Kōtuitui
New Zealand Journal of Social Sciences Online
Weaving cohesive identities: New Zealand women talk as mothers and
workers
Ella R Kahu
Mandy Morgan
School of Psychology
Massey University
Private Bag 11–222
Palmerston North, New Zealand
ella@kahu.org
Abstract This exploratory study examines the discourses which
construct women as mothers and workers and explores the strategies the
women use to weave these sometimes contradictory identities together.
Discourse analysis was used to explore the talk of two focus groups of
first-time mothers, all New Zealanders of European descent in stable
heterosexual partnerships with babies aged less than six months. The
women deployed an intensive mother discourse which privileged their
maternal role and positioned the babies as needing parental care and
mothers as the natural providers of that care. However, they also
felt the pressure of successful woman and economic rationalist
discourses in which paid work is essential to wellbeing and good
citizenship while motherhood is devalued. The women’s decisions about
re-entering the paid workforce were characterised by conflict and
constraint. The analysis focuses on the strategies of resistance that
the women used to warrant their life choices, including constructing
motherhood as a job, and deploying an independent mother discourse
which serves to facilitate their striving for the best of both worlds.
Also explored are some of the structural barriers that serve to further
limit women’s choices.
Keywords Motherhood, work-life balance, gender roles,
discourse analysis, identity, care, paid work
Introduction
Socially, much is expected of women in New Zealand and other Western
societies. The pressure on women to return to paid work quickly
following the birth of their children has never been greater. In New
Zealand, the government is increasingly vocal in its desire to increase
women’s participation in the workforce as a means to increase
productivity and thus stimulate economic growth (Ministry of Women’s
Affairs 2002). This social context, and the changing ideology around
gender roles, leaves new mothers with the challenging task of creating
lives which somehow allow them to be both mothers and workers.
A substantial body of empirical research
has attempted to identify the factors that influence mothers’ choices
about combining motherhood and paid work. Three broad clusters of
research can be identified, each based on different underlying
assumptions about the nature of the self and human agency. Firstly,
economic accounts construct women as rational individuals driven
primarily by financial need whose choices are influenced by demographic
factors such as the number of children, and financial factors such as
income, work experience and childcare costs (e.g. Barrow 1999; McGovern
et al. 2000; Gray et al. 2002). Secondly, psychological accounts also
take an individualistic approach and argue that women have internal
stable attitudes and preferences that shape their choices (e.g. Hakim
2000). Both, which are empirically founded, construct the individual as
a free agent and largely fail to consider women’s social context. The
third cluster is more diverse and consists of structural, sociological
and social constructionist explanations. Structural accounts focus on
social factors such as tax regimes, government policy and cultural
ideology but risk being overly deterministic and positioning women as
entirely constrained by their context (e.g. Edwards 2001; Jaumotte
2003; Gutiérrez-Domènech 2005). In contrast, sociological
accounts consider identity and morality as central to women’s choices,
arguing that within their context, women do exercise a limited agency
(e.g. Duncan & Edwards 1997; Glover 2002; Himmelweit & Sigala
2004). As Collins & Wickham (2004: 43) describe: “Just because a
political/social/moral system promotes a particular role for women does
not mean that women necessarily conform to that role”. Social
constructionist accounts, including this paper, also consider identity
to be central but extend this to examine the linguistic processes by
which those identities are constructed (e.g. McMahon 1995; Hays 1996;
Lupton & Schmied 2002).
Social constructionism argues that the self
is a discursive process where the multiple discourses and multiple
positions available to us produce a struggle to maintain a sense of a
consistent and unitary self (Davies & Harré 1990). The
emphasis on language shifts the focus of study from inside the person
to the discursive spaces between people. Women’s decision making is
best understood, therefore, not by an examination of individual factors
and variables but rather through an exploration of how women construct
motherhood and paid work and how the decision is constituted in
language. Within this framework, discourse analysis, which broadly
studies language and its constitutive power, is the most appropriate
methodology.
There are, however, a multitude of styles
of discourse analysis (Burman & Parker 1993). The current research
blends two broad approaches: discursive psychology and critical
discourse analysis. The former is a close and detailed analysis of the
immediate function of the talk, looking at how individual accounts are
warranted and identities created (Potter & Wetherell 1994).
Critical discourse analysis takes a wider view and draws upon
Foucault’s ideas to look at how dominant discourses support
institutions, reproduce power relations and have ideological effects
(Parker 1992).
Previous social constructionist research in
the United States, Britain and Australia has highlighted the
contradiction between the dominant discourses of intensive mother and
successful woman (Hays 1996; Hughes 2002; Lupton & Schmied 2002). A
relatively recent discourse, emerging from changing political and
social conditions through the twentieth century (Hays 1996), the
intensive mother discourse defines a good mother as one who puts her
children first and spends as much time with them as possible (Lupton
& Schmied 2002). The devaluing of unpaid work in New Zealand has
been highlighted by authors such as Waring (1988) and Else (1996).
Unpaid work such as mothering is positioned as non-work, with paid work
deemed to be the foundation of citizenship (Barlow et al. 2002). More
recently, the shift to a deregulated economy in New Zealand has
resulted in even greater importance being placed on paid work (Copas
2001). Recent concerns with labour shortages and an OECD report noting
that New Zealand has lower than average labour force participation by
women (Bryant et al. 2004) has resulted in the government viewing
increasing that participation rate as an important political strategy
(Clark 2005). A recent analysis of the New Zealand government’s policy
for women revealed that despite its “rhetoric of valuing women’s
traditional contributions, caregiving and community work are all but
invisible” (Kahu & Morgan 2007: 144). It is within this context of
conflicting pressures on women that the current research is situated.
