Moms with guns: women's political agency in anti-apartheid visual culture

African Arts, Summer, 2009 by Kim Miller

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There are many other examples of groups of women who have put their motherhood to political use in strikingly similar ways. For example, Simona Sharoni describes how Jewish Israeli women relied on "traditional" notions of motherhood as the "primary discourse of struggle" (Sharoni 1997:144) during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the Palestinian intifada. (3) According to Sharoni, female members of Parents Against Silence employed the imagery of motherhood in their political activities, which included publishing and distributing a range of visual ephemera and holding public protests and rallies near the prime minister's office in Jerusalem and near the ministry of defense in Tel-Aviv (ibid., p. 152). Sharoni reports that the women succeeded in finding widespread empathy and acceptance in Israeli society in large part because they did not seek political power for themselves, and because the image of motherhood that they projected was one "that would not be threatening to most Israelis." They insisted that they were "not feminists, but rather mothers concerned with their sons on the battlefield" (ibid., pp. 152-53). (4)

In 1990, Sri Lankan women formed a grassroots organization called the Mothers' Front to protest the disappearance of their sons and husbands during the civil war. Their primary political tactic was public spectacle, including theatrical weeping, moaning, and cursing, which enabled a widespread "mobilization of maternalised suffering" (de Alwis 1997:220). This organization of approximately 25,000 women relied on a similar view of womanhood, based on women's social roles as wives and mothers, and foregrounding a "traditional" version of motherhood as one that encompasses "women's biological reproduction as well as their interpellation as moral guardians, care-givers and nurturers" (ibid., p. 211). The Mothers' Front's single demand was a call for a "climate where we can raise our sons to manhood, have our husbands with us, and lead normal women's lives" (ibid., p. 210). More recently, women in Kenya have drawn on motherhood as a political resource by engaging in courageous public protests where they are openly critical of the state and law enforcement after local police were accused of kidnapping and killing their sons (Alsop 2008).

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In each of these cases, women managed to create public voices for themselves in circumstances where political dissent was previously restricted. Importantly, their success was heavily dependent on "spectacular public practice" of conventional motherhood (de Alwis 1997:212). Indeed, the public spectacle of non-threatening, socially acceptable notions of motherhood provided these women with greater acceptance from both allies and opponents and brought them significant recognition as political actors in the public sphere.

There are, however, strategic advantages and disadvantages to grounding one's activism in one's identity as a mother. While these examples of women's political visibility are impressive--especially given the relative shortage of women's representation in state-level politics (5)--activism that places emphasis on motherhood as a political tactic can be limiting for both women and men. For example, mother-activism can reinforce patriarchal appeals to women's maternity (as actual or potential mothers) as the primary basis for their worth. It may also create movements that are too narrowly based because, as Julia Wells notes, "the majority of people do not experience their oppression as mothers. Men, youth, and women who are not mothers all stand outside the core of affected participants." Wells goes on to say that because mother-activist movements are also relatively short lived, they tend to "grow like bubbles which eventually burst" (Wells 1991:29).