Child-rearing practices and attitudes of working and full-time mothers

Mothers who wish to work are faced with the double burden of paid employment and childcare. They also have to confront the widely held view that ‘a woman's place is in the home’ and the prevailing popular opinion that a mother who also works outside the home is somehow harming her child. Previous research has shown little evidence that maternal employment disadvantages children.The present study, a comparison of the child-rearing practices and attitudes of a group of working (both full- and part-time) and a group of full-time mothers of 4 year olds, reveals few significant differences between the two groups. Mothers in paid employment differ in only one child-rearing practice: they place greater stress on table manners.However, a number of significant attitudinal differences emerged between the two groups of mothers: working mothers found their child rearing more pleasurable, their relationship with the child was better and the child was more likely to be described as happy and contented. Working mothers were rated warmer, higher in self-esteem and less anxious about their child rearing. Husbands of working mothers were more likely and more willing to participate in childcare and were rated as having a more affectionate relationship with the child. Overall, the results of the study are strongly supportive of the aspirations of the growing number of women who wish to combine work and motherhood.     

Black Mothers,Bad Mothers: African Refugee Women and the Governing of ‘Good’ Citizens Through the Australian Child Welfare System

In this article I explore how the child welfare system in Australia is a basis of governmentality, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with 35 women resettled in Australia as refugees originating from African countries. Although the explicit aim of the child welfare system is to protect children from a risk of significant harm, the findings presented here suggest that such systems can concurrently operate to evaluate, monitor, and demand behavioural change from women who are the subject of intervention in accordance with logics of white neoliberal motherhood, in which parental merit is measured through, and problematised by, factors of racialisation, assumptions of cultural difference, counter-heteronormativity, and socio-economic marginalisation. I argue that the child welfare system not only operates to protect children, but can also function as an instrument to govern women to ‘fit’ with an idealised standard of citizenship in Australia. Thereby supplanting maternal guardianship with the mandate of government institutions, operations of child welfare position the paternalistic authority of the state as absolute and render mothers who do not conform to white neoliberal motherhood as vulnerable to intervention.     

Understanding child abuse: Ideologies of motherhood

Child abuse is usually considered to be a social problem where ‘bad mothering’ is of central concern.This study argues that the institution of motherhood in western society is oppressive, however; indeed, under the circumstances, it is surprising that incidents of child abuse are not more widespread. Some of the difficulties and dilemmas of women as mothers are discussed with a view to suggesting ways in which women can break out of the isolating experience of abusing children.     

Motherhood as a national mission: The construction of womanhood in the legal discourse in Israel

The paper looks at the notion of womanhood that emerged from the discourse around two laws passed in the first years of the State of Israel: the 1949 “Defense Service Law” and the 1951 “Women's Equal Rights Law.” Law is conceived of as “producing” the cultural meaning of “women” as a social category and defining its relations to the state. My main argument is that in this discourse, the Jewish-Israeli woman is constructed first and foremost as a mother and a wife, and not as an individual or a citizen. The construction of a distinct category of women that emphasizes women's difference takes place within an ideological context of the self-conscious myth of gender-equality. Motherhood is defined as a public role that carries national significance. And it is via this notion of “motherhood as a national mission” that women are incorporated into the state and not through the universal characteristics of citizenship. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict, coupled with the central role that the family and the military play within the Israeli culture and society are the major determinants of this specific definition of Jewish-Israeli women's citizenship.     

Mothers and daughters: Linking women's life histories in Grand Bank, Newfoundland, Canada

Grand Bank is a small fishing town on the southwest coast of Newfoundland, Canada. The oral history project, on which this paper is based, focussed on the “life stories” of women in three, four and sometimes five, different generations of families. My aim was twofold. First, I wanted to build a picture of the way to the economy, and the sexual division of labour has changed in the period 1890–present. Second, I wanted to see how, by focussing several accounts of the same family experience, I could break apart the ideological construction of the past. I could also use contrasting accounts of mothers and daughters to re-examine the role of “work” in the family and the construction of a sexual division of labour.This paper explores how women situate and construct both their past and present experience, and what the different accounts given by mothers and daughters and grandaughters tell us both about female family relationships and about the interaction of gender with economic, social and technological change. The paper also suggests why this particular oral history approach, using different generations of women in the same family, is especially relevant to feminist concerns.     

