use the power they have both to protect their children and to resist the various ways they are subordinated and abused. Although battered women’s mothering practices are often tied up with their intimate partners’ controlling and abusive behaviors, they usually achieve a positive sense of themselves from the process of mothering and from the social status they gain from being mothers. For women who are battered, mothering can be a source of empowerment that helps them not only care for their children, but also survive and assert themselves.
Because it is a source of power in a context in which women have very little power, mothering within domestic violence can take on a greater meaning than it does in other contexts. Many women who have been battered describe a violation of some aspect of their mothering as a catalyst for leaving their boyfriends or husbands (Mullender et al., 2002). However, a close reading of their narratives shows that although motherhood becomes especially important to them as a source of identity and power in the context of their partners’ abusive behavior, motherhood is only one of many sources of power that battered women draw on. The current article expands on previous work looking at battered women who are mothers (e.g., Radford & Hester, 2006) to consider how motherhood shapes the actions of women who are battered.
Background
Much has been written in the past decade about cultural meanings of motherhood and the implications social policies have for children and those who care for them. Nevertheless, there is surprisingly little overlap between the literature on domestic violence and recent literature on mothering (Lapierre, 2008; Peled & Gil, 2011). In a wide-ranging review of a decade of literature on mothering from the 1990s, Arendell (2000) mentions domestic violence in only one sentence of the article and cites only one work that addresses the intersection of violence and motherhood. Recent theoretical and empirical studies of mothering almost always neglect to consider the ways that abuse and violence shape the experience and practice of mothering. References to domestic violence are absent from many important books and edited volumes about mothering (Bassin, Honey, & Kaplan 1994; Chase & Rogers 2001; Glenn, 1994; Johnson, 1988; McMahon, 1995; Villani, 1997). Even a book entitled, Mothering Against the Odds (Coll, Surrey, & Weingarten, 1998) lacks a discussion of the effects of domestic violence on the meaning and practice of mothering.
Yet, we know intimate partner violence is a central part of many women’s lives. At least 1.5 million women in the United States suffer from violence from an intimate partner every year (Tjaden & Thoennes, 2000). In a 1998 study, 31% of women reported having experienced domestic violence by a husband or boyfriend at some point in their lives (Collins et al., 1999). Other researchers have found that intimate partner violence may be a more common problem among pregnant women than some conditions for which they are routinely screened and evaluated (Connelly, Newton, Lansverk, & Aarons, 2000; Radford & Hester, 2006). Intimate partner violence is so prevalent among women, including women with children, that many researchers recommend that health care providers, including emergency room doctors, midwives, obstetricians, and pediatricians, institute routine screening protocols for their patients (Campbell, 2002; Pulido & Gupta, 2002).
Although domestic violence is widespread and infuses every aspect of the lives of women who are battered, including their identities and practices as mothers, it has not been addressed in most of the recent literature on mothering. On the other side of the literature divide, researchers who focus on domestic violence have not taken advantage of the recent contributions of those who study and theorize about mothering. Some of the most interesting contemporary writing on motherhood has focused on the connections between ideology, experience, and agency in the lives of mothers (Glenn, Chang, & Forcey 1994). Many researchers focus on women’s agency by looking at the various ways mothers practice mothering and how those practices are shaped by the diverse social conditions in which they live. They are going beyond earlier universalistic conceptions of motherhood (Chodorow, 1978; Ruddick, 1982) by considering the multiple ways that ideology and race, class, and gender relations shape different mothers’ lives. This complex and dynamic understanding of the meanings and experiences of motherhood, which not only includes an analysis of the ways social relations shape motherhood but also considers mothers themselves to be main actors in constructions of motherhood, can help us better understand the ways that motherhood shapes the actions of women who are battered.
Some of the literature on domestic violence does acknowledge and address the fact of motherhood, meaning the fact that many women who are battered have children. A great deal has been written about the effects of domestic violence on children (Graham-Bermann & Edleson, 2001; Holden, Geffner, & Jouriles, 1998; Kolbo, Blakely, & Engleman, 1996), and the correlation between domestic violence and child abuse (Bancroft & Silverman, 2002; Edleson, 2001). However, the literature on intimate partner violence has done little to pick up the threads that mothering scholars are weaving as they explore the connections between mothering ideology, experience, and women’s agency.
An exception to this failure to address the intersection between domestic violence and mothering is a small group of scholars who are addressing the ways that battered women are frequently blamed for harm that the men in their lives bring to their children (DeVoe & Smith, 2003; Fleck-Henderson, 2000; Radford & Hester, 2001; 2006; Roberts, 1999). These writers address the prevalence of mother blaming in situations where intimate partners are battering mothers. Citing several examples of women who were charged with the failure to protect their children from abuse, Roberts (1999) notes that women are all too often held responsible, blamed, and punished for any and all harm that comes to their children, regardless of whether or not they perpetrate that harm. Furthermore, Mullender et al. (2002) argue that motherhood is socially constructed such that women are “doomed to fail,” and for women who experience intimate partner abuse an environment is created that is “deeply unconducive to achieving even ‘good enough’ mothering” (p. 157).