The study
Eleven women were recruited to participate in two focus groups.
Previous research has tended to collect data using individual
interviews but it was felt that focus groups had the potential to
result in much richer data because they more closely resemble everyday
social interaction and they allow members to challenge, question and
disagree with each other (Wilkinson 1998). While individual interviews
tend to decontextualise the participants (Wilkinson 1998), discussion
with friends, often those in similar situations, is a social process
women commonly use to help make decisions. In addition, groups are less
hierarchical and thus reduce the power imbalance between the researcher
and the women (Wilkinson 1998). Focus groups represent something of a
compromise in that they have the advantage of being more natural but
allow a higher degree of control than naturalistic observation (Morgan
1997). We also wanted the groups to be of mutual benefit and there is
evidence to suggest that women find participating in focus groups a
more gratifying and enjoyable experience (Madriz 2000). Feedback from
the women, after the focus groups, suggested they found the experience
both interesting and enjoyable.
Eight of the women volunteered to take part
in the research following the distribution of an information sheet and
a personal presentation to two organisations: (1) Plunket, the leading
provider of post-natal maternal and child care in New Zealand; and (2)
SPACE, a support programme for first-time parents. Snowball sampling
was used to recruit the final three women. The criteria for inclusion
were first-time mothers who had been in full-time paid employment prior
to the birth and whose child was under six months of age. Because the
study aimed to study text and talk rather than people, the sampling was
purposive rather than random (Denzin & Lincoln 2000). Millward
(1995: 279) suggests that sampling in such cases should select the
people who will provide “the most meaningful information in terms of
the project objectives”. First-time mothers were therefore ideal. The
homogeneity of the groups also helped ensure the adequacy of the sample
size. As research into theoretical saturation by Guest et al. (2006)
concludes, assuming a reasonable degree of participant homogeneity, 12
participants is sufficient for data saturation to occur with the
metathemes present in as few as six.
In New Zealand, most mothers are entitled
to 14 weeks of paid leave and 38 weeks unpaid leave which can be
allocated to either the mother or father. Three of the women were still
on paid leave, six were on unpaid leave, one had returned to full-time
work with her husband as a full-time father, and one was at home but
was not entitled to leave as she had been employed as a contractor.
As feminist researchers, we need to
recognise the diversity of experience and not make the mistake of
constructing “the category of women as representative of all women”
(Worell & Etaugh 1994: 446). With its social constructionist
recognition of multiple realities, this research does not aim to
generalise the findings across women and it is important to highlight
the narrow range of women taking part. The women we listened to were
all European New Zealanders from apparently middle-class backgrounds in
stable, heterosexual partnerships. This was not intentional and
arguably reflects the predominant identities of women who attend
parenting support groups and who have the time and inclination to
volunteer for academic research. This self selection bias, leading to
the exclusion of women of different identities, has been noted as
problematic in other feminist qualitative research (Cannon et al.
1991). There is little doubt that women with different backgrounds
would talk about their choices in a different ways. However, although
we do not claim that these women are representative of mothers, the
discourses they deployed in accounting for their experiences are
available to many other mothers and therefore, the findings are of
interest widely.
The groups were held at a community venue
and two trained early childhood teachers were available to help care
for any babies who attended. The discussions, facilitated by the first
author, were largely unstructured with a series of trigger questions
used to keep the conversation flowing. The groups were recorded using
both audio and video, with the video used only to overcome the
potential difficulty of identifying the speaker within the group when
transcribing (Morgan 1997).
Firstly, we briefly summarise the women’s
constructions of motherhood and paid work, linking them to previous
research of this nature. The main focus of this paper is the
difficulties the women had in weaving together the sometimes
incompatible identities of mother and successful woman, the discursive
strategies the women used to manage and ease this tension, and the
structural barriers which served to constrain their choices.
Constructing motherhood and paid work
As with previous discursive research into motherhood, the women in
the groups drew strongly on the dominant ideology of intensive mother.
Hays (1996: x) describes this as: “a gendered model that
advises mothers to expend a tremendous amount of time, energy and money
in raising their children”. Intensive mother has its roots in the
traditional gender divide that positions men in the public sphere as
breadwinners and women in the private sphere as caregivers. Despite the
dramatic increases in women’s participation in the labour force in
recent years and despite egalitarian constructions of parenting in
which the paternal role has increasing importance, the intensive mother
discourse continues to exert its dominance (Glenn 1994; Hays 1996;
Lupton 2000). As the following example from the current research
suggests, the intensive mother discourse constitutes motherhood as
central to a woman’s identity and women as primary caregivers:
Kirsten: What about the children? They’re trying to encourage
people to go and work, make it more attractive to be in the workforce.
Who’s going to be looking after the next generation? And it is women
who have those children there’s no way round that, so they should be
focussing a bit more on that as well. I mean okay it’s for the women
but children is a very big part of being a woman.
The women in the focus groups constructed
men and women as having a different bond with the baby and a different
style of parenting. These differences, which underpin the intensive
mother discourse, were warranted by a strongly biological chain of
explanations. The mother carries the baby so bonds earlier, her
hormones play a role, the maternal instinct “kicks in”, she breastfeeds
the baby which is both an emotional connection and a physical tie.