Models of school-age child care: A review of current research on implications for women and their children

This article discusses various models of children's out-of-school care arrangements, mainly in the United States of America. Forms of care include programs or centers, family day care homes, and self-care. The implications of each of these different systems of care and outcomes for both children and their parents are reviewed through the lens of existing research. While there is no consensus in the research literature, so-called “latch-key” children appear to experience more negative effects than supervised peers, although these negative effects may be mitigated by variables, such as the amount of time spent alone and the parent-child relationship. A small group of studies finds positive outcomes for children who participate in recreational after-school programs, although age-inappropriate care arrangements and age of participating child may be associated with negative outcomes. No research has been conducted across program types. Many mothers of school-age children without regular after-school care or alternative care on school holidays, appear to accomodate their career and work choices to their children's schedules, possibly in order to avoid the “latch-key” alternative.     

The Nationalization of Motherhood and the Stretching of its Boundaries: Shelihot Aliyah and evacuees in Eretz Israel (Palestine) in the 1940s

This article examines perceptions of motherhood as they developed during the late 1940s in the midst of the national struggle for independence in Eretz Israel (Palestine). It considers two case studies in which mothers who were ‘recruited’ by the emerging nation were temporarily separated from their children. The first case concerns women emissaries (Shelihot) who were called to help in Jewish refugee camps in Europe after the Holocaust. The second case involves mothers who were not evacuated with their children from their settlements during the War of Independence but remained, instead, at the front line. These situations led to the development of new perceptions of women and motherhood, which were shaped and matured during the national struggle for independence. The two case studies are used as lenses to explore women's own experiences and perceptions against the backdrop of the intensified idealization of motherhood in times of emergency circumstances.     

全面二孩政策背景下婴幼儿照料对女性工资收入的影响研究

照料孩子往往使职业女性遭受"生育工资惩罚",全面二孩政策是否会加重这种"惩罚"?研究基于广东省的问卷数据,得出如下结论:在孩子0—3岁时母亲的照料时间付出会对其工资产生负向影响;相比于一孩母亲,照料孩子的时间付出对二孩母亲工资的负向影响更强;对婴幼儿照料的支持有助于提高母亲的工资;综合考量规模优势、幼儿早教、健康卫生等因素,托幼机构照料是几种照料方式中最优的。为降低母亲照料孩子的代价并提高全面二孩政策的实施效果,研究建议:政府应大力发展低龄幼儿托育机构,建立托育服务基本保障体系,并出台政策支持不同社会主体提供多层次的托育服务,以满足家庭不断增长的托育需求。     

“(L)Activists and Lattes”: Breastfeeding Advocacy as Domestic Performance

This article considers how “lactivists” (lactation activists) consciously stage the act of public breastfeeding as a means of political advocacy, cultural resistance, and ideological subversion. Through the exploration of a specific nurse-in protest (the 2004 Nurse at Starbucks campaign in Silver Spring, Maryland), the author explores how the “domestic performance” of nurse-ins force spectators to confront (and hopefully, reconsider) latent and overt assumptions about motherhood in relation to parenting proficiency, civic responsibility, maternal sexuality, and political efficacy. In so doing, the author discloses how nurse-ins subvent traditional perceptions of mothers and mothering as a way of instigating social change.     

Augusta Webster’s Mother and Daughter and the only child debate

The enduring debate about family size has roots in Victorian England, most notably in literary works addressing the issue of balancing motherhood and a writing career. One Victorian writer and activist, Augusta Webster (1837–1894), directly addressed the issue of family size in her uncompleted sonnet sequence Mother and Daughter (1895), which she began when her only child was a newborn. In this posthumous series of 14-line poems, Webster defends her decision to have one child and, in doing so, challenges popular assumptions that only women with multiple children could be considered ‘complete’, socially-acceptable mothers. Despite her efforts, however, and despite the rising popularity of one-child families, the results of numerous scientific studies and the lingering critiques of mommy blogs make it clear that challenges to mothers of ‘onlies’ remain.     