Roberts (1999) argues that the ideology that renders women wholly responsible for the well-being of their children influences court and media assessments of women’s culpability in cases where the men in their lives have harmed their children. Women are often charged as accomplices to the crimes of assault and battery perpetrated by men because they have failed to fulfill their normative roles as those who are solely responsible for the care of their children. When women do not fulfill their “duty” to protect their children, they are punished. Black women are at a particular disadvantage because, being barred from the cult of White womanhood, they are expected to be bad mothers and their mothering practices come under greater scrutiny.
This research builds on Roberts’ (1999) and Radford and Hester’s (2001) suggestions that rather than simply assume that mothers who are battered are not concerned about the well-being of their children, we make the effort to examine the ways that they interact with their children when coping with and resisting abuse.
Method
One of the most frequently cited obstacles to studying battering in intimate relationships is the problem of access (Okun, 1986; Schechter, 1988). Because battering usually takes place behind closed doors and there is a strong stigma attached to it, women are often deterred from publicly identifying themselves as having been battered. Consequently, there is no identifiable representative population of women who have been battered from which one can sample. Many studies have drawn participants from one or more organizations that battered women might turn to for help, such as shelters, hospitals, government institutions, and psychologists, limiting the samples to women who seek help from those particular organizations. National studies such as the National Violence Against Women Survey (Tjaden & Thoennes, 2000) use large representative samples, but often identify only a small percentage of women who experience intimate partner abuse. Furthermore, these large-scale surveys are often unable to gain the in-depth information on the context in which the violence took place. It is exactly this context that we are interested in, and data from in-depth interviews effectively revealed that context.
Women were contacted by putting up fliers in laundromats, child care centers, grocery stores, battered women’s shelters, health centers, legal aid offices, community colleges, and universities in three towns and five cities across Massachusetts. The fliers sought participants for a research project “about women who experience abuse, violence, or battering in relationships.” A token payment of US$20 was offered for participation in the study and US$10/hr for child care for those with young children. Some of the women interviewed said that the US$20 did serve as an incentive to participate, though they were less interested in the payment’s monetary value than the symbolic meaning of being paid for telling me about their experiences. One woman said, “Sure, $20 isn’t much, but it’s something, and it makes me feel like what I have to say is important.”
While the participants in this study are not a random sample, every effort was made to interview women from a broad range of economic and social backgrounds. A strictly representative sample was not necessary for this research as it is part of an exploratory study focused on analyzing battering as a process by examining constructions of women’s subjectivities and agency within that process. Furthermore, an advantage of a self-selected sample like the one used for this study is that it includes participants who are interested in talking about their experiences of being battered and are therefore less likely to censor parts of their experience, giving a fuller picture of their lives, emotions, and actions during the time they were battered.
This analysis is part of a larger research project on the ways women who are battered by intimate partners resist the control, abuse, and violence that their partners exert on them. The research involved in-depth interviews with 25 women from both urban and rural parts of Massachusetts, which took place either in the woman’s home or in a study room in a library. Nineteen of the women had children at the time they were being battered. Of the 19 women who had children, 10 were White, 1 was Native American, 5 were Latina, and 3 were African American. One of the women had a PhD, 4 had a bachelor’s degree, 3 had some college, and 11 had a high school degree. Seven of the women worked in the paid labor force either consistently or at some points during their relationship. Their work included research, nursing, clerical work, retail, dry cleaning, sex work, and selling drugs. All but two of their intimate partners worked throughout all or most of the time they were together. Their jobs included physician, engineer, auto mechanic, carpenter, selling drugs, and grocery store clerk.
As this article is focused on the social context in which battered women mother, in-depth, in-person interviews allowed exploration of the many factors that shape women’s experiences and actions while they are being battered. Each interview lasted 2 to 4 hours. The interviews were semistructured and consisted of open-ended questions, which gave both the interviewer and the participants freedom to take the conversation in unplanned directions to explore more deeply the processes and themes under investigation. As Reinharz (1992) notes, “eschewing standardization in format allows the research question, not the method, to drive the project forward” (p. 22). The questions were designed to learn about the ways the power dynamics in the woman’s relationship to the man who abused her, as well as social norms, social networks, and access to economic and institutional resources, shaped each participant’s actions, her identity, and her interpretations of her actions.
