Race, Class, and the Photopolitics of Maternal Re-vision in Rickie Solinger's Beggars and Choosers

Ruby C. Tapia

IN

2002, THE B I R M I N G H A M

CIVIL

RIGHTS INSTITUTE

hosted the

debut of historian and curator Rickie Solinger's photography exhibition Beggars and Choosers. Since then, the show's fifty-plus images of historically reviled maternal bodies have traveled and been exhibited in academic, artistic, and community venues all across the United States. Speaking to the show's overtly political aspirations, Solinger describes it as an attempt to "interrupt t h e c u r r i c u l u m " that makes a c o m m o d i t y , a racialized economic privilege, out of the fundamental h u m a n rights to reproduce or not to reproduce. Indeed, the show deploys a number of critical narrative devices to interrupt widely shared visualities of one of the historically most classed, racialized, and sacralized sentimental objects in the United Statesmotherhood. Comprised almost entirely of black and white d o c u m e n tary-style photographs taken between 1%7 and 2002, the "voices" (via text panels) of eighteen of the pictured women and contextualizing facts (also on text panels) about the socioeconomic realities and public policy decisions that produce maternal experience along stark lines of race and class. Beggars and Choosers is an assembled declaration that "motherhood is not a class privilege in the United States."' The exhibition has been the occasion for countless critical conversations about the racial and cla.ss politics

Feminist Studies 36, no. 2 (Summer 2010). 2010 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 375

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of maternal imagery in forums ranging from art galleries to university classrooms, museums to community centers, lecture halls to roundtahles. Each Beggars and Choosers photograph had its own story, its own context of production, its own other history of intention and reception hefore it was chosen from the portfolios of famed documentary photographers such as Susan Meiselas, Corky Lee, and Mel Rosenthal. Perhaps it is these famous artiststhe documentary authority of their visions, the talent with which they light, frame, and shoot their suhjectsthat hails the show's audiences to walk gallery corridors of hlack and white, to linger (or not) on the exhihition's central question: how and why do we (dis)regard these classed, raced, and sexualized bodies and experiences as (non)maternal? Indeed, the artful rendering of these individual hodies and the display of them in a collective maternal shape has profound potential to arrest our aesthetic eye. But does it truly transform our maternal visualities? Ever since I first encountered Beggars and Choosers as a member of an ad hoc committee to organize and install the show at Ohio State University in 2004, I have heen fascinated by its multiple, apparently contradictory modes. On the one hand, some of the show's images adopt the formal composition of traditional, aestheticized, sentimental maternal imagery. On the other hand, these iconographie maternal contours are the extent of the show's adherence to popular expectations of maternal imagery. In what iollows, I analyze the photopolitics of Beggars and Choosers through an interrogation of these contradictions, asking how they emerge in the show's alternating tendencies to "beg" for, to "choose," to declare, and to question the humanizing potential of maternal images. What does it meanwhat could it meanfor sympathetic and nonsympathetic viewers alike to decipher the worth of the women pictured in Beggars and Choosers through the lens or experience of their maternity? Can this worth register in spite of these women's racialized and classed positions, in spite of the different historical materialities of their experiences and all of the various judgments that they compel? And if it is possiblegiven the historically dehumanized place of nonwhite and economically disadvantaged women in visual landscapes of the maternalthat the show's display of maternally emhodied difference might not, itself, preclude our ability to see the objects of its photographs as subjects.

Fig. 1.

