Stratified maternity in the barrio: Mothers and children in Argentine social programs

Abstract

Are feminist goals and children's rights necessarily at odds? Diverse fields of academic practice have tended to respond in the affirmative. Scholarship ranging from the gender and development literature to feminist scholarship on carework and reproductive labor emphasize the tension between women and children embedded in social policy design, in which children represent a burden of care for their mothers. As feminists have noted, historical child welfare practices, and more recently the rhetoric of the "best interests of the child," have often undermined the interests of women. The children's rights literature has paid little attention to women's interests, which renders them invisible or, worse, actively obfuscates them, by treating women only as mothers. Feminists have noted how certain children's rights approaches emphasize the practical contradiction between children's care and women's autonomy and how certain child's rights approaches lead to anti-feminist postures.