The interviews were audiotaped and transcribed for analysis. Information was coded based on patterns in the interviews. What emerged from the interviews were both question-and-answer exchanges between the interviewer and the participants, and narratives or long stories that the participants related in an effort to make sense of their experiences and actions while they were being abused. Charmaz (2002) makes a distinction between constructivist and objectivist approaches to qualitative research. Researchers with an objectivist perspective view people’s telling of their experiences as pure and true reflections of what happened, while constructivists view data from interviews as interpretations of the social world, which reveal a person’s perspective on the events s/he describes, and not the event itself. Recognizing that people develop stories about their lives that mediate between what really happened and the meanings their experiences hold for them, we approached the interview data from what we will call a modified constructivist perspective.
Veroff, Chadiha, Leber, and Sutherland (1993) write, “. . . direct questions can elicit historical truth to some extent, they often engage much more of the person’s social self-presentation and hence are primarily useful in understanding situations where self-presentations are particularly salient” (p. 439). While constructivist scholars often focus mainly on interviewees’ self-presentation and interpretations of events, we were also interested in the content of participants’ stories as reflections (partial though they may be) of events and motivations in their lives.
We used narrative analysis to examine the women’s stories of the turning points in their relationships that led them to their decision to leave their abusive partners. In analyzing the women’s narratives of turning points in their relationships, we were surprised to find many contradictions in their stories. For example, it was common for a participant to identify one event that led her to make the decision to leave her abusive partner at one point in the interview, and then identify an entirely different event as the reason she left at another point in the interview. More than half of the mothers interviewed said that a violation of some aspect of their mothering served as a catalyst for them to leave their husbands or boyfriends, but at another point in the interview they identified a different reason for leaving. Narrative analysis takes the narrative, the story, as the object of investigation (Riessman, 2002, p. 696). By examining contradictions in these participants’ stories, we uncovered the ways ideology and social relations shaped participants’ interpretations of their experiences as well as the multiplicity of factors that shaped their decisions to leave their partners. This method permitted the examination of the very complex ways that motherhood affected the lives of the women interviewed.
Results
Judith Butler, in The Psychic Life of Power (1997), argues that subjectivity is created through subjection, through subordination. She writes of the paradox that subjects are formed through subjection and thus they are dependent on their subordination for their very being. Responding to critics of her previous work who contend that her theories do not include the possibility for agency, she attempts to resolve this problem by arguing that the subject that is inaugurated through the exercise of power transcends that power. In the simplest terms, Butler’s argument is that the power that subordinates subjects also brings subjects into being. That same power is transformed in the process of creating the subject and emerges as power that belongs to the subject.
Butler’s description of the paradox of subjection and agency is useful for understanding women’s experiences with mothering. Just as women are made and not born, so are mothers. Mothering ideologies and practices are shaped through power relations, namely gender, race, and class relations. Women’s identities as mothers and their practices of mothering are constructed through their subordination as women as well as their often-subordinated positions within race and class relations. However, women often gain affirmation and strength through their identities as mothers. The same gender, race, and class relations that create mothers and motherhood through subordination also create the basis for mothers’ agency. In the process of creating mothers, power relations also create women’s ability to act as mothers. Thus, the power that both subordinates and constructs mothers is transformed into mothers’ power.
Eli Zaretsky (1976) writes that it is a tragic paradox that love, dependence, altruism, and the oppression of women all exist within the same matrix. However, many writers on mothering have tended to either critique it as exploitative and oppressive work (Eisenstein, 1983) or celebrate it as something that is meaningful and fulfilling to women (Ruddick, 1982). The problem with the first framework is that it fails to recognize the ways that women may be empowered by mothering, and the problem with the second is that it reveres practices that are entwined with women’s subordinate status. The experience of mothering is much more complex than either of these formulations; it often involves exploitation, fulfillment, and some measure of power (Abel & Nelson, 1990; McMahon, 1995). By being primary child caregivers, women are subordinated, but they also gain status and emotional satisfaction that they can transform into power within their families and communities. For example, women often gain a sense of control from managing a home and the routines of its members (Gerstel & Gross, 1995).
In the larger study of the resistance strategies of women who had been battered by their husbands or boyfriends from which the current study was derived, this paradox of subjection and agency became apparent in interviews with the women. All of the women in the study provided the vast majority of the care for their children. While the reasons they were the primary caretakers of their children were entangled with their intimate partners’ abusive behavior as well as their oppression within gender, class, and race relations more generally, their experiences of mothering were mostly positive. Contrary to the view that battered women with children are irresponsible parents, this study indicates that despite the amount of time and energy battered women need to spend focusing on their own survival, they are very concerned about the welfare of their children. Far from being neglectful parents, the mothers in this study went to great lengths to care for their children. Furthermore, their identities as mothers became a source of empowerment in their efforts to protect themselves and their children and to resist the control and violence that their abusive partners used against them. Most of the women in the study found great strength and motivation in their experiences as mothers during the time that they were being battered. The power of motherhood is elaborated below, but first we examine the meaning and practice of motherhood within the context of domestic violence.