Dorothea Lange Migrant Mother, 1936 From the Office of War Information, Farm Security Administration

Fig, 2

Priscilla Carrasco Migrant Mother, 1967

Courtesy of the artist

Fig. 3, above

Rudy B. rnelas Maria y Solstiz, 2001

Courtesy of the artist

Fig 6,opposite

Anne Hamersky Ana and Joseph, 1997

Used by permission of the artist

Fig 4

Sasba Harris-Cronin Dr. Jacqueline Pope, 2001

Courtesy of the artist

Fig. 5

Steven Rubin Chen in Detention, 2001

Courtesy of the artist

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we have another crucial question to consider. Are we comfortable that the resignification of these women into a place of value occurs (perhaps only) by virtue of their documented proximity to children and to motherhood, to the universalized idea of female biology and feminine nature properly fulfilled? Even if we were comfortable with this. Hortense Spillers, in her discussion of our "historically ordained racial discourse," would emphasize that, with regard to the African American women depicted in these images, their proximity to visions of legitimate motherhood is nothing more than t h a t - a proximity. Locating the emergence of gender itself within the historical time-space of slavery. Spillers asserts that " m o t h e r h o o d as female blood-rite is outraged, is denied, at the very same time that it becomes the founding term of a human and social enactment." Where the ability to participate in the legitimate reproduction of the legitimate family constitutes a female's worth-indeed, where it constitutes her genderthe African American female is without access to the signifying repertoires of both m o t h e r h o o d and womanhood. Being without access to expressions and evidence of womanhood and motherhood within a racialized grammar of gendered humanity, African American women, according to Spillers, are thus without access to a legible being. Theorizing this illegibility from a critical legal perspective, in 1998 D o r o t h y Roberts mapped the historical relationship between "race, reproduction, and the meaning of liberty" that continues to dehumanize noowhite women by denying them the fundamental human rights to reproduce and be mothers. Both Spillers and Roberts contribute to an important body of critical race feminism that maps inextricable relationships between language and practice, between representation and knowledge, that have long produced maternity as a racialized idea and experience. Solinger has centered these issues in her historical scholarship, most recently in Pregnancy and Power: A Short History of Reproductive Politics in America (2005), in which she illuminates the staggering range of cultural and political debates that have long been articulated through issues of reproduction and mothering.^ Formed initially within the cultural and material economies of slavery, perpetuated through the twentieth century in eugenics-inspired laws and public policy, and reinscribed in current U.S. institutions of (un)-

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welfare and incarceration, our grammars of race and gender have indeed restricted the reproductive and human rights of economically disadvantaged women and women of color. It is not, of course, that these women do not give birth, nurture their children, belong to and sustain communities connected, in part, by reproduction and motherhood. But just as the category of womanhood, by virtue of the cult of true womanhood, has historically produced economically disadvantaged women and women of color as its constitutive shadow, so too does motherhoodin its readily availahle, common, dominant, shared discourses-continue to place women of color and impoverished women outside the reverential light and humanizing lexicons of the maternal.'' At a quick glance. Beggars and Choosers wants simply to use the authority of documentary vision to recast these women within this reverential light. Upon deeper analysis, we see the attempts of the show's photographic assemhlage to muddy this hght, to interrogate the spectrum of human worth according to race, class, and gender that it has historically made material. The truly re-visionary push of Beggars and Choosers is toward an examination of the colliding and colluding politics that fix maternal images in the first place along a spectrum that ranges from the reviled to the revered. The inertia of the maternal iconography against which it struggles is massive; it expands in many different ideological and political directions. If race and class produce the chasm hetween the hiological fact of some women's motherhood and society's willingness to accord humanity to these women, race and class are only two axes of the problem. As an intersectional feminist analysis shows us, the predominantly maternal constitution of women's humanity has long plagued the politics of hoth dominant cultures and antiracist resistant movements in the United States. From W.E.B. Du Bois's prescription of "sexual respectability" to African American women; to the Black Power and Chicano movements' cultural nationalist dictums for black and brown women to serve the cause with their faithful reproductive labor; to contemporary, racially targeted public health efforts to curb the "teen pregnancy" problem, women's sexual and reproductive capacities have been sites not only for the devaluation of poor people and people of color hut also sites wherein marginalized persons and communities struggle over the terms and mean-