The perils of mrs pooter: satire,modernity and motherhood in the lower middle class in England, 1870-1920

Abstract

This article examines some contrasting representations of lower middle-class women, marriage and motherhood in late Victorian and Edwardian England. Alongside traditional cutting images of white-collar men were misogynist criticisms of suburban women as obsessive consumers and irresponsible child-rearers who lowered racial and cultural quality. By contrast, the women who wrote about themselves in an 1898 Daily Telegraph series on working wives focused on practical problems faced by working mothers, traversing the same themes of the double burden, adjusting employment to childcare imperatives, and ‘quality time’ with children, which remain symptomatic of the problems of ‘modern’ motherhood     

“All my life is one big nursing home”: Russian immigrant women in israel speak about double caregiver stress

Adding elder care to the list of women's multiple roles may significantly jeopardize their well-being and health. This qualitative study explored the experiences with multiple roles among 20 middle-aged Jewish women who immigrated to Israel from the former Soviet Union with their extended families. Before emigration, most informants were professionals or white-collar workers, but in Israel they experienced occupational downgrading and ended up working as attendants or nurses in geriatric care. At home, these women of the “sandwich” generation acted as informal caregivers to their husbands, children and elderly parents. Coupled with the challenges of resettlement, this double caregiver stress led to significant emotional and physical burnout. Exhaustion and tight time budgets led to health problems and poor self-care among these women. The informants' social networks were mainly coethnic, and their coping tools drew on the Israeli–Russian community. The study concludes that, even in the relatively egalitarian Russian–Soviet gender system, women function as principal caregivers, often at the expense of other life goals.     

‘Everyone needs a holiday from work,why not mothers?’ Motherhood,Feminism and Citizenship at the Australian Royal Commission on Human Relationships, 1974–1977

The Royal Commission on Human Relationships was an initiative of the Whitlam government, instigated in 1974 to investigate ‘the family, social, educational, legal and sexual aspects of male and female relationships’, with particular attention to the concept of ‘responsible parenthood’. The Commission heard evidence from thousands of Australians on a broad range of topics, and given the Royal Commission's origins in the 1973 Federal Parliamentary debate over abortion, it is perhaps unsurprising that motherhood featured so prominently in submissions presented to the Commission. In this article it is argued that mothers’ submissions to the Royal Commission on Human Relationships reveal the ways that social and cultural meanings of motherhood were being contested in 1970s Australia. Rather than making claims for rights in the established language of maternal citizenship, many women deployed their private experiences of mothering to argue that the state should facilitate their access to both paid employment and time away from mothering. These mothers argued for equal citizenship rights, challenging the reproductive compact that had long been central to maternal citizenship. The submissions reveal the ways that mothers (and their critics) drew upon both new and old meanings of motherhood to articulate new cultural and political possibilities for motherhood and citizenship in 1970s Australia.     

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Resident Mothers and the Moral Dilemmas they Face During Custody Disputes

Recent scholarship has critiqued the tendency for separated mothers in custody disputes to be defined as hostile and alienating. Through the presentation of three case studies, drawn from an interview-based study with 21 women, we show how such pejorative constructions only arise when the conflicting gendered moral accountabilities of contemporary motherhood are overlooked. We found that mothers tend to believe that contact with non-resident fathers is generally in a child’s best interests. However, as a result of balancing complex moral obligations for the care of their children, they may raise questions about particular kinds of arrangements for contact with particular fathers. We argue, therefore, that family law practice will lead to better outcomes for children when professionals listen to the history of, and reasons for, mothers’ positions. To enable family law professionals to undertake this task, we offer an alternative interpretive framework for making sense of women’s stories. Should family law professionals make use of this framework, it is likely that they will understand that the positions mothers adopt are often the outcome of the difficult moral dilemmas they encounter in caring for their children, and that the reductive rubric of the ‘hostile mother’ needs to be treated with scepticism.     