Because of these, she subsequently becomes more attuned to the baby’s
needs, and is therefore the better and preferred caregiver. This
logical and seemingly irrefutable chain has led some feminists to
suggest that women’s reproductive capacity is the very cause of their
oppression (Firestone 1972). It is also one of the reasons for the long
standing dominance of the intensive mother discourse: if it is
biological then it is immutable.
Motherhood is constructed simultaneously as
the most natural role and the least valued. As Grace (1998) points out,
mothering is seen as priceless, a critical role in children’s lives,
but at the same time, mothering is neither rewarded nor respected by
society. Instead, paid work is deemed to be the source of a “socially
valued sense of self” (Vincent et al. 2004: 577). Much government
rhetoric, including New Zealand’s current policy for women, assumes
that paid work provides the basis of citizenship (Kahu & Morgan
2007). This reflects the increasing dominance of an economic
rationalist discourse which values only that which is done for money.
As Chodorow (1979: 89) explains, the maternal role is devalued because
it lies “outside of the sphere of monetary exchange and [is]
unmeasurable in monetary terms”. It is also part of the rationale
underlying a liberal feminist discourse which constitutes equality as
achievable only through women’s increased participation in the public
sphere.
The devaluing of motherhood and the
increasing valorisation of paid work has led to what has been called
the successful woman discourse (Hays 1996). Success is defined almost
exclusively by achievement in paid work and education and increasingly,
this is seen to be the ideal for women as well as men (Lupton &
Schmied 2002). The women in the groups talked of returning to work as
something that was expected of them; of feeling like this was something
they were compelled to do. Foucault describes this internalisation of
an ideology as disciplinary power: people are in a constant state of
self surveillance, each modelling their behaviour according to social
norms (Rabinow 1984). The women in the focus groups articulated this
power clearly:
Helen: Society makes you feel like you need to go back to
work.
Debra: Yeah.
Sarah: Yeah, it does doesn’t it.
Within the successful woman discourse,
full-time mothering is not good enough. A full-time career in the paid
workforce is essential, as in the following example where motherhood is
described as having no expectations:
Donna: I wanted to be everything my mother wasn’t. Because my
Mum was the traditional, you know, spat out five children from the age
of 18 and so she bound herself to home. I mean she had five kids, she
didn’t drive. She still doesn’t and so she has no expect– well, it is
to say no expectations of herself, to better herself really. Like she
did the Mum thing.
One of the effects of women’s identity
being increasingly tied into their work is experiencing the transition
to motherhood as a time of loss (Nicolson 1999). The current research
parallels previous accounts of both Australian and New Zealand mothers,
which have identified loss of identity as a common theme in women’s
stories of why they opt to return to the workforce (Stewart & Davis
1996; Benveniste 1998).
Kirsten: I love looking after her and doing everything for
her but I was just getting lost. <Sarah: Yeah> That’s sort
of how I felt.
Vic: But for my mental state and for just the person I am, I
need to be doing something else. As much as I love being a Mum and
wouldn’t, you know, would never turn back the clock and not have done
it, I do feel I need to be doing something else.
As well as constructing paid work as
necessary to their sense of wellbeing and personal success, women are
increasingly feeling the pressure of economic rationalist discourses
which construct economic independence as essential. Historically,
women’s financial dependence upon men prevented them leaving violent
relationships and so economic independence was seen as a matter of
protection as well as justice (Sheppard 1896). Early feminists called
for state assistance as the solution and in New Zealand, this
eventually resulted in the implementation of the Domestic Purposes
Benefit for solo mothers in 1973 (Nolan 2000). More recently, however,
the increasing individualisation of society has resulted in economic
independence meaning from both man and state (Lewis 2002). For the
women in these groups, this manifested as a sense of guilt for being
financially dependent on their partners:
Diane: I will feel guilty about living on just [my partner’s]
wage. I’ve had my own money for such a long time that I find it really
difficult to not have it and not have, I sort of feel like I’ve got to,
for every dollar I spend I’ve got to [justify it].
This links into previous New Zealand
research into the allocation and control of money with Pakeha1
families which noted that women who were not earning tended to feel
they did not have the right to spend money upon themselves (Fleming
1997). In this sense, paid work is constructed primarily as a source of
income. The pressure on mothers to earn comes partly from the need to
increase the family income but partly from the need to not be dependent
and to help provide for the family.
These complex and often contradictory
constructions of motherhood and paid work constrain and enable women in
different and conflicting ways. Duncan & Edwards (1997) use the
concept of gendered moral rationality to explain the power of identity
to limit and constrain choices. Our sense of who we are, how we weave
our identity from these threads, makes some actions necessary and
others impossible. As Debra makes clear, the choices that she sees as
available to her are limited by her identity:
Debra: I’m the kind of person that, well you have a baby, you
don’t stick them in daycare. You know, you have your baby to hang out
with them.
The dominant discourse of intensive mother
makes staying at home the most acceptable choice but other discourses
position full-time mothers as worthless, dependent and unsuccessful.