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ings of their own social, cultural, indeed human, being.'' Although Beggars and Ghoosers does not work through or toward the policing of women's reproductive and maternal caregiving capacities, one can readily see its work to declare these capacities and its determination to claim a space of respect, if not "respectability," for them in the post-civil rights, post-1965 immigration era of a rapidly changing racial and economic landscape. How the show manages-if indeed it does-to construct this space of respect outside the discursive spheres of hoth white, middle-class motherhood and nonwhite, cultural nationalist maternal duties is an essential question. As an installation of unexpected maternal hodies and largely unheard mothers' words. Beggars and Ghoo.sers moves against prevailing discourses of legitimate motherhood and toward an insertion, in their place, of something different, varied, variable, and "real." It does this logically, through an aesthetic of black and white realism that informs the documentary perspective of each photograph's individual framing. This realist aesthetic combines with the fact that some images in Beggars and Ghoosers compositionally reproduce traditionally maternal iconography with/through a range of racialized, classed, and sexualized human subjects to suggest a critical intervention in the genre of exhibitions themed to display various shades of the would-be universal experiences of family and motherhood. From its use in World's Fair expositions to Works Progress Administration projects to ethnographic endeavors, photography's portable lens onto the world has long made it an ideal technology for reproducing the symbolic properties of variously situated but always recognizable maternities. Of these varied historical sites of anthologizing and exhihiting, perhaps the most prominent is Edward Steichen's 1955 Family of Man. Gomprised of over 500 photographs by 273 photographers from around the world. Family of Man was intended as a document of human life experienced in conditions of comfort and duress, celehration and loss. In its seven-year tour, an estimated nine million people viewed the exhibition in the United States and other countries.' Steichen prohed all corners of the earth to find groups of compositionally similar documentary-style photographs, which he then grouped into series of human experience, including motherhood, fatherhood, hunger, celehration, and death. One of the most memorable of these was a collection of images that featured

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mothers from different parts of the world nursing their children, a series that came to he known among Steichen's staff as "Tits and Tots,""" As a numher of historians and theorists of photography have argued. Family of Man constructed its "glohal village" with decontextualized images of intimacy and suffering, with exoticizing and eroticizing displays of difference under the sign of international unity. This humanistic display kept with cold war internationalist discourses around the 1945 founding of the United Nations and its 1948 "Universal Declaration of Human Rights,"' Among its other critical interventions in visual discourses of race, gender, and class, we might understand Beggars and Choosers as a structured refutation of Steichen-like, static, decontextualized images of maternity. Obviously, Beggars and Choosers is a study of women's experiences of motherhood in specific raced and classed, post-civil rights U,S, contexts, in contrast to Steichen's unity of humankind across the planet. But Family of Man and Beggars and Choosers share a similar documentary mode in their common display of raced and classed difference; and some of their apparently common themes of motherhood and family might lead to an unfortunate conflation of the two within the sentimental spaces of visual reception, A close look at the interrogative modes of Beggars and Choosers with regard to both the liheral universalist maternal narratives of Family of Man and the exclusionary discourses of proper maternity in the United States reveals the profound stakes of imaging maternal bodies and of using images to speak about how these bodies have been pictured in the past. Moreover, the fact that both shows feature a Migrant Mother photograph encourages us to consider the two exhihitions together. In 1955, Steichen's exhibition displayed Dorothea Lange's famous 1936 photograph of Florence Owens Thompson and her children in Nipomo, California (fig, 1), Mtgrant Mother was one of many images that Lange took during the course of her work for the Farm Security Administration, An iconic image of the Great Depression, the poignantly desperate likeness of Thompson and her children achieved for photography an unprecedented role in compelling sweeping economic reforms, Lange's Mtgrant Mother became and remains the Madonna of all images of motherhood in/and poverty, motherhood in need of salvation hy an external source. In their study of

