• Corpus ID: 55229209

From Maternalism to Activist Mothering

@inproceedings{logsdonconradsen2011FromMT,
  title={From Maternalism to Activist Mothering},
  author={susan logsdon-conradsen},
  year={2011}
}

• susan logsdon-conradsen
• Published 2011
• Sociology

This paper examines mother activism throughout the three phases of the environmental movement beginning in the late nineteenth century to ascertain the motivations and evolution of maternal activism. After discussing three models of maternal activism (liberal feminism, maternalism, and feminist care theory) and the debate around maternalism as a framing of activism, two recent theories are utilized to ground this reading of mother activism. The first, matricentric feminism developed by Andrea O’Reilly as a framework for maternal activism in the twenty-first century proposes that the three models of maternal activism are complementary and should be viewed together rather than seen as competing models. The second framework as described by Natalie Wilson argues that maternalism should be viewed on a continuum with activist mothering, a form of activism that is launched from mothering but is embedded in a political awareness and a broader context of social justice. Reading the history of environmental mother activism via the combination of these two frameworks enables documentation of the multifaceted nature of maternal activism and the ways in which the framing of mother activism has evolved over time from a solely maternalist framework to a multidimensional grounding. The paper provides support for the necessity and utility of matricentric feminism in understanding historic and current activism, and concludes that the evolution towards activist mothering began in the later half of the twentieth century.