Similarly, constructions of paid work as necessary for personal
wellbeing and as normal added to the increasing expectation that women
will be economically independent and help provide for their families,
make returning to employment the most accessible option. However, this
choice risks positioning oneself as a poor mother who has failed to put
her child’s needs first. Women are struggling to find ways of being
that somehow counter the negative effects of this conflict, and to find
subject positions within these discourses that allow them some degree
of comfort. Miller (1996) interviewed new mothers who returned to their
career within a year of childbirth, and described the process they went
through in the transition to motherhood as improvising identities. This
captures the agency within the process. Rather than passively taking on
a fixed maternal identity, they were, within limits, developing new
identities from the conflicting discourses available to them. The
challenge for these and other women is to steer a path at a time when
“cultural definitions of ‘what’s right’ are slippery and shifting”
(Miller 1996: 127). The remainder of this paper examines how the women
in these focus groups managed this task. We look firstly at how the
decision itself was constructed, and then highlight some of the
discursive strategies used by the women to support their choices, and
finally we examine how structural barriers act as further constraints.
Choice, conflict and constraint
In talking about the process of deciding whether or not they would
return to paid work, some of the women talked of making a decision as a
couple while others described their partners as supporting whatever
decision they made. All the women were in stable partnerships and,
within a truly egalitarian construction of parenting, it would be
expected that parents would decide together how their joint
responsibilities of provider and caregiver would be distributed.
However, in all but one instance, the decision, even if made jointly,
was only about what the mother would do, as Helen’s comment made clear:
Helen: Yeah no we talked about it. We talked about what I’d
do.
The underlying assumption is that the
father’s life, as primary breadwinner, remains essentially unchanged
and the decision is solely about the shape of the mother’s life. She
was the primary caregiver and the decision was about whether she would
add paid work to her responsibilities. In some instances, the
construction of the partner wanting the mother at home for the good of
the child, as the intensive mother discourse dictates, was quite
explicit:
Ella: How much is money impacting upon what you’re doing as
far as working or not working is concerned?
Lisa: Not at all. [My husband] just doesn’t want me to go
back.
Ella: He doesn’t want you to go back. <Lisa: No>
Because?
Lisa: Because he thinks that for [our daughter], it’s best
for [our daughter] if I’m at home.
It was noticeable that on a couple of
occasions when individuals were asked whether the idea of their partner
staying home had been considered, their responses became quite hesitant
and almost defensive:
Ella: And you talked about it as a couple? <Helen:
Mmm> Was there any suggestion of him taking time off work or
anything? Or was it assumed, was the decision about what you would do?
Helen: Yeah, not really, his, he’s only really new in his
job, well a couple of years into his job and it’s not really (.) well,
he could take time off but (.)
Ella: It wasn’t talked about.
Helen: No.
Ella: It’s alright. I’m just, you know, just asking.
Helen: No we’re quite, you know, I, yeah.
Ella: You’re quite?
Helen: I’m quite happy for him not to take time off <Ella:Yep>
mmm.
Helen’s reply was characterised by
unfinished sentences, restarts and pauses, and Ella (the interviewer)
remembers at the time feeling that she had made Helen uncomfortable.
Her response of “it’s alright” was aimed to reassure. Helen finished by
returning to the inference that it didn’t matter whether it was talked
about or not because she was happy with things the way they were. That
the women felt the need to defend what is still the norm, that it would
be the mother who took time off work, is suggestive of the tension
between dominant discourses. On the one hand, within the intensive
mother discourse, this assumption makes sense – mothers are the natural
caregivers. On the other hand, within liberal feminist discourses,
decisions such as this should not be gender based and women should have
both the right and the desire to remain in the workforce. This tension
around the decision-making process was characteristic of the women’s
talk. Rather than a “free choice” where they weigh and measure the pros
and cons of each option, they talked primarily of conflict and of
constraint, of what they could not do.
Within a social constructionist account of
agency, our task as individuals is to create and maintain a coherent
sense of self. Given the many contradictions in the women’s
constructions of motherhood and paid work, tension was inevitable and
the women’s task of weaving together these seemingly incompatible
strands into a unified identity was without doubt a difficult one. Lisa
was one of the best examples with her talk peppered with “I can’t”. She
can’t go back to her job, she can’t leave her baby, and she can’t have
it all.
Lisa: I’ve really missed [work], you know, I’ve really missed
[it]. Sometimes I think oh gosh I can’t just you know go to Australia
now for a week and even when I go back I still can’t do that. I’ve had
to say I’ll come back but I can’t come back in the same role.
Lisa: I took six months and I was adamant I was going to go
back at six months (laughs) but I just can’t leave her.
Lisa: Yeah, I just want the best of both worlds really and I
can’t have it.
Donna, the only mother who was in full-time
work and whose husband was full-time caregiving, also talked in terms
of conflict. She described herself as choosing to be a professional and
clearly took pride in her educational and career achievements. Now that
she has a child, however, she is torn. She needs to be at work for the
money, she wants to be there so as not to waste her skills and
education and to feel like a successful woman but, at the same time,
she wants to be with her child:
Donna: I’ve got a Batchelor of Business and, you know, I did
really well at that and I’m a chartered accountant and have done that
whole path. I haven’t studied for seven years for nothing (laughs) and,
you know, invested that money and time.
Ella: And yet you /still–
Donna: /Struggling to be at work, yeah. Yeah. It’s hard.
Even the women who on the surface seemed to
have found making their choices easier spoke in terms of conflict and
constraint. In the following extract, Vic talked about how things might
have been easier a generation ago. That she says “I’m meant to be…”
rather than “I want to be a …” each time, speaks to the external nature
of the forces, the powerful weight of a society’s expectations.