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iconic photographs, public culture, and liberal democracy, Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites argue that Migrant Mother's analogy with tbe image of the Madonna strengthens tbe call to the absent tatber, whose obligation to care for this woman and ber children assumes Biblical proportions. . . . The pbotograph follows tbe conventional lines of gender by associating paralyzing fear with feminine < . passivity and keeping maternal concern separate from economic resources ... [T]he question posed by tbe photo is. Who will be the father? According to Hariman and Lucaites, the helpless desperation of Lange's Migrant Mother casts the puhlic in the traditional role of family provider. In effect, the photograph renders impossihle the coexistence of motherhood and poverty: its plea for male-gendered, state assistance is its plea for Owens's migrant motherhood to he returned to its proper place.* By contrast, the Mtgrant Mother in Beggars and Choosers (fig. 2), taken by Priscilla Carrasco in 1967, documents the intersection of migratory farm labor, race, and gender as an unexpected picture of beatific, female familial bonds. Carrasco's photograph is not the first image to directly engage the aesthetics and politics of the impact of Migrant Mother. Rather, her 1967 photograph belongs to a historical series of image-conversations with Lange's photograph wherein nonwhite embodiments of motherhood and impoverishment make a claim to signification. As Judith Davidov recounts
in Women's Camera Work: Self Body I Other in American Visual Culture,

In 1964 the Latin American magazine Bohemia reproduced an artist's rendering of the "Migrant Mother" on its cover, turning the bead of one child to show its face. And in 1973 tbe Black Panther's Newsletter ran in full page an artist's version of tbe pbotograph which gave black features to tbe faces and the hair, adding the caption "Poverty is a crime, and our people are the victims."' In this way, race-conscious cultural movements placed nonwhite figures into the molds of Lange's maternal and child subjects, visually indicting the ways in which the New Deal reforms inspired by Migrant Mother had responded to white impoverishment while failing to seemuch less alleviatethe economic suffering of people of color. Carrasco's photograph, however, represents an altogether different shape of migratory motherhood, one that beckons neither pity nor assistance. Although Lange actu-

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Ruhy C. Tapia

ally took several photographs of Owens and her children, the most famous rendering of Migrant Mother etched a pictorial map of maternal suffering in which its child-subjects huddled and its mother-subject peered into dusty emptiness for help, lor strength. In contrast, Garrasco's Migrant Mother averts her gaze from both the camera and the horizon, nuzzhng into her maternal space. The older child smiles at the picture of her mother cradling her younger sister, or perhaps her smile is directed at Carrasco. The centered subject, the closely held child, marks with her eyes the camera's intrusion. . , In contrast to the pictures o{ Migrant Mother created by Lange, the Black Panthers, and Bohemia, in which impoverished motherhood was meant to elicit feelings that would lead to action on the part of viewers, Garrasco's image renders a beautifully full and accomplished "family of women" that appears to need nothing more. Rather than ask for entry into the iconography of motherhood at the intersection of migratory labor and poverty, it stands back from the class, gender, and racial politics of sentimentahty that would facilitate any expected or untroubled consumption of Mexican migratory motherhood. Indeed, the affective registers of Carrasco's Migrant Mother are not readily discernible beyond their romanticization of resilience and racialized rural space. On the other hand, without any visual evidence of hardship, it is difficult to place the subjects in the photograph within any impoverished vision, despite what we think we know about the lives of migratory farm laborers. Ultimately, the politics of this Migrant Mother's sentimentality have yet to find any easy place in our maternal visualities. In this way, Carrasco's photograph is perhaps one of the most illuminating entry points to the re-visionary maternal space constructed by Beggars and Choosers. Not all the Beggars and Choosers photographs are as clearly critical of traditional maternal iconography as is Carrasco's echo of Lange's Migrant Mother. In many cases, one must diligently decode the problematic relationships of the show's images to prevalent, universalized maternal visions such as those that appeared in Family of Man. For example, Steichen illustrated a worldwide experience of motherhood in the breastfeeding series, in which compositionally similar photographs of nursing mothers and infants combine into a racially, ethnically, and nationally diverse group