Belly Casts and Placenta Pills: Refiguring Postmaternal Entrepreneurialism

ABSTRACT

This article takes at its starting point the idea that maternalism and entrepreneurialism are necessarily antithetical as Julie Stephens argues in Confronting Postmaternal Thinking: Feminism, Memory, and Care [2012. New York: Columbia University Press]. Building on scholarship which shows how motherhood has become commercialised and commodified in contemporary culture, we extend this field by investigating how mothers who are providers of services to other mothers and pregnant women are negotiating neoliberalism and entrepreneurialism. Through an empirical investigation of birth and parenting entrepreneurs – including hypnobirthing classes and placenta pill businesses – in Bristol, UK we argue that our self-employed participants were building community and care economies within neoliberal modes of self-production, thus suggesting a more complex and ambivalent relationship between entrepreneurialism and postmaternalism. We suggest that the experiences of women entrepreneurs or ‘mumpreneurs’ offer insights into how the spaces of work might be, counter to Stephens’ characterisation, places of negotiation and struggle for the politics of feminism, rather than sites of ‘anti-maternalism’ or the ‘forgetting’ of maternalism. Moreover, our participants’ accounts were strongly shaped by feminist ethics of care thus challenging the representation of such services as therapeutic postfeminist technologies of self-work.     

Women talking : Creating knowledge through difference in cross-cultural research

This paper discusses the research process of a cross-cultural study investigating the health care experiences of Chinese Canadian and Indo-Canadian women. Employing the notion of reflexivity, the paper discusses the use of an accepted feminist method, the in-depth interview, in a study involving women from racialized groups. The paper discusses the layering of power relations at the different sites of data gathering, and the negotiation of “difference” between researchers, research assistants, and study participants throughout the study. The position of research assistants, as mediators of the research process, is given particular attention. In discussing our attempt to put the principles of feminist research into practice in cross-cultural research, we argue that problems encountered in the interview method require critical reflection, not only on the grounds of the practical issues of gaining detailed, narrative accounts of women's lives, but also in relation to the way in which “others” are constructed through research practices.     

silent voices: mothers who kill their children and the women’s liberation movement in 1970s Japan

In the early 1970s Japan witnessed the emergence of a new women’s liberation movement that put forward an unprecedented gendered critique of Japanese post-war society. Known as ūman ribu (woman lib) or simply ribu (lib), this movement appeared at a historical time when the numerical increase in cases of mothers who killed their own children prompted the news media to describe maternal filicide as a dramatic social phenomenon. This article explores ribu’s engagement with the increased public visibility of mothers who kill. It contends that the solidarity and support the movement demonstrated for these criminalised mothers radically challenged idealised notions of motherhood, maternal love and the sanctity of the mother–child bond, and deeply questioned the post-war nuclear family as the cornerstone of society. The article investigates the revolutionary potential of ribu’s preoccupation with murderous mothers by framing it in the context of the movement’s call for consciousness transformation and for the pursuance of a more genuine relationality, and it gestures towards an understanding of what might be at stake in reading maternal filicide through the interpretative grid of a revolutionary agenda.     

Women and substance use/abuse: Towards a feminist perspective or how to make dust fly

The purpose of this paper is to offer a feminist perspective in the area of women and substance abuse. A major strand of thinking highlighted throughout this paper is that a women- orientated response rooted in the identity and consciousness of women substance users/abusers is essential. Five key areas are explored and these include: (1) the need for a feminist perspective which moves beyond ‘masculinist’ truths; (2) substance abuse as a “gender illuminating notion”; (3) the “unacceptable” and “acceptable” faces of dependency; (4) the development of a women- orientated methodology in the field of substance abuse; and (5) substance abuse and “pleasure”: is this relevant for women? While pointers for future research are indicated, it is suggested that more work “by women and for women” is needed in the area.     

Political women in singapore: A socio-linguistic analysis

This study sets out to discover how the political woman in Singapore is portrayed in Singapore through a study of her representation in the media. A focussed study of the Singapore English newspapers in the political elections of 1984, 1988 and 1991 show the construction of the political woman in two ways: one is through the creation of the stereotype, packaging the political woman as a type of woman and like all women, operating within the framework of the family, such as, their role as wives, as the helped, as mothers and as “the weaker sex”; and the other is through the medium of language itself, for example, such as the use of address terms, overlexicalization, and the tabloid commentary style.