The Meaning and Practice of Mothering in the Context of Domestic Violence
Ideology, oppressive microrelations with men in their lives, and oppressive large-scale social relations all shaped participants’ experiences of mothering. Much has been written on the role of ideology in shaping the meaning and practice of mothering. The current dominant ideology of good mothering is what Sharon Hays (1996) calls “intensive mothering.” This current prescription for a good mother requires that she be self-sacrificing in her devotion to the care of her children, rather than “a subject with her own needs and interests” (Bassin et al., 1994, p. 2). It entails that the mother be the primary caretaker of her children, deeply nurturing, and focused on her children above all else. A central tenet of the ideology of intensive mothering is that being a mother is part of women’s gender identity, and women, not men, should assume the vast majority of parenting and center their lives and their time around their children (Hays, 1996). The women interviewed for this study both reflected and diverged from this model in several ways.
On the surface, the ways that many of the mothers described their mothering practices reflect the current dominant ideology of intensive mothering. They performed all or most of the child care, they cared deeply for their children, and being a mother meant “everything” and “the world” to them. The ways many women described their feelings for their children are consistent with the intense love and devotion that are part of the idealized mother–child relationship.
What did it mean to you to be a mother back then?
Meant a lot. My children meant the world to me. They still do . . . I always had to be happy, smile for my kids. It all comes to my kids. I mean, they’re my life.
Another woman, Kathy (White, middle class, retail worker), responded, I am there for my children. And I have put a lot of things in my own life on hold to make sure my children have what they need.
A recurring theme in many of the women’s narratives was that they were often more concerned for their children than for themselves.
Yeah. It wasn’t so much that I was afraid he would kill me, it was that he would kill me and take Kristin and that Kristin would end up spending her life with him, living with god knows what.
You know, do whatever you want to me, but don’t even think about doing anything to one of my kids. Are you crazy?
While all the women with children in the study expressed similar feelings of deep love and responsibility for their children, their motivations and the ways that they cared for their children varied. “Mothering is neither a unitary experience for individual women nor experienced similarly by all women. It carries multiple, diverse, divergent, and often shifting meanings” (Arendell, 2000, p. 1196). Mothering takes place within specific historical contexts shaped by intersecting structures of race, class, and gender and within specific contexts that may include drug and alcohol abuse (as was the case for three of the women in the study) and/or the abusive control of an intimate partner (as was the case for all of the women in the study) (Collins, 1994; Glenn,1994). The mothers in this study were primarily responsible for their children and all of them expressed a strong commitment to the care of their children. However, the meanings of motherhood and the ways in which they were able to care for their children varied by their experiences of abuse from their partners, their economic conditions, their relationships to kin and community, and whether or not they were using drugs.
The intimate partners of the participants had a significant impact on their mothering practices. All of the women in this study said that they performed the majority of the care for the children either because they were coerced or forced to do it by their boyfriend or husband. The following excerpt of an interview represents a typical response to the question, “How about taking care of the kids? Did both of you do it?”
No, that was totally my responsibility.
And how did you decide that?
I was told that was my responsibility.
And did he ever do any childcare? Play with the kids?
Minimal. Usually it was in the form of . . . to put on a good show for everyone else.
Women also performed the majority of child care because either they knew that their partners were abusing their children or, like Sue, they simply did not trust their partners to provide good care to their children.
I was very protective and I saw my role as being like the protector type role for my daughter, Kristen, even more than as the person who was going to guide this little person through life . . . When Kristin came into the picture, things were already bad between Eric and I, so I never got as far as seeing it past making sure that she was okay and cared for by me.
A few women had more traditional views of women as household workers and caretakers and men as financial providers. For instance, having a man support them and their children financially was a primary concern of many of the working class women interviewed. The first thing Luz (Latina, working class, service worker) mentioned when asked, “What is a good father?” was, “A good father is a person that’s a provider.” However, though she believed women should be primary child caretakers, she believed that fathers should also care for their children, “It is also a person that spends time with the kids, you know. A good father is a person that that makes time for the kids, that tries to make an example for the kids.”