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rendering of t h e (one) M a d o n n a - G h i l d pair. Solinger, too, includes Madonna-Child iconography in her exhibition. In Beggars and Choosers, however, we are asked to see the relationship of this iconography to universal maternal experience as a question rather than a declaration. One of many varied images comprising a perpetually partial picture of motherhood in Beggars and Choosers is Rudy Ornelas's Marta y Solstiz (fig. 3). The Madonna-Child references in this photograph appear displaced, if not provocatively misplaced, according to prevalent maternal visuaUties. Softly focused and light-hathed, Ornelas's photograph appears to make a universally recognized angelic maternal heauty out of "Maria" breastfeeding her infant. But there are skewings and suhstitutions of expected objects with unexpected ones that unsettle the photograph's iconography. The burst of sunlight captured in the window produces a slightly off-kilter halo for Maria, and it compels us to ask about the difference (even defiance) of this image in relationship to the sentimental maternal narrative that its composition appears to reproduce. This blinding circle of would-be holy illuminationwere it not for its misplacementquestions our conventional maternal visualities, as do the actual ohjects in the photograph that constitute Maria's halo. A picture of a yard with trees, a clothesline, and lounge chairs, this halo is not simply a light from heaven; rather, it is a window-framed picture of working-class domesticity and a very present hope for-perhaps a tentative promise of-rest. There is a grounded ethereality to the photograph that would grant the presumahly Latina "Maria" and her working-class accoutrements a defamiliarizing presence within universalized maternal iconography. In the context of the exhihition's other maternal re-visions, the defamiliarizing possihilities of Ornelas's photograph are all the more pronounced. As do many of the photographs in Beggars and Choosers, Ornelas's picture flluminates the intersection between motherhood, race, and class as a documentation of motherhood itself. For all its potential as a tool of maternal re-vision, however, the sentimental, reverential aesthetic that captures these intersections may (only) substitute one revered maternal body for another, or one maternal accessory for another, rendering the overall effect of this "different" maternal vision merely romantically ethnographic and not at all subversive of gendered and sexualized scripts

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of maternity. Such is the ever-present danger of figuring the maternal, and it is within this dangerous context that Beggars and Ghoosers places Ornelas's revered Maria in re-visionary conversation with less romanticized maternal bodies and less sentimentally soothing mothering scenes. Indeed, Beggars and Ghoosers retextualizes Ornelas's photograph within a cacophonous maternal iconography and maternal visualities, disrupting its easy placement within the realm of "merely" race-conscious, soft-focused sentimentalism. Juxtaposed with a profoundly different image of maternal cradling, such as Ghandra McGormick's photograph foyce Priestly, Sugar Cane Scrapper (1986), the sentimentalism of Maria y Solstiz is profoundly unsettled and unsettling. Joyce Priestly references the displacement from domestic space of African American women since the time of slavery. Where a sentimental maternal composition would have Priestly sitting and gazing upon her child's face, McGormick's image freezes Priestly standing outdoors in a cane field, holding cane scraps, rather than a babe, in arms. Her gaze is directly at the camera. In this antisentimental image, fantasies of the romantic maternal collide with the historical reality of African American women's manual labor. The photograph belongs neither to the historically iconic imagery of racially "diverted mothering," wherein African American women tend to the needs of white children, nor to the iconography of African American women field laborers rendered "simply" with or without their children. Rather, Joyce Priestley documents a piercing absence legible by virtue of our expectations of maternal compositions and a piercing question about the historical place of African American women and mothers within them.'" Beggars and Ghoosers includes a numher of photographs that pose questions about the place of certain racialized women within the compositions of maternal visions. They also pose questions ahout the role of children's hodies within these compositions. The absent child in Sasha Harris Gronin's Dr. Jacqueline Pope (fig. 4), for example, signifies something altogether different from the absent child suggested hy McGormick's Joyce Priestley. In a text card that renders Jacqueline Pope's "photo-voice," Pope attributes her successful extraction of herself and her children from an ahusive relationship to her ability to secure public assistance before welfare was "reformed" in 1997. She recalls her dismay that year when President