Vic: I sometimes think that maybe I’d have less conflict in
myself if I was just mentally, this is my purpose, this is what I have
to do. <Jo: Mmm> Then I think maybe I wouldn’t be, you
know, how I’m meant to be a career woman, I’m meant to be a Mum, I’m
meant to be a wife, I’m meant to be a homemaker, I’m still meant to
have friends. And how do I fit all this in my life?
Within the intensive mother discourse, the
child is constructed as precious and needing parental care. Ribbens
McCarthy et al. (2000: 789) describe adults’ desire to put the needs of
the children in their care first as a “strong moral imperative”, not
merely a guideline or a social expectation but an unquestionable
requirement. But as Duncan et al. (2003) point out, it is not just that
they feel morally obliged to put the children first but that they wish
to. For all the women, including those planning to return to full-time
paid work, their child was their highest priority and they were very
willing to adjust their life accordingly.
Donna: I’m always thinking about him and I’ve made it worse
by sticking a picture of him beside my computer (laughs) so he’s right
there (group laughs). I think that’s more important. It’s more
important to me in my life right now to be a good Mum.
Debra: I had a really high stress job and I was doing really
well, and so I was making my mark in [company] and was loving it. And
then I got pregnant and my priorities changed. I was working 10 to 12
hour days and I thought, well, I’ve got someone else to think about now
so, for the first time ever, I used to leave at five o’clock and not
stress and stuff. Now having the baby, it’s like, gosh, I don’t even
want to do that anymore.
This then is the crux of the dilemma: the
women want to put their children first as the intensive mother
discourse dictates but they also want to be successful women who earn
money and who do more than “just” stay home. The next stage of the
analysis looks at the discursive strategies the women used to manage
this tension.
Discursive resolutions: warranting choices
The agency afforded by social constructionism is a much broader
process than simply choosing actions; instead it provides us with the
opportunity to take part in the “creation, sustenance and
transformation” (Shotter 1995: 387) of the culture within which we are
embedded. While we are constrained by the discourses of our culture,
these discourses are fluid and changing and are themselves influenced
by the choices that people make (Kenwood 1996). This section of the
analysis looks at the strategies of resistance the women used in
presenting their identities. Firstly, the women resisted being
positioned as worthless and dependent and in doing so defended the
choice to not participate in paid work. Secondly, reconstructions of
both mother and child were used to facilitate a striving for the best
of both worlds by combining motherhood with paid work.
The key strategy used to resist the
motherhood as worthless discourse was a variation of the traditional
gender division which constructed the family as a unit within which
children need to be cared for and money needs to be earned. This
resistance had two distinct discursive elements: motherhood as a job
and family income as joint regardless of source. In the following
example, Kirsten used both elements to manage her discomfort at not
earning:
Kirsten: I’ve always earned my own way. I’ve always been very
independent and I’m actually surprised at how I’m coping with not
bringing money in and I’m just sort of okay. I’ve got my fifty bucks a
week I can do whatever I want with that but I’m, it’s just sort of
okay. I’ve got a full, more than a full-time job I’m doing so he is
bringing in the money and I didn’t expect to be like that.
Ella: You thought that you would–
Kirsten: I thought that I’d feel guilty about spending money
and not actually contributing.
Kirsten had previously explained how, even
before they had children, both incomes went into a joint account from
which each was allocated a personal allowance. She described herself as
having “more than a full-time job” and her husband as bringing in “the”
money which frames it as the family’s money. Despite her assurance that
she is coping well with the shift, her repeated use of “just sort of
okay” revealed her struggle. Okay means only average and in this
instance it was reduced further by the two qualifiers, “just” and “sort
of”. This suggests that she is accepting rather than happy with the
change and highlights the difficulties of such resistance.
Constructing motherhood as a job has a dual
effect. Firstly, it aims to accord the role the same high value which
is automatically bestowed upon jobs in the paid workforce and thus
resists the positioning of motherhood as worthless. Secondly, it serves
to justify the choice to be at home. If a mother already has a
full-time job, why would she be expected to hold another job as well?
Kirsten: I read somewhere recently that being a Mum at home
is the equivalent of two and a half full-time jobs.
Rita: I worked in town, loved my job, and I’ve been back
there once and I thought oh yeah, I’ll be back but then when I’m at
home I love that job even better, so I just don’t know. I haven’t made
up my mind what I want to do.
On other occasions, describing mothering as
a job was used to resist the idea that a mother at home was not
contributing and was therefore not free to spend her partner’s
earnings:
Sarah: And also for me, like [if] I’m earning the money I can
go and have a latte if I want to with a friend. <?: Mmm>
You know, it’s not all just going into the pool of the house.
Helen: But you are the Mum. <Sarah: I know> You
know, you’ve got a big job and so you deserve to go and have a latte
every now and then.
Sarah: Thank you (laughs) (group laughs).
Helen: I mean it should be like, when they look at the most
important jobs, Mum should definitely be on the top (laughs) before
anything else.
Helen quite explicitly argued that because
Sarah has a job, she deserves the reward of a latte. At first, she
described motherhood as a big job, suggestive only of the amount of
time that it requires, but she then built on this and reframed it as
the most important job, big not just in terms of time but in terms of
value. In general, it was the maternal rather than the paternal role
that was framed as a job. On only one occasion was the gender neutral
term parent used in a similar context, suggestive of a more egalitarian
construction of parenting:
Helen: I think it’s still, there are still lots of people out
there who do not see parenting as a job and it’s really sad.
Debra: People who’ve had children realise that it’s a job.
