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Regina and Stanley, 1996, Brooklyn, New York, by Regina Monfort

For many new mothers in the United States, the tax credit on their bundle of joy is a welcome perk. For a select few, bearing a child brings a much larger windfall: Jennifer Lopez reportedly received $6 million for flaunting her newborn twins on the cover of People magazine. Then there are those for whom motherhood, as the saying goes, is simply its own reward.

There’s the waitress in Ohio fearing the time when, due to welfare reform, the government assistance she relies on runs out. She plans to work multiple jobs, as she’s done before, but worries nonetheless: “What will happen if I can’t get by? Will they take my kids away and put them into a foster home?” There are mothers in prison; pregnant teenaged sisters in foster care; and the developmentally disabled woman whose 10-year-old daughter’s skills are starting to surpass hers.

Portraits of these women and their children are part of “Beggars and Choosers: Motherhood Is Not a Class Privilege in America,” a photography exhibit on view through June

Vermont Gurdwara, 1999, Los Angeles, by Jerry Berndt

14 at the Elmer L. Andersen Library on campus. With 56 images made by 43 documentary photographers, this exhibition, starting with its title, aims to provoke.

“If you bring your culturally conditioned eyeballs to the gallery, you’ll say, ‘Whoa, wait a minute, what’s she doing? She shouldn’t be a mother,’ ” says Rickie Solinger, the New York–based historian and author who organized the exhibit. “Then you’re affirming that certain women shouldn’t have the right to be a mother,” she continues. “Motherhood is a right. Like the right to vote, the right to free speech, it doesn’t matter if you’re poor or rich, it’s a right for everyone.”

Lisa Norling, an associate professor of history at the University of Minnesota, was instrumental in bringing the exhibit—which is based on Solinger’s 2001 book, Beggars and Choosers: How the Politics of Choice Shapes Adoption, Abortion, and Welfare in the United States—to campus. “Rickie Solinger is an important and well-known historian of women and public policy in 20th century U.S. history,” Norling says. “With this exhibition,

Mother and Daughter, East 173rd Street, 1980, New York, byt Mel Rosenthal

we wanted to foreground the kind of work that she does, make a strong statement about the value of women’s history in general, and showcase historical resources we have here at the University.” Solinger, she notes, used the U’s Social Welfare History Archives in conducting research for her 1992 book, Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race before Roe v. Wade.

This is not the only exhibition that Solinger has organized; in fact, she has forged a supplemental career as a curator. It started with “Wake Up Little Susie.” In 1992, she was working with several other women as part of a collaborative program of the Rocky Mountain Women’s Institute in Denver, and the group decided to create an art installation based on the issues Solinger addressed in that book, including how post–World War II public policies made it difficult for unwed black mothers to get housing, assistance, jobs, and education.

“I realized only a limited number of people are going to read my academic books,” Solinger says. “So making exhibitions is another way of doing this kind of public education.”

Immigrant mother goes over her son's vaccination records so he may enter 1st grade, 1991, Los Angeles, by Susie Fitzhugh

A mixed-media installation, “Wake Up Little Susie” showed at more than 60 colleges and universities over 11 years. “Interrupted Life: Incarcerated Mothers in the United States” was her first exhibition not based directly on a book. “Beggars and Choosers” has traveled to dozens of campuses since 2002. And a fourth, featuring contemporary artworks that incorporate historical domestic tools, recently opened at the Bennington Museum in Vermont.

Norling wanted the “Beggars and Choosers” exhibit on campus during the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, which the University is hosting this June. With work by renowned photographers Susan Meiselas, Eli Reed, and others, the exhibit’s images “challenge both romantic platitudes about motherhood and stereotypes about ‘bad’ mothers by portraying actual mothers in their particularity,” says Annette Igra, the Carleton College history professor who will moderate a panel discussion on the exhibit. “Yet there are clues to the larger con-text that reveal the ways inequalities of class, race, and gender shape the experience of mothering.”

Mary and Mika, 1997, Oakland, California, by Anne Hamersky

Besides the exhibition’s role at the Berkshire Conference, Solinger intends for it to “interrupt the curriculum” by serving as a complex topic for discussion in a range of University courses, including sociology, history, and women and public policy.

When students look at, say, Brenda Ann Kenneally’s Little Moms, will they focus on how the scrawny, large-eyed girl in the foreground seems scarcely larger than the toddler she holds on her hip—or will they note how she does so with utter poise? What will they think of the mother in Corky Lee’s Ten-minutes-to-four in the Garment Factory, hunched over a sewing machine, her daughter hovering at her side? How long will it take them to notice that the woman dressing her child in Anne Hamersky’s Mary and Mika is sitting in a wheelchair?

Perhaps because it features documentary photography, “Beggars and Choosers” may be the most controversial of Solinger’s exhibits. As its Web site explains, “Public opinion polls show that a majority of Americans [believe] women shouldn’t have children if they are too poor

Homeless in Florida, 1997, Daytona Beach, Florida, by Betty Press

and resourceless to support kids properly.” But “Beggars and Choosers” confronts viewers with powerful images of poor, nonwhite, immigrant, and very young women being mothers with dignity and determination.

Still, it’s hard not to question how they manage to do the hard work of mothering—or, more to the point, why. Solinger, of course, expects just that. “Many people think that they are the ones who are causing poverty in the U.S.” She counters that belief with text panels that include quotes from the mothers themselves, as well as an array of information on what Solinger describes as “very substantial causes of poverty: paying people non-living wages; a lack of adequate education; or the most common, a lack of health insurance.”

Is it any coincidence that those particular issues—money, schooling, health care—loom large in any parent’s mind?

“Beggars and Choosers” is on display through June 14 at the Elmer L. Andersen Library, 222 21st Ave. S., on the West Bank of the Minneapolis campus. Call 612-624-4377.