Beggars and Choosers: Biography

Rickie Solinger, curator of "Beggars and Choosers: Motherhood Is Not a Class Privilege in America," is a historian writing about reproductive politics and welfare politics in the United States. Since 1992 she has been working with artists and photographers to create traveling exhibitions associated with the themes of her books, which include Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race before Roe v. Wade and Beggars and Choosers: How the Politics of Choice Shapes Adoption, Abortion, and Welfare in the United States. Solinger is currently designing an exhibition about incarcerated mothers in this country and finishing a book, Pregnancy and Power: An Orientation to Reproductive Politics in U.S. History.

The complete Beggars and Choosers exhibition includes 56 photographs by 43 photographers and two photography books. The Moving Walls 9 exhibit includes the work of 12 photographers: Maureen Beitler, Susie Fitzhugh, Anne Hamersky, Brenda Ann Kenneally, Corky Lee, Regina Monfort, Margaret Morton, Betty Press, Eli Reed, Stephen Shames, Taryn Simon, and Amy Toensing. The photographs depict women who have been defined as too young, too poor, too nonwhite, too disabled, too gay, or too homeless to be legitimate mothers. Yet in the photographs, the women appear as mothers with strength, dignity, and determination.

The exhibition opened in Alabama in 2002, at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. It has subsequently traveled to college and university galleries across the United States, and will continue to be displayed at academic venues through 2008.