<Helen: Yeah yeah> <?: Yes yes> Those who
don’t, have no idea.
While this discourse successfully confers
on motherhood some of the status that is traditionally only accorded to
paid work, Bailey (2000) makes the critical point that although this
can be seen as an achievement of feminism, it also serves to validate
the valorisation of paid work. It is only through constructing
motherhood as work that it can be accorded the same respect and value,
and therefore the construction still values work above care.
Constructing motherhood as a job was
relatively common; however, the related strategy, constructing income
as joint, was only rarely used:
Sarah: … our income’s quite low.
Vic: … financially we’re in a position where if I choose not
to go back …
Donna: … we still earn probably more …
Donna: … we’re not poor.
Interestingly, in two of the four
instances, the speaker, Donna, was the breadwinner in her family.
Tichenor (1999) found that in the United States wives who earned more
than their husbands all described their marital assets as joint but
several of the husbands who earned more expressed the view that because
they earned more, they got to decide how the money was spent. She
concluded that while money has generally been seen to be one of the key
sources of power within a relationship, her research suggests gender is
a more important determinant of marital power.
Motherhood as a job, and income as joint,
serve to justify a choice of not being in the workforce and, within the
intensive mother discourse, this choice to stay home is constructed as
“putting the child first”. However, most of the women in the groups
were planning at some stage to take up part-time work or work from home
in such a way that would allow them to be with their child while also
earning money and regaining some lost independence and sense of self.
The analysis now explores the discursive strategies the women used to
support this choice and which, through the reconstruction of both
mother and child, allow the women to call on a discourse of putting the
children first to support life choices other than full-time
stay-at-home mother. The three related discursive strategies discussed
here all retain at their core the idea of children’s needs coming
first. Firstly, working for financial gain was constructed as a need
not a want, with children positioned as benefiting from the income.
Secondly, a newer discourse of motherhood was deployed which argues
that mothers need to spend time away from the children in order to be
good mothers. And finally, to a lesser degree, the child was
reconstructed as needing more than parental care.
Constructing working in order to earn money
as a constraint rather than a choice was an important strategy to
warrant the decision to return to the workforce. For example, when
talking about women’s choices generally, they talked of women having
to work rather than wanting to.
Helen: Well not necessarily that they want to go back to work
but that they have to go back to work.
Debra: So have to work as opposed to want to.
Suggesting mothers work because they want
to, is too much in light of the power of the intensive mother
discourse; after all, good mothers want to be with their children. This
conflict is highlighted by Helen’s explanation of her decision to
return to full-time teaching at the end of her parental leave period.
Helen: Well I just, I miss my job. And it’s money, which is,
I sort of, am not really torn but I do feel that having two incomes
will be better for [my daughter] in the long run. You know it would be
nice, it would be great for her, to be at home with her as well, but
I’ve. I suppose it’s telling yourself over and over again that my job
is a really good job in the respect of the holidays and if I need to
finish at 3.30 I can. And my husband with his shift work he has three
and a half, four days off a week so we will be able to spend time with
her as well. So she won’t be in daycare all the time so that’s why I
feel like, I don’t feel so bad to go back to work coz I know she’s not
going to be in there from 7 till 5.30 every day. Yeah so I feel quite
happy to go back and I do miss my job. I love teaching.
As the only one in her group planning to
return to full-time work in the foreseeable future, Helen clearly felt
the need to justify her decision. She started and finished with a
comment about missing her job which suggests this is an important
factor. But within the intensive mother discourse, returning to work
for this reason alone positions her as a bad mother who puts her own
needs first. Therefore, the decision was quickly reframed: “it is
money”. Within dominant capitalist discourses, money as a motivator is
understood and is a more acceptable reason to leave your child than
missing your job. However, a danger of the financial need discourse is
that it can elicit an accusation of materialism. Helen defended herself
against this unspoken criticism by constructing the extra income as for
her daughter’s benefit.
Helen also needed to refute the unspoken
criticism stemming from the intensive mother discourse that as a
full-time worker, she will be neglecting her child. Earlier the group
had constructed putting your child into full-time care as something
that mothers should not do. For example, Kirsten commented that she
“didn’t have a child to leave her in daycare all day long”, a comment
that was followed by a chorus of agreement. Helen was therefore quick
to explain that her daughter would not be in full-time childcare, and
by shifting from “I” to “we” and emphasising the flexibility of both
parents’ jobs, she constructed the childcare as a mutual
responsibility, drawing on an egalitarian parenting discourse. Her
resistance of the dominant intensive mother discourse was not easy
however. The variation and disclaimers indicate her tension: she isn’t
really torn but…; it would be great to be at home but…; she doesn’t
feel so bad to go back to work.
The second strategy for reconciling the
conflicting images of intensive mother and successful woman has been
labelled in earlier research as the “independent mother” (Brannen 1992;
Woodward 1997; Lupton 2000; Harrington 2002; Hughes 2002). This
discourse stresses the importance of a mother striving for her own
development and actualisation through her work and argues that a woman
who is dissatisfied with her life because her own needs are not met
will not be a good mother (Lupton & Schmied 2002). The women in the
groups drew on this discourse to justify returning to part-time work:
Vic: I think one day a week would be really nice … And then I
guess when you come home you’d probably appreciate that you’ve got this
lovely baby at home and the next few days are going to be nice coz I
get to spend it with you …
Lisa: I feel it makes you a better mother too. I feel like if
I can go away for a few hours and leave [my daughter], when I come back
I’m far more refreshed and, kind of like I’ve missed her while I’m away
so I’m refreshed and probably just better at it.