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3^

Bill Clinton signed the Temporary Aid to Families in Need (TANF) program into law: then "a sickness spread through me, the result of knowing that many women and children will die without a permanent government safety net," Originally part of the Welfare Made a Difference National Campaign, Pope's words and her image continue to circulate in Beggars and Ghoosers as testimony to the relationship hetween race, class, and maternal experience and to the role puhlic policy plays in shaping this relationship. But their placement in an exhihition that asks us to reconsider what constitutes visual evidence of maternity asks us, also, to consider the different significance of the nonplace of the child within vastly different images of motherhood. Whereas McCormick's J^ice Priestley would appear to be an image of undesired mother-child separation as a historically prevalent experience of maternity among African American women, Harris-Cronin's image of a (presumably only momentarily) childless, smiling, and triumphant "Dr, Jacqueline Pope" provides perspective from a different angle of the relationship between social (im)mobility and the everyday, hodily proximity of mothers to children. Also an image of a mother without her children, Steven Rubin's "Chen in Detention" (fig, 5) remarks-with the help of Hua Zen Chen's photo-voiceon the violent separations produced at the collision of reproductive law, immigration, race, and incarceration. After being forced to undergo an ahortion and threatened with sterilization by China's government for violating the country's one-child law, Chen sought asylum in the United States, Upon her arrival in 1999, the Immigration and Naturalization Service detained her for twenty months in the Regional Jail in Hopewell, Virginia," Focused on something in the upper environs of her prison, Chen is stilled by Rubin's camera in an almost repentant, searching gesture. The low-angle perspective of the camera is also a critically searching one, a perspective that emphasizes its own inability to see outside the frame of Chen's imprisonment or to "know" Chen's experience. Immigrant detainees and nonwhite mothers are two of the fastest growing populations of incarcerated persons in the United States, Rubin's Ghen in Detention stands at the intersection of both of these categories. Beggars and Choosers frames and displays each of its fifty-eight photographs both as its own picture of motherhood and as a single utter-

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anee in the show's systematic attempt to re-vision motherhood. Because Solinger accords each venue full creative license to order and hang the photographs as it chooses, each installation possesses its own rhythm even as it shares with every one of the show's other assemblages a tense, interrogative position relative to the grammar of maternal visions. In one venue, for example, Susan Mieselas's 1974 Mitzi, a photograph of a topless, boa-clad, white "Carnival Stripper," may appear between Keith Calhoun's
African American Mother with Child at St. Luke's Baptist Church (1986) and

Ruhin's Chen m Detention (2001). In another venue, the same Mitzi might appear before Ornelas's Maria y Solstiz and after Anne Hamersky's Ana and Joseph (fig. 6). Any of these orderings might be punctuated at any point by the clearly queer motherhoods in Naomi Harris's Grayson, Mommy, Spencer,
and Mommy T. Do the "Ya-Ya," a Family Ritual (2002) or by Margaret Morton's

Cathy with Cats (1995), a picture of a homeless woman who is determined to avoid living in a shelter so as to keep her "little family" of eighteen cats with her. This structured flexibility in the exhibition of Beggars and Choosers does not, however, claim that its maternal images are interchangeable. Unlike the photographs in Family of Man, the visual utterances in Beggars and Choosers are not equal substitutions in a universal statement about motherhood. Rather, Beggars and Choosers works to declare that there is nothing universal about motherhood, even as certain maternal bodies are systematically excluded from its idealized picture. Whereas a central message of Beggars and Choosers appears to be that absolutely any arrangement of its drastically varied subjects can-or perhaps, could be seen tohighlight the very jagged "face" of motherhood, the exhibition ultimately does not trust the humanized, maternal iterability of its photocomponents heyond, or without, the frame of the show. Indeed, Beggars and Choosers refuses to leave the maternal bodies it displays open to preformed value judgments. The show charts a range of racialized, classed, and sexualized maternal experiences in their "real," varied, underprivileged, social, and material contexts in order to document extant motherhoods, hut the human value-ing of these motherhoods must still depend on something in addition toif not altogether other thanany likeness of historically reviled maternal bodies. Without the photo-voice placards

