Social Construction of Motherhood & Violence

The social construction of motherhood is influenced by the culture in which a woman exists. The respective culture frames her experience of race, class, and gender, and the intersection of these experiences outline the duties and moral obligations of motherhood that all women are expected to obey. With this prescribed notion of submission, moral duty and gender specification, women are ascribed to a position of vulnerability.

As currently constructed, mothers of color are particularly vulnerable to experiences of violence because the social construction of american motherhood idolizes a woman's ability to do the work of mothering on her own. Black women, African woman, are not created to mother in solitude; rather, it is a collective effort, a sisterhood that raises the children and thereby the community as a whole.