The most extreme version of normative gender roles came from Maida (Latina, working class, did not engage in paid work during the time she was with the boyfriend who abused her). Her view of what a man should do was that “he should be off his lazy ass and work. I say a man should work . . . I mean, guys don’t take care of kids, right? A guy can’t change a Pamper. I mean, guys can change Pampers but not like we can do it.” She noted that “a lot of men say that they shouldn’t work in a woman’s place in the house.” Largely agreeing with this, she said, In some cases, I think if the man has a good job and he can take care of the bills or whatever and takes care of the house by working, then he should work. And when he comes home from work, he should come home to a clean house, to food on the table.
Maida had few job prospects and she and her boyfriend struggled financially. In part influenced by ideology, in part by her economic location, and in part by the actions of her boyfriend, Maida was more concerned with having a man to support her financially than with having a reluctant and abusive man take care of their child.
Kathy (White, working class, retail worker) was the only participant in the study who said that being a mother had always been one of her main goals in life, “That’s what I’ve always wanted to be more than anything.” Of all the mothers, her identity as a mother adhered to the ideology of intensive mothering most closely. She had always wanted to be a mother because she valued it as important work for women and looked forward to the close bonds she expected to forge with her children. Even so, when asked if she believed there is a difference between being a mother and being a father she replied, “Hell yeah! There shouldn’t be, but there is.”
There were several reasons that Kathy practiced intensive mothering. Among them, when she was growing up, her father owned a small business and spent a great deal of time at work, so the family could afford to have her mother stay home and do all the housework and childcare. Kathy expected that she, too, would marry a man who earned enough money for her to stay home and take care of the children. Her father was controlling, emotionally distant, and occasionally abusive toward her mother and the children; while she believed men should parent children in the same way that women are expected to, her experience was one that demonstrated to her that many men cannot or do not do so. Furthermore, her husband, and later her boyfriend, both of whom were abusive toward her and her children refused to provide direct care for the kids. As a result of these experiences, Kathy recognized she had few options aside from relying on herself to care for her children.
The Power of Motherhood
For the women in this study, motherhood was a source of affirmation and strength that helped them to survive and to care for their children. Contrary to the popular view that battered women have highly negative images of themselves, many of the women with children spoke very positively about their mothering practices. Similar to the women in Peled and Gil’s (2011) study, almost all of the women described themselves as “good” mothers. Being a mother is the one area of their lives that many of the women felt overwhelmingly, if not unequivocally, positive about. Kathy said, “Being a mother is probably what I do best; it’s something that I haven’t managed to fuck up too bad so far. I have a lot of pride in that.”
However, the women’s definitions of what makes a “good” mother varied. For Kathy, it was being an intensive mother.
How do you know or believe that you’re a good mother?
I am there for my children. And I have put a lot of things in my own life on hold to make sure my children get what they need.
Similar to Kathy, Michelle (White, middle class, professional) defined a good mother as an intensive mother, as someone who gave her children all of her energy and attention. However, Michelle did not feel she had to be perfect to be a good mother, nor did being a good mother entail being entirely selfless. Part of what she loved about being a mother was that it was an intellectual outlet for her. She had been interested in zoology before she was married, and extended that interest to child development when she had children. She also felt she “got a lot” out of nurturing her children. She felt that it was because she found mothering interesting and benefited from being nurturing that she was able to be a dynamic mother. She said, “Not that I’m the best mother in the world, but . . . I was a dynamic mother because I just loved it. . . . I knew I was a good mother because I gave it my 100 percent.” Maria (Latina, working class, service worker), who was quite emotionally devastated after many years of being abused, when asked if she thought she had been strong as a mother, responded, “Yeah. I was pretty strong I think, for having a kid by myself who never had a problem with the law. As a mother, I did whatever I could.” For Maria, keeping her son out of legal trouble and “doing whatever [she] could” were measures of a good mother.
Not all of the women were as sure that they were good mothers, however. Lisa (White, working class, intermittently sold drugs and/or was a service worker) used drugs with her abusive husband throughout most of her marriage. When she was asked, “Do you think you are good at taking care of people?” she responded,
Well, yeah, to a point I feel like I’m good at it. I tried to be a good mother and a good wife and help my kids out as much as I could and I was a responsible drug addict. I was. I would clean the house, I made supper, I made sure the kids were clean and had clean clothes and I did the laundry and I did stuff. . . . I did the stuff that you’re supposed to do and extra if I could. I’d help them with their homework, but then on the other hand, I wasn’t really there for them emotionally. I mean, in body I was there, but because I was doing drugs, emotionally, I wasn’t.
Lisa’s definition of being a good mother included taking care of one’s children both physically and emotionally. In her case, poverty, abuse, and the influence of her husband who both used and dealt drugs had impelled her to use drugs regularly and limited her abilities as a parent. Thus, she felt she had fulfilled only part of her responsibilities as a parent, and she was good at taking care of her children only “to a point.”
