Politicizing Motherhood

In Xiaolan Bao’s essay, “Politicizing Motherhood”, Bao occasionally, and consciously, makes an effort to compare Chinese women to women of European descent in order to first show how these Chinese women had the same merits as those of white women and then to show the additional difficulties Chinese women faced because of their double responsibilities of working and parenthood. By doing so, Bao skips over stereotypes of Chinese women that readers may have had, while emphasizing the root problems of Chinese women to be a lack of child care facilities. This in turn, created their dilemma between choosing to take care of their kids in a healthy fashion or to work so that they could fulfill their family’s economic needs. Similarly, the Chinese women tried to emphasize their childcare problems by using arguments explaining the problems working-class families faced from a lack of childcare facilities in the community instead of dwelling on the difficulties they faced from being both mothers and workers.

Something I found interesting about this essay was that even though these women were low-paid, unskilled, garment industry workers, their arguments for childcare facilities were very well thought out. In addition, they knew that they could pressure union leaders by publicizing their purpose for meetings in the news and to their communities. What was most impressive was their ability to, throughout the years, and through their limited free time, build up organizational skills, as well as a greater knowledge about the U.S. political system and labor laws. And I agree with Skyler when she says that there was a lack of focus on the political activism of the women. They knew exactly what they needed in order to help relieve some stress from multiple responsibilities, and from what I gathered about Bao’s writing was that these Chinese women knew the best, or at least better, ways to go about building support for their cause.