Vic talked about appreciating the baby more
if she worked one day a week and Lisa then built on this to construct
time away from her child as making her “a better mother”. Similarly, in
the following example, the women were talking about missing the child’s
development if they were in full-time care. Helen, as the only one in
the group planning to return to full-time work, responded by
acknowledging this is a cost but then quickly pointed out the benefit
to her daughter of her working.
Helen: I’m going to miss that. I know where you’re coming
from. I know I’ll miss that. If all of a sudden they say that she
walked at daycare and didn’t walk at home you know.
?: /Oh my God.
Debra: /You’d be gutted.
Helen: I can imagine being heartbroken. <?:
Yeah> I mean I don’t know how I’ll feel until it actually happens
but I know that will be hard. But there is the other side of things
that I know that me being at work is going to be beneficial for her and
I will totally be in, you know, caring and loving for her when I am
with her. I won’t just be taking the time, you know, for granted. But
yeah it is missing out on the little things like that.
Debra: That’s a good point that Helen just said. Like the
time that she does have with [her daughter] won’t be taken for granted.
<?: Mmm> So, you know, you have limited time with them so
it would probably be more special <?: Yeah> and you would
<?: Mmm> try to interact with them more or do whatever as
opposed to, you know, “Go and have a sleep so I can go and do the
washing”.
As has been noted in other research (Lupton
& Schmied 2002; Hand & Hughes 2004), the women did not
explicitly judge each other. However, in managing their own
presentation and warranting their own choices, as in the example above,
the women inadvertently positioned others in the group who are making
different choices as deficient. Helen’s use of the independent mother
discourse to construct her own choice as positive, inadvertently
positioned women who do stay home full time as taking their child for
granted and therefore not being as loving. Discursive competition like
this is an inevitable consequence of any dichotomy and one of the key
reasons why many feminists argue so strongly for a complete
transformation away from the private/public divide.
The independent mother discourse positions
full-time at-home parenting as undesirable for the mother and child. In
previous research, this was supported by a more specific reconstruction
of the child as needing to be in childcare for educational and social
purposes (Hays 1996; Blair-Loy 2003). Again, this allows women to
construct a decision to be in paid work as still meeting the criteria
of good mother by putting the child’s need first. This third strategy,
the independent child discourse, was rarely deployed by the women in
these focus groups however with only Jo, on two separate occasions,
suggesting that a child may be better off in childcare:
Jo: I didn’t know whether the best thing psychologically for
me was gonna be going back to work, or whether maybe the best thing for
me was to stay at home but the best thing for [my son] was for him to
be in daycare. I didn’t know what sort of a little kiddie he would be.
Jo: I’ve just got this thing in my mind that I don’t know
what he’s going to need. What’s going to be the best for him? You know,
you hear some people say it was definitely best for the child to be at
daycare, you know, it’s what he needed, he was far better at daycare
than being at home on his own.
Generally, although the women talked of the
children as benefiting from some time in a crèche or playcentre
at a later age, this was not used to justify returning to the workforce
at this time. While the lesser use of this discourse in comparison to
research in the United States and Britain may reflect a cultural
difference, it more likely reflects the age of the children. Lupton’s
(2000) Australian research found that until aged one, a child was still
positioned as requiring intensive parental, preferably maternal, care
and therefore it was not socially acceptable for the mother to seek her
own development and autonomy until that time.
As has been seen, the women drew on varied
and sometimes contradictory discourses of mother and child to warrant
their life choices and to therefore exercise a limited agency. Although
they found some ways to resist the negative constructions of
motherhood, the increasingly dominant discourses of economic
independence and successful woman clearly exerted a pressure which made
choosing not to work difficult. In many ways, we have simply shifted
from a social context where women felt obligated to stay home and
prioritise motherhood, to one where women feel obligated to be in paid
work and somehow do it all. In addition, although the evolving
discourses of independent mother and child are making the choice to
combine mothering with paid work more acceptable, women still face
significant structural barriers as is discussed in the final section.
Striving for the best of both worlds
Part-time paid employment has been described as a rational
compromise between the pressure of intensive mother and successful
woman, a win-win solution (Hughes 2002). However, while this was the
preferred choice of most of the women in the groups, structural
barriers still serve to make such a choice difficult. For example, for
all the rhetoric of family friendly policies in New Zealand, a number
of the women commented that returning to their previous job on a
part-time basis was not possible:
Rita: I don’t know whether I could go back part time. From a
work’s point of view not from mine. I’d like to go back part time.
Jo: But the guy [manager], even though how brilliant he is,
he couldn’t get his head around someone not being there from 8.30 to
5.00.
In addition, part-time work, and therefore
part-time workers, is not constituted as having the same intrinsic
value as full-time work/ers. In the following example, discussing why
part-time work is inefficient, Lisa and Jo constructed part-time
workers as less committed:
Lisa: I work in a company where all the office staff are part
time and it’s really inefficient.
Donna: Right. I don’t think you could have the whole
workforce part time.
Ella: Inefficient how?
Lisa: Oh there are just people coming and going and nobody
ever really seems to know what’s going on.
Ella: So it’s the continuity?
Jo: Is that, is that, yeah, I wonder if that’s, or attitude
even. <Lisa: Oh possibly) People’s attitudes are, they’re
not, because they’re part time they see it–
Lisa: /I think they have a part-time–
Jo: /They don’t see themselves as part of a big team rather
than, have a part-time mentality rather than, I’ve got to do this and
I’ve gotta make, you know, I’m contributing to a team.
Lisa: And a lot of them are there, they just come in at nine
and they leave at one, they’re just, I mean they have a different work
ethic from me anyway.
A second barrier to part-time work is the
structuring of the childcare sector around the dual worker model where
the child is assumed to need full-time care. Full-time placement is
also more efficient for the centres. Helen talked about this problem:
Helen: Yeah, I mean we’ll, we don’t mind paying the full
week, like we talked about that. We’ll just have to pay the full, you
know, as you do, pay for the full week and we’ll just take her out
whatever days he’s got free or I’m free.
Because their jobs do not fit a pattern of
regular full-time hours, their daughter will be enrolled in full-time
childcare, but they will “take her out” whatever days they have free.
This rigidity within the childcare system will potentially force an
important shift. Whereas previously children were at home unless they
needed to be in care, it may become the norm that children are in care
unless they can be at home. Whilst in theory, this makes little
difference to the hours a child spends in each environment, it
potentially contributes to a dramatic shift in the underlying ideology
of what is normal for children.
Alongside part-time work, taking time off
while the children are young and then returning to work is another
common strategy for doing it all. However, this too is not without
problems:
Debra: My idea was to have three kids and not work until
they’re all at school. So that could be in 10 years time. What am I
going to do in 10 years time? There’s no way like, you know, technology
changes in all that time. Your skills have all gone, people look and
go, “Oh you haven’t worked for 10 years”. You start right at the bottom
again.
Rita: You’ve got to work your way–
Sarah: All you’ve done is a Mum, that’s kind of the feeling
isn’t it.
This construction of the challenging and
demanding job of mother as “all you’ve done” links back into the
constructions discussed earlier of motherhood as worthless and as doing
nothing. Little acknowledgement is given to the extensive skills of
time and task management, interpersonal skills and other talents
acquired through mothering and the various voluntary jobs that mothers
invariably take on. Perceptions of mothering as a time of losing rather
than gaining skills ensures women do not regain their former level of
work and tend to remain in lower status jobs with the accompanying
lower pay.
Conclusion
The dominant discourse of intensive mother, positioning women as
natural caregivers and motherhood as central to women’s identity, was
strong within these groups. In contrast, the successful woman discourse
which constitutes motherhood as of low value and a time of loss was
also deployed. Within this discourse, paid work is essential for
personal wellbeing as well as the basis for full citizenship. In
talking about their identities as paid workers, the women positioned
themselves as needing to be co-providers and to be economically
independent with the right to spend money closely linked to the ability
to earn it. These findings parallel research undertaken in other
Western countries.
The contradictory nature of these dominant
discourses makes any decision regarding mothering and working
problematic. Rather than constructing the parental roles as similar and
equal, with only one exception, the father’s continued role as primary
breadwinner was taken for granted. Instead, the decision focused on the
degree to which the mother would incorporate worker into her maternal
identity. Various discursive strategies were used to warrant the
choices the women were making but, in all cases, the decision was
constructed as putting the child’s needs first. To resist the idea of
motherhood as worthless and full-time mothers as economically
dependent, the family was constructed as a business unit where both
parties worked—the father to earn the family’s income and the mother to
care for the family’s children. This strategy serves to warrant the
choice to be a full-time mother. However, most of the women were
attempting a best of both worlds solution. They wanted to be in paid
work, either now or later, but they also wanted to be good mothers. The
women deployed the evolving discourse of independent mother,
constructing women as needing to have space and time away from their
babies in order to be better mothers. Interestingly, unlike other
research in this area, the parallel reconstruction of children as
needing to be in childcare was only lightly touched on in the groups.
Structural barriers continue to make the
decision to combine motherhood and work difficult. Part-time work is
seen as limited in availability, part-time workers are constructed as
not valued, and the childcare sector as not catering well for those
with short, flexible or unusual work hours. In addition, taking time
out from the workforce is perceived as resulting in reduced skills thus
limiting future employment opportunities. Overall, this analysis
suggests that despite the belief that women increasingly have the
freedom to choose their own life path, their choices continue to be
constrained both discursively and structurally.
As mentioned, this research was limited
through self selection to women who were broadly homogenous in terms of
ethnicity, socio-economic status, couple status and sexuality. As a
group, they could be described as advantaged in terms of education and
income. More research is needed to explore how other mothers weave
coherent identities from the available discourses. Women from low
income families, where decisions about work and family may not be seen
as a ‘choice’, warrant similar research. As well as women of different
socio-economic status and women who are in dual breadwinner families,
it would be of particular interest to explore how Māori and Pacific
women construct their identities of mother and worker, particularly in
light of research in the United States which found indigenous people
more easily combined the two (Segura 1994). Also of interest would be
research with lesbian mothers. Without the constraints of prescribed
gender roles, it is possible that lesbian couples manage a more
egalitarian partnership and have ways of talking that construct carer
and worker as equally valued. Finally, this research was also confined
to first-time mothers with young babies. Other research has found that
positions within the independent mother discourse become more
accessible as the children age (Lupton 2000). More research is required
to explore how and when such shifts occur, focussing in particular upon
significant changes such as the end of paid parental leave (one year in
New Zealand), the birth of a second child and the youngest child
starting school.
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