Race, Class And Feminist Theorizing About Motherhood

The master narrative of motherhood is one of sacrifice and of nurturing children. Douglas Kirk’s 1959 film Imitation of Life is a social critique of the climate of the 1950’s depicting the lives and consequent tribulations of four women in two intertwining mother-daughter relationships. White aspiring actress, Lora Meredith and her daughter, Susie, hire Annie Johnson; a middle-aged black woman, as their live-in housekeeper. Annie and her mulatto daughter, Sarah Jane are thrust into the center of white upper middle-class society. Patricia Hill Collins’ “Shifting the Center: Race, Class and Feminist Theorizing about Motherhood” discusses the importance of incorporating structures of race and class into the subjective experience of motherhood. In Imitation of

Annie discovers Sarah Jane is staying in Los Angeles and tracks her down in a last desperate attempt to make a connection. Annie is disappointed and heart-broken to learn Sarah Jane is “passing” and working as a dancer at an all-white club. Collins asserts that: “Outsider within status is bound to generate tension, for people who become outsiders within are forever changed by their new status” (S29). When Annie goes to visit Sarah Jane, she shuns her mother, telling Annie that she should act as if she never had a child and if the two should cross paths that Annie should not acknowledge her. In “Shifting the Center”, Collins concludes that “Highlighting racial ethnic mothers’ struggles concerning their children’s right to exist focuses attention on the importance of survival” (72), Sarah Jane believes that her survival and success in the “white world” depends solely on her ability to make people believe she is white. Although Annie does not want to leave her daughter behind, she accepts Sarah Jane’s choice to “pass”. Heartbroken and weary from vying for her daughter’s acceptance Annie returns home to Lora and