The effort to balance work and family is one of the defining features of contemporary parenthood. For women in particular, the conflict between staying at home or working outside of it has inspired much scholarship, policy and public debate, most vividly captured in the prevailing ‘mommy wars’ discourse (Douglas and Michaels, 2004; Dillaway and Paré, 2008). According to this discourse, women's ‘recent’ entrance into the paid workforce has thrown up a variety of as yet unresolved obstacles that women must overcome in order to meet both their economic responsibilities as good citizens and the requirements of raising good citizens. In her discussion of intensive mothering, Sharon Hays (1996) points to the inevitable contradiction such an intensification of childrearing requires: how can mothers do both? Parental leave policies appear to be one strategy to enable mothers to manage both but as the discussion in Chapter 7 describes, assessing the effectiveness of such a strategy requires attending to the complex intersection of race, gender, class and dominant parenting ideologies as they shape and constrain policy making and individual parents’ experiences. Indeed, the very question itself, and the suggestion that it is a new dilemma, is extrapolated from the experiences of white, middle-class women. Historically, from slavery through colonialism and into the postwar period, black women have been ‘socially positioned as workers’ (Reynolds, 2001, p. 1049) and have had little choice but to balance work and motherhood for generations.

But how do contemporary mothers negotiate this legacy? Historical representations of black womanhood continue to inform black women's mothering, including both experiences and perceptions of it, with their capacity for work framed as neglectful, whether in their inability to find work and provide for their burdensome children or their emasculating prioritization of work over family (Reynolds, 1997, 2001). Today, women confront both heightened pressures to mother intensively and repeated reminders to take (financial) responsibility for their children. These injunctions are intensified for black mothers thanks to a historical legacy that excluded them from the boundaries of good motherhood precisely because they participated in paid work. That mothers might zealously conform to dominant models of good childrearing or resist this model by an equally ardent commitment to economic productivity and good neoliberal citizenship is evidence of the lasting effects of this legacy. However, these pressures may also offer opportunities for negotiation, rejection and reshaping of black motherhood.