Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Ideal motherhood, characterised by expectations of intensive, limitless and selfless care, serves to hold women responsible for all that befalls their children, and works to individualise and privatise the work of childbearing and rearing. The individualisation of mothering work, the shortcomings of social and structural supports for that work, and the sanctions on women who fail to meet normative expectations of ideal motherhood are intensified for disabled women.
Our narrative interviews with 44 disabled Canadian women about their pregnancy decisions and mothering experiences illuminate normative notions of what kinds of women can, and perhaps should, be mothers, and highlight the specific challenges disabled mothers face. The women described barriers to becoming and remