This article addresses the experiences of mothers who are Deaf and how they navigated their positions as being part of the larger Deaf community while raising their children. The analysis addresses the struggles they faced when encountering school systems and how, particularly in the hearing world, they were often put in positions to portray themselves as legitimate mothers. What can these women's experiences tell us about the concepts of motherhood, ability, and disability? Overall, the author seeks to use this research to question the work of mothering as something that is innate and instead illustrate how these Deaf women, especially when confronted with decisions about language choice, are responding to the social contexts that they are placed in as part of their daily lived experiences as mothers.

MOTHERING AS A CONCEPT OF WORK

In previous research, I have explored how Deaf mothers do the work of "maternal thinking" when they communicated with their children in family groups and explored how they discussed wanting hearing or deaf children and how they made decisions about how they communicated with their children (Najarian, 2006). I argued that the Deaf mothers developed strategies to "normalize" their experiences as Deaf mothers by often rejecting the idea of deafness as a disability and taught their children both English and American Sign Language (ASL) so that their children could more easily go back and forth between the worlds of the Deaf and the hearing. In the current article, I further broaden the idea of their motherwork to include how they negotiated their children's experiences in school systems, extracurricular activities, and in their own activism and volunteer work. How they did this work and the languages that they used played a key role in how they were seen as Deaf women and also as mothers.

Various scholars have argued that families, as social institutions, serve to organize women as expected to do particular kinds of work (Rich, 1976; DeVault, 1991; Harrington Meyer, et. al. 2000). Although this work may seem to be a natural attribute of women, sociological perspectives allow us to question to what extent the work of mothering is something innate and how much is shaped by cultural expectations. Ruddick (1982) has argued that mothering is a learned practice which involves "maternal thinking" and that it has three major components including preservation, growth, and acceptability of the child. Being maternal becomes a socially created category, which is based largely on the disciplinary practices of being a mother or the "discipline of maternal thought" (p. 77). First, mothers work to preserve the life of their child. To do this, mothers must be careful not to exercise control over their children. Mothers must also work toward humility and cheerfulness, which have become associated with successful mothers. Second, she argues that mothers work to foster growth in their children. For growth to occur, mothers must learn how to adapt and respond to change. Third, mothers must raise an acceptable child. Ruddick defines acceptability as determined by the "values of the mother's social group" (p. 83). She argues that there is a contradictory side to this third aspect of maternal thought. As she explains, while a successful mother might be rewarded for sacrificing herself, she might also be teaching her children this idea along with other potentially harmful practices, which ultimately might harm her children. This practice, then, is in tension with the first two practices of maternal thought, preservation and growth, which mothers work to instill in their children, since it has the risk of harming children.

Hays' (1996) work on intensive mothering, especially in terms of women who give up paid work to do full-time mothering is particularly salient to this study. For Hays (1996), the ideology of intensive mothering is seen by mothers themselves as having a method of child rearing that is "child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor-intensive, and financially expensive" (p. 8). This work is seen as something that is done by women and those that adhere to the idea of being a good mother. Malacrida (2008) has written about the tightrope that mothers with disabilities walk in terms of being good mothers who are thought to be good if they are dependent through a relationship with a male provider and also able to nurture their children. She argues that, for women with disabilities, a dependency on male partners can bring vulnerability to abuse and she explores the dilemmas that mothers who are seen as disabled face in their work as mothers. Malacrida (2009) also examines the contradictions and tensions embedded in mothers who are seen as disabled in terms of how they perform ideal motherhood. She is careful to point out that all mothers struggle to be seen as ideal, but that the experiences of mothers with disabilities allows us to see more closely how this process occurs. Similarly, this study about Deaf women investigates how these women experience their lives as mothers and how they often struggle to be seen as good mothers.

Other scholars have investigated how caring for a disabled child requires "maternal thinking" (Kittay, 1999), the extended caring role of mothers who have children with disabilities (Traustadottir, 1992), and how women with disabilities have struggled to be seen, by some, as mothers (Reinelt & Fried, 1998). Others have explored the idea of mothers who are seen, in some cases, as different than the "norm," such as lesbian mothers, single mothers by choice, and mothers who adopt children, and who are often put in positions to justify that they are, in fact, legitimate mothers (Bock, 2000; Dunne, 2000; Dalton & Bielby; 2000; Rothman, 2005). For example, Dunne (2000), in her study of lesbian parents, found that these women challenged ideas of a heterosexual norm. Dalton and Bielby (2000), who also studied lesbian parents, had similar findings, but also found that the women in their study also reinscribed gendered ideas of parents in their families. These two studies show how ideas of what is normal are also largely connected to larger ideas about gender and family and what constitutes a "good" mother. Building off of the above literatures, I will analyze the "maternal thinking" of Deaf mothers and discuss how doing an intersectional analysis of gender and ability furthers thinking on the topics of mothering, gender, ability, and what it means to be a legitimate mother. I will also focus on the role of language contributes to the above literatures and the concept of a "good" mother.

As part of a marginalized group in the larger hearing society, Deaf women are often, like other women, striving to achieve the ideal form of motherhood. Yet, Deaf women are also proud of their cultural identity as part of the Deaf community and seek to pass this on to their children. How the mothers in the above literatures are stigmatized in the larger society connects with the stories of Deaf mothers who also experience being stigmatized and thus develop various strategies to illustrate their legitimacy. These strategies include how they educate their children in schools, include them in extracurricular activities, and how they involve their children as part of their activism and volunteer work. Language and whether or not to teach their children American Sign Language (ASL), Sign Exact English (SEE), or to use oral methods, also becomes an important factor in the work of these Deaf women. This article will show how language becomes a key part of the work of maternal thinking, not just for the women of this study, but for all mothers, especially those who consider themselves part of a linguistic minority.

BEING DEAF AS AN IDENTITY

According to Deaf scholars, the lowercase deaf describes the audiological condition of the not hearing whereas the uppercase Deaf refers to a group of deaf people who share a common language, American Sign Language (ASL), culture, and history (Padden & Humphries, 1988). Instead of viewing themselves as disabled, the Deaf community defines being Deaf as cultural and sees itself as part of a linguistic minority whose primary language is ASL (Lane, 1999). People who are deaf are often, although not always, older Americans who lose their hearing and become deaf later in life and do not consider themselves part of the Deaf community. Hard of hearing individuals, as another group, sometimes identify with the Deaf community, but not in all cases.

Deaf studies scholars often contest the distinction between the terms deaf and Deaf. In their study of deaf and hard of hearing youth and welfare policy of the disabled, Hauland, Gronningsaeter, and Hansen (2003), discuss how it becomes problematic to place individuals into such categories because of the risk of reducing people's complex identities to one particular status. Instead of using either deaf or Deaf, they adopt a "minority approach" when it is necessary in their analysis and a "disability approach" where it is useful. Brevik (2005), in his study of Norwegian Deaf people, adopts a similar perspective and provides an analysis of how individuals navigate their deaf/Deaf identities. These literatures suggest that issues of identity have much to do with the languages of each country and is not solely an American and ASL issue. In line with these scholars, I take the position that the terms deaf, Deaf, and hearing and the privileges and stigmas attached to them are socially constructed and mediated through the various contexts which people find themselves in their daily lives. For the purposes of this article, where all of the women identified themselves as Deaf, I have chosen to use that term as a way of letting them decide how they wanted to be portrayed. When I speak about deaf women more generally, I use the term deaf as a broader way to identify a group, some of whom may indeed consider themselves also Deaf and part of the Deaf community. Thus, the language in this article shows the changing construction of deaf/Deaf while I have also tried to provide the individual women in this study with a say in how they define themselves as Deaf.

METHODOLOGY

The analysis used for this article is part of a larger study where I conducted extensive life history interviews with ten deaf1 women, who live in Rochester, New York and Boston, Massachusetts (Najarian, 2006). I relied on personal contacts and snowball sampling for the data collection. I emailed potential interviewees about my project and also told them that I am hearing, know sign language, and have a Deaf brother. Having a somewhat insider status, I believe, helped me to gain access to these women. Although I know sign language, I know Sign Exact English (SEE), not American Sign Language (ASL), which is the official language of the Deaf community, so I offered to pay for sign language interpreters. In an effort to capture the visual language, I audio and video taped all interviews. Despite the sample not being random and also small, the respondents gave me a tremendous amount of information about their experiences. Tables one and two provide demographic information of the Deaf women.

Respondents ranged in age from thirty-four to sixty-three and all are college educated. One respondent had completed three years of undergraduate studies, one had her Associate's Degree, of the two who had Bachelor's degrees, one of these was pursuing graduate work, and six had Master's degrees. This sample, then, is a particular group of Deaf women and had I interviewed women who did not have a college education, I suspect the data would look different. The sample, then, which consists of upper middle class, predominantly White women is indeed limiting. Many of the women described themselves as among the first group of deaf women in the United States to attend and graduate from hearing colleges. Despite them not being representative of all deaf women, they add to the literatures on gender, disability, and family. I also chose to interview college educated deaf women to investigate the relationship of gender and ability on the topic of mothering. Due to their relative privilege from their college educations, the women of this study, more so than other deaf women, have the potential for more inclusion in the hearing world and therefore are likely to be continually navigating their way in both Deaf and hearing settings. They are, then, because of the continual change in context, a group that allows for a closer analysis of gender and ability.

When asked to describe their race or ethnicity, nine said they were white while one described herself as Jewish. Seven described themselves as economically comfortable while three said they were somewhat comfortable. Nine of the ten women were married while one was divorced. One of the nine who was married at the time of the study had earlier been divorced and one was separated. All except for one respondent had married men who were deaf or hard of hearing. At the time of the interviews, the women had anywhere from one to four children ranging in age from six weeks to thirty-seven years old. Three of the mothers had all deaf children while seven had all hearing children.

I chose to interview five women from Rochester, New York because of its large Deaf community. In the United States, this community, known nationally, exists in part because of the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID), which is part of Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). The school is a place where Deaf, hard of hearing, and hearing students all thrive and many settle in the Rochester area after they complete their college educations. I selected five women from Boston, Massachusetts to compare similarities and differences that might exist between a close knit Deaf community like Rochester and a more dispersed, yet still thriving Deaf community in Boston. Although the findings in this paper do not reflect large differences between these communities, I wanted to include the rationale for the author's choice of locals so as to speak to the overall study design and set up.

I interviewed the women using a general set of questions regarding their early family, educational, mothering, and paid work experiences. Through the use of grounded theory method, I sought to have the analysis arise from their stories (Glaser & Strauss, 1999). While also using feminist qualitative methods, I sought to make their stories visible to those who might not know of them to understand the range of women's experiences (DeVault, 1999; Reinharz, 1992). I have, for the purposes of this article, translated the women's quotes into English so that they are more readable to a wider audience. This decision shapes their stories; however, my hope is that by making these women visible to those that might not know about them, this will contribute to larger discussions on the sociology of gender and on mothering as a kind of work.

FINDINGS

This article investigates the mothering experiences of college educated deaf women in the context of a larger hearing society and explores how they decided to educate their children. The article is organized into three sections which show the various strategies these women used in their mothering. These include teaching the skills of lifetime educators and self-advocates to deaf children, sending their hearing children to Kids of Deaf Adults (KODA) camps, and incorporating their activism and volunteering in their work as mothers. The findings of this article point to how these women do the work of integrating their children and themselves into their communities and how they make political decisions about their choices of language as well as educating their children. These practices become part of the work of maternal thinking and add to the concept of it as a kind of work. Their examples also allow us to challenge the idea that mothering is something that is an innate quality to women and instead view it as something that is seen as learned and due, in part, to one's social context and experiences.

CONCLUSION

This article has investigated the work of Deaf women concerning decisions about their children's formal and informal educations as well as linked it to Ruddick's (1982) concept of maternal thought, which includes the work of preservation, growth, and acceptability of their children. In each of their stories, learning ASL and English became critical decisions regarding how these women did this work, which influenced how they defined themselves as mothers and as members of the Deaf world, hearing world, or the places in between. The learned skills of self-advocating and educating others about deafness, which were passed on to both their deaf and hearing children, suggest that the children as well as the mothers also became active agents in this ongoing process of negotiating one's identity in these worlds. There are three major findings for this article.

First, teaching the skills of being lifetime educators and self-advocates to their Deaf children became part of the work of maternal thought and support the idea that maternal thinking is something that is learned rather than an innate quality of women. The context of hearing schools and navigating their deaf children's educations in these settings put the Deaf mothers into positions where they had to develop this strategy as part of their mothering and also pass along this skill to their children. This was also the case for participation in hearing camps and when searching for an acceptable school for their deaf children. In this way, we can see how, as described in the section of "Being Deaf as an Identity," that the boundaries of being deaf, Deaf, and hard of hearing are blurred and that these women and their children were constantly negotiating their identities in a variety of contexts.

Second, the Deaf mothers who had hearing children, in an effort to ensure acceptability of their children in both the Deaf and hearing communities, sent their children to KODA camps as a strategy so that their children could meet others who had similar experiences. These findings also relate to scholars who study families with "disabilities" and how they often work to "normalize" their experiences (Harris, 2003; Traustadottir, 1992). The women of this study, then, as with these families, through the process of their everyday activities, did the work of integrating themselves into a larger hearing society and resisted being seen as different. As in the examples of those who had deaf children, since these families interacted with both hearing and Deaf people, the mothers had to learn how to foster an atmosphere where they children could be preserved, grow, and be accepted.

A difference from other families, is that these mothers and their children had to learn how to do this for two communities, the Deaf and hearing, and the places and between. The decisions of these Deaf women about language are political ones because in making decisions about speaking English, ASL, or a combination of both, they carved out places for themselves and their families. If they raised their children to speak ASL, they and their families were seen as part of the Deaf community, whereas if they taught them spoken English, they were seen as more a part of the hearing world. The larger Deaf community and hearing society played a role in how these families were seen in regards to these cultural identities, but the women themselves also identified their decisions as political ones. Their experiences also further support the idea that maternal thinking is something that is learned and not something that these women are born with knowing how to do. They learn how to mother in this way because the social situations that they encounter prompt them to respond as "good" mothers.

Finally, the Deaf women, through their activist work and by volunteering in their children's extra curricular activities, resisted stigmas that might have been attached to them as not being legitimate mothers and workers. In this way, they especially worked toward making their children acceptable to the hearing and Deaf worlds, but they also made efforts to show how they were legitimate mothers and could do this work in a variety of contexts. They also taught their children the importance of knowing how to exist in both worlds and the ability to go back and forth in these settings. Again, in this way, the boundaries of being deaf, Deaf, and hard of hearing seem to shift and change in a variety of contexts.

This article has made visible the mothering experiences of Deaf women with specific regards to their children's formal educations, extra curricular activities, and their own activism and volunteer work. The stories of the women in this study suggest that it is necessary to do an analysis that includes a discussion of gender as well as ability to more fully understand the concept of mothering as a kind of work and to question whether that work is an innate characteristic of women. Instead, the data suggests that the practices of maternal thought were learned due, in part, to context and the positions of these women and their families. It also illustrates how the terms of ability and disability are also based on context and suggests that they should be contested by scholars and activists who are interested in further theorizing of these topics and in creating social justice for all people.