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testifying to eighteen of the featured women's maternal experiences, and without text panels on Work and Wages, Education, Health Care, Women in Prison, and Childcare that tell viewers how these women appeared before their present aestheticized renderings, there are only differentially dehumanizing and exoticizing visualities to decode them for us. The question, then, comes back to whether and how our U.S. visual grammars of race, class, gender, and sexuality are explodable from within any solely visual maternal discourse, and if so, whether the visual transformation of all once-reviled maternal bodies into one revered picture of "other" motherhood is even desirable. In these ways, and in many others. Beggars and Choosers is a much more complicated work than our initial readings might grant. As an antiracist, activist scholar of reproductive politics in the United States, Solinger writes and curates cooperatively with other feminist scholars such as Dorothy Roberts and Gwendolyn Mink who understand motherhood to be a right that is inextricable from one's status as fully human. We might understand Beggars and Choosers' push toward a conversation about reproductive rights as opposed to reproductive choice as merely liberal reformist if we lose sight of the radical idea it proposes that bodies that are "too poor, too young, too disabled, too gay, too homeless" be given access not only to reproductive and maternal rights but also to visual maternal signification on a large scale.'^ Even so, entry to these signifying possibilities would come at drastically different costs and would have drastically different implications for each category of historically reviled motherhood. To successfully render all the photographic subjects in Beggars and Choosers in the light of their maternity-whether their maternal "wrongness" is due to their race, class, age, sexuality, or all of the abovewould be to obliterate the differentially (de)humanizing grammars that organize not only our visualities but also, and accordingly, our materialities. That is a vision that is much more than sentimental maternity, much more than reformist. And it may not be possible.

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N O T E S

1.

Rickie Solinger invited Kay Obering, curator of Wake Up Little Susie: Pregnancy and Power before Roe v. Wade, which was based on Solinger's earlier book ot the same title (Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race before Roe v. Wade [New York: Routledge, 1992]), to participate in tbe process of selecting the photographs for Beggars and Choosers and to organize the traveling exhibition. Solinger and Obering worked together on the curatorial phase during 2000 through 2002. Solinger has performed all subsequent work on and organization of the exhibition. See also Rickie Sohnger, "'Beggars and Cboosers': Motherhood Is Not a Class Privilege in America," Labor History 43, no. 4 (2002): 411-18. The full title of the exhibition is Beggars and Choosers: Motherhood Is Not a Privilege in America.

2.

Hortense Spillers, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book," Diacritics 17 (Summer 1987): 80; Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage, 1998); Rickie Solinger, Pregnancy and Power: A Short History of Reproductive Politics m America (New York: New York University Press, 1995). 3. See Hazel Carby, Reconstructiong Womanhood: The Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 4. Shawn Michelle Smith discusses W.E.B Du Bois's investment in the visual politics of African American sexual respectability in her "Families of Undoubted Respectability," in Photography on the Color Line: W.E.B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture (Durham, NC: Du University Press, 2004), 77-112. 5. Monique Berlier, "The Family of Man: Readings of an Exhibition," in Picturing the Past: Media. History, and Photography, ed. Bonnie Brennen and Hanno Hardt (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 221. 6. Kathleen Newton Haven, staff assistant to Edward Steichen from 1953 to 1955, interview with Milton Meltzer, 3 May 1976, cited in Meltzer's Dorothea Lange: A Photographer's Life (New York: Parrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1978), 295. 7. Eric Sandeen, Picturing an Exhibition: The Family of Man and 950s' America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995); Allen Sekula, "The Traffic in Photographs," in Photography against the Gram (Halifax: Nova Scotia College of Arts and Design. 1984). 8. Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (Chicago: LIniversity of Chicago Press, 2007). 9. Judith Davidov, Women's Camera Work: Selfj Body Other in American Visual Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 6. 10. For a history of photographic representations ot African American women, see Deborah Willis and Carla Williams, The Black Female Body: A Photographic History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002). 11. Steven Rubin's photograph of Hua Zen Chen also appeared in his traveling exhibition: American Justice through Immigrants' Eyes, 2002-2006. 12. Solinger, "Beggars and Cboosers," 412.

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