Even though Lisa thought she had only partly fulfilled her responsibilities as a mother, she was somewhat ambivalent about her negative feelings regarding her mothering abilities. She was well aware that the ideology that poor women are bad mothers had influenced her self-criticism. After she stated how concerned she was about her son and how she wishes she had been a better mother to him, she elaborated:
So is it all your fault?
No, it’s not really all my fault, but I think it’s all my fault all the time. . . . If I was a better mother, my kids wouldn’t be dropping out of school and getting arrested. It’s all my fault they’re that way, you know? It’s not my husband’s fault, it’s my fault. Everything is my fault. I guess . . . and I get that because my husband used to always say that to me, you know, “It’s your fault. It’s your fault I split your head open.” . . . I think it has to do with being a woman, you know, women get treated like that, they’re the bad person all the time. I mean, women are always in the wrong. Women can do no right. Women are bad influences . . . Unless you’re rich. Then if you’re a rich woman, it doesn’t count for you. . . . It’s the poor people and the middle class people who get blamed for things going wrong with their children. You know, it’s the women, the women, the women who get blamed.
Motherhood is often one area of women’s lives where they have some control, some power. It is an area where they can use their creativity and talents. For many women, motherhood is a main source of self-worth; it was, in the words of one of the women, “the only thing I ever did right.” This is especially true among women who are being battered. Batterers usually use a variety of methods to control their partners, including violence and verbal abuse, psychological manipulation, isolating their partners from friends and family and any support they might give, and economic abuse like refusing to let their partners work or refusing their partner access to the family’s money. Women who are battered often have very little control over most areas of their lives. One area in which they almost always have some power and authority, however, is parenting, as many batterers seek to limit the amount of work they do around the house. When women’s actions and freedom are severely limited, as they are for women who are battered, the parts of their lives where they do have some power become even more important to them.
This was evident in many of the interviews. When Alice (White, working class, service worker) was asked if she thought she had power as a woman during the time she was abused, she responded, “Oh yeah. Nobody tells me about my kids. Nobody. Cause I raised them, nobody else raised them.” It is significant that Alice answered a question about her power as a woman in terms of her role as a mother. She saw motherhood as the main source of her power as a woman. Similarly, when Maria (Latina, working class, service worker) was asked a general question about how she would describe herself, she described herself as strong as a mother:
If you had to call yourself something or describe yourself, how would you describe yourself?
Strong. Yeah, I have courage . . . at least I had courage to . . . all these years to go through all this and be there for my son, Rafael. So I guess, I’m strong in a way . . . I never, I never wanted to give up on Rafael no matter what happened.
Motherhood as a Turning Point for Women Who Are Battered
The sense of strength and power that all of the women felt from their identities and practices as mothers helped the women to survive and to care for their children during the time that they were with their abusive intimate partners. For several of the women, motherhood also served as a turning point that impelled them to end their relationships with the men who abused them. Many of the women identified a particular incident where they felt their children were being harmed by their abusive partners as something that changed their feelings about their relationships with the men who abused them. Some of the mothers stated that seeing their children were being hurt propelled them to leave their relationships. We conceptualize these events as turning points—episodes during which the batterer’s abuse conflicted with the woman’s beliefs about how children should be treated and/or her understandings of her role as a good mother. These are points in which the contradictions in the women’s relationships became untenable.
Sue (White, working class, did not engage in paid work while she was married to the man who abused her) reported that she left her husband after he slapped their daughter in her high chair when she refused to eat.
. . . It was the end of that night that I left him. . . . It was the first time that I ever decided that if I really had to physically injure him . . . I thought I could. We became embroiled in such a battle that night, such a physical battle. But it’s probably the first time that I actually fought him back, not just like tried to hit him, but actually fought him back . . . was when he hit her . . . and that was the one time that I left and then I didn’t go back. You know, the final time I left him.
Similarly, Rachel (White, middle class, began paid work as a clerical worker toward the end of her marriage to the man who abused her) reported that “everything started to change” after her husband threw an object at their older son:
All of a sudden I saw that my son’s not going to make it [emotionally]. . . . When I finally saw that something horrible was going to happen to me or my children—really my older son . . . I was really scared. Like, terrified. That’s when I told my friend. And as soon as I told her, then everything started to change.
Michelle (White, middle class, professional) never felt her husband hurt her children, but the event that she identified as a turning point in her relationship revolved around her identity as a mother and her assessment that she was a good mother: “When my husband told me I wasn’t a good mother . . . that was the beginning of the end.”
