Data from two semi‐structured interviews gathered approximately six months apart from seven women who were receiving cash welfare benefits at the time of the first interview and were not receiving benefits at the second interview were used to analyze the experiences of leaving welfare. Emergent themes about the post‐welfare experience are: (1) the low wages and lack of advancement opportunities in jobs, (2) confusion related to program administration, (3) the continued reliance on income support programs and kin, and (4) the banking of cash benefits under the five‐year time limit as a new safety net.
On the basis of interview data, this article examines the mothering practices of three women, one Jew and two African-Americans, who raised their children in the 1930s and 1940s, a period in which medicine became the dominant discourse of motherhood. Each mother referred to medicalized motherhood with a discourse of scientific universals (e.g. "it was scientific"). Yet their approach to medicalized motherhood reflects their racial, ethnic and social class positions. Medicalization gained meaning for women not as an abstract body of scientific knowledge but as a signifier of social position, enabling mothers to measure their own practices in relation to others. If women were injured by medical discourse, as a long line of scholars suggest they have been, it is not because medicine rendered them the objects of a standardized construction of "the good mother." Rather, it is because medicalization invited mothers to participate in creating and measuring separation among women themselves.
Crack mothers-particularly African American and Latina women-have been constructed as maternal villains who actively and permanently damage their offspring. Many women have been arrested or lost parental rights to their children because of child neglect charges. Despite this panic, recent medical and legal research indicates that reports of damage to the fetus have been greatly exaggerated. This article examines the ongoing questions in medical publications about crack babies. The authors connect the search for biological markers of cocaine use during pregnancy to a new cultural conception of a bio-underclass. The conclusion considers medical developments and controversies in the broader context of class and racial divisions and reproductive politics in the United States.
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