[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on History of Women's Rights and the Problems they Still Face Today
If motherhood is sacrosanct, individual mothers are suspect. By now feminists are all too aware of how American society offers up paeans to the institution of motherhood yet provides actual mothers with only the stingiest of prenatal care and no basic childcare. Meanwhile, individual mothers stand accused of offenses ranging from fetal neglect to child abuse. This general cultural preoccupation with defining and enforcing good motherhood is directed at all women, but it takes different forms, depending on one's class, race, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation and marital status. While these efforts to police the boundaries of motherhood to elaborate not only what good mothering consists of but who is a mother at all have intensified in the 1980s and 1990s, they have a long, unfortunate history.
Single mothers in particular have historically been at the center of efforts by church and state to police motherhood. (Elizabeth A. Clark (1986) Unwed mothers have been considered dangerous anti-mothers, fallen sisters to be redeemed, feebleminded or sexually delinquent "problem girls" to be treated, neurotic teenagers seeking to resolve complicated psychological problems, and welfare queens. Although some societies have compelled unmarried mothers to raise their children, others have forbidden single women to do so, denying them the social identity of mother.
Beginning in the 1600s with the efforts of the Catholic Church to stigmatize illegitimacy and place pregnant women under surveillance, Kerzer traces the history of the system's evolution, from its inception during the Counter-Reformation to its eventual decline in the late nineteenth century, when secular reformers attacked it on the basis of morality, economics and public health. By the mid-1800s, the 1200 baby depositories scattered throughout the rural villages and urban centers of Italy were receiving thousands of infants a year, with up to forty percent of all newborns abandoned in some cities......
