The Third Parent: Communal Organizations and Parental Power
Wed, December 18, 3:30 to 5:00pm EST (3:30 to 5:00pm EST), Virtual Zoom Room 08Abstract
My paper analyzes how Black and Jewish mothers were at the center of social work cases as communal organizations, like the Detroit Urban League and the Jewish Social Service Bureau, tasked these mothers with creating a respectable household in public as well as private. Mothers were used as a tool to reverse racialization of their respective communities as these social service organizations worried about the white American gaze. Motherhood, according to these organizations, meant keeping the home clean, the children disciplined, and the family together. Both organizations focused on keeping nuclear families together, despite whatever abuses transpired between husband and wife or even parents and children. A nuclear family played a key role in attaining respectability. When mothers lived with boyfriends, these organizations would deny aid. When marriages were headed to divorce, the social workers at these organizations became marriage counselors for the couple. While men were treated as breadwinners, women were treated as the arbiter of respectability for their family. Because these communal organizations focused on changing the public perception of their racialized identity, mothers were often their only point of contact and she was held responsible by the social workers when the family failed to attain respectability.
In return, mothers used these organizations as a third parent. When their children moved or misbehaved, some mothers contacted the Detroit Urban League or the Jewish Social Service Bureau to monitor or correct their children. They used the nation’s extensive social welfare network to assure their children were living a “respectable” life outside of their physical purview. Within the Black community, mothers used the Detroit Urban League to advocate for their imprisoned children to be paroled early or not based upon their own assessment of their children’s reform. These women mothered the race during a time of focused on racial uplift.