Discussion
Clearly motherhood was central to the identities of most of the women interviewed. Many of the women described their decisions to extricate themselves from their partners’ abuse as motivated solely by care and concern for their children, and not for themselves. However, it became evident through the course of the interviews that they were very strong women who had done extraordinary things to protect and save themselves as well as their children. Their statements about motherhood and the ways it influenced their actions often contradicted other statements they made during the course of the interview about their sense of self and the motivations for their actions. Many women described motherhood as being “everything to them,” but at other points in the interview talked about how their identities as respected community members were important to them, or how their paid work not only gave them economic resources with a bit of independence from the men who abused them, but it also made them feel competent and useful.
Here we will provide an extended examination of the interviews with Rachel and Kathy to illustrate this point. For Rachel (White, middle class, began paid work as a clerical worker toward the end of her marriage to the man who abused her), seeing that one of their children was suffering both physically and emotionally from her husband’s abuse was an important factor that impelled her to take steps to leave him, but it was not the only factor. When asked why she left her husband, she said that it was when he threw an object at their son, Jonathan, and cut his face that she decided that she had to leave her husband. This seems to fit well with theories that stress the ways in which motherhood is special to women and how a woman’s identity as a mother might lead her to put her children’s welfare above all else (Hays, 1996). But if we look below the surface, we can see that the story is much more complicated. What impelled Rachel to action was not only that her son was suffering, but also the fact that people would “know.” She said, “I thought, ‘Everybody is going to find out now . . . This is it. My secret is out.’ It was no longer a secret . . . And I went and I told my friend about it.” It was the fact that people would “know” about her husband’s abuse that also impelled her to take steps toward leaving her husband. When her husband hurt her son, she acted not only out of concern for her child, but also because the cut on Jonathan’s face became public evidence that Rachel’s husband was abusive.
Further complicating this story, Rachel’s husband’s attack on their child had not been random. It was part of an escalating conflict in which Rachel had fought for autonomy and stood up to her husband, despite his increasingly intense and frequent violence. Long before her husband hurt their son, Rachel had self-consciously prepared for her financial autonomy by getting a job and opening her own bank account. She said, “When I did that, I knew he was gonna like, kill me. And he nearly killed me. But I just didn’t care. I just didn’t care. I knew, if I was ever ever gonna leave him, I had to have a job. I couldn’t be a housewife, because I would be dead economically.” The night before her son was injured, Rachel’s husband learned that she had taken his name off a joint bank account that held money that her mother had given her. When he discovered this, he “went wild” and perpetrated the worst beating he had ever inflicted on her, a beating that went on most of the night.
Rachel’s husband’s act of violence against their son, Jonathan, came at a time when Rachel was already taking steps to increase her financial autonomy so she could someday leave her husband. Rachel had taken a job despite her husband’s attempts to prevent her from doing so, she opened a bank account with just her name on it, and she removed his name from one of their joint accounts. Although Rachel sees the turning point in her marriage as her husband’s injury to her son, her decision to leave was not based solely on her desire to protect her son. Rachel (sometimes) presents it this way and (sometimes) understands it this way, and her husband’s act of throwing an object at their son was indeed a turning point, but it was not a discrete turning point. It was, in many ways, a continuation of the process of their relationship, a process throughout which Rachel had engaged in many acts of resistance. Rachel’s decision to tell her friend was not driven, as it seems on the surface, solely by her concern for her son’s well-being. It was, rather, based on a convergence of many factors that included her steps to become somewhat financially independent, her many acts of resistance prior to this episode which helped her maintain a relatively strong sense of self, having a friend who worked with battered women (the friend to whom she finally disclosed her husband’s abuse), her close-knit community being able to see that her husband was perpetrating violence against their son, a long-cultivated hatred for her husband, her husband’s reaction to her taking his name off her bank account, and her husband’s act of violence against her son. All of these conditions together shaped this incident as a turning point.
Rachel’s decision to leave her husband came as part of a long process. What Rachel identifies as crucial clearly was in some sense, but her decision to leave her husband formed within a much broader context. It is possible that while motherhood is very important to women, it is this very fact that leads them to emphasize the importance of motherhood in their actions and to deemphasize the importance of other factors.
Just as Rachel noted that it was when her husband hurt their son that she began to take steps to leave him, Kathy (White, working class, retail worker) stated, “My husband started getting abusive towards my oldest daughter, which is what got him kicked out.” In fact, she identified her role as a mother, which she described as “somebody that protects their children,” as moving her to end her marriage to her husband. Later in the interview, she said that “a good portion of the reason” (and not the entire reason) her marriage ended was “because my ex-husband was not only nasty as hell to me, but he was nasty to my older daughter, too.” When asked if there was anything aside from the way he was treating her eldest daughter that made her decide to end the relationship Kathy stated that she had become tired of the mind games her husband was constantly playing with her.
I was just sick of it. I was really, really sick of it. . . . I think they try to get you to believe a certain “reality.” . . . And awhile, I started to think, “how can you believe this, it’s so ridiculous.” After a while, I thought, “Ok, you are a total nut. And I got to get the hell out of here.”
In fact, over the course of the interview, which lasted more than 4 hours, Kathy described quite a few incidents that led her to her decision to divorce her husband, but described each one as the turning point, as the definitive turning point. About 6 months before Kathy initiated divorce from her husband, something happened at a party that made her realize how controlling her husband was. He had not wanted to go to the party and tried to get Kathy to stay home with him, but when Kathy said she did go by herself, he followed her.
So, he went to the party and he didn’t say a word to anybody the whole time over there, which was all of an hour, because he was just being so obnoxious. He followed me from room to room to room to room. Sat wherever I sat. So finally, I don’t remember who it was, but it was the funniest thing. She turned to me and she said, right in front of everyone, and right in front of him. She turned to me and she said, “How can you fucking stand that?” And I said, “Stand what?” And she says, “Don’t you see what he’s doing? He’s, he’s tied to you like a little puppy.” She says, “What the hell is wrong with him?” She said it right in front of everybody and right in front of him. And I can’t remember. I was like embarrassed. But more than it being embarrassed, I was like . . . angry. Cause it was the first time, like I knew it, but it was the first time I knew that people could really see it. And I was like, “I’ll be damned. It’s not all my imagination.” Cause I could convince myself a lot of times if I worked hard at it, that things were my imagination, that it wasn’t really happening. But that was the first time that I could really really really see it. And I was like, “Oh my God. I just can’t deal with this. Everybody can see this. So, now I know.” And it wasn’t so much, “Now I know everybody can see it, now I’m embarrassed.” It was like, “Now I know everybody can see it too and it’s real.” It made it really real for me.
At another point in the interview, she said that it was when her husband told her that he didn’t care about what happened in their marriage, he didn’t care if they had a good marriage or not, he just cared about how it looked to other people, she realized that he didn’t care about her the way she wanted and expected her husband to care about her. She said, “The light went on; somebody was finally home” after he told her that. When asked if she thought that was a turning point, she responded:
Oh yeah, definitely . . . I had been working really hard in my mind to stay there. And after he said that, I just sat there and thought to myself, “Duh, stupid. What are you staying here for? Hello. Did you hear what he just said to you?” Actually in a way, I’m kind of thankful that he said it to me, because then it made it okay for me to go.
And at yet another point in the interview, when she was asked when she began thinking of leaving her husband, she replied, “I can’t answer that. I don’t know. I don’t remember.”
Conclusion
Participants’ contradictory statements about how they came to make decisions about their relationships not only reveal the multiplicity of factors that shaped their lives while they were being battered, but also some of the ways that social expectations and public discourses on motherhood shape their narratives and their descriptions of what is and was central to their identities and their lives. Drawing on Gubrium and Holstein’s (1987) work on the influence of domestic discourse on people’s descriptions of family life as well as Peled and Gil’s (2011) study of mothers who have been abused, we argue that participants’ emphasis on motherhood when describing the motivations for their actions is shaped in part by cultural expectations and discourses that elevate motherhood as a defining feature of women’s lives. In addition, while motherhood is very important to women, and especially women who are battered, it is possible that it is this very fact that leads them to overemphasize the importance of motherhood to their actions. As significant as motherhood is for women who live with abusive intimate partners, mothering is only one of many sources of power that battered women draw on. While it is important to recognize the strength many battered women derive from motherhood, an overemphasis on motherhood as the main impetus for battered women’s actions may make it difficult for them to recognize other sources of their power.
Conventional perceptions of mothering as joyous, rewarding, and all-important inhibit women’s abilities to express the dynamic range of experiences, feelings, and beliefs associated with motherhood. Indeed, the normative response is for mothers to present themselves as valuing motherhood above all else, and these cultural pressures contribute toward an overemphasis on mothering in battered women’s narratives. For battered women, the normative constructions of ideal motherhood have both positive and negative effects. On one hand, cultural constructions of the ideal mother encourage battered women who mother to believe that they are valuable because of the work they are doing to raise their children. On the other hand, these same constructions may obscure other aspects of their lives that offer sources of self-worth and empowerment. In addition to motherhood, jobs, a positive sense of self, and support from friends are among the many other important sources of power in battered women’s lives.
It is important to recognize both the ways that battered women are empowered by motherhood and other sources of strength and value in battered mothers’ lives. When normative constructions of motherhood as the central and sometimes only source of women’s identity and strength obscure other sources of empowerment for mothers, they may be less likely to draw on the many and varied strengths they have. Similarly, if activists and service providers who work with battered women fail to recognize their diverse strengths, they will be less able to fight for effective social change and less likely to support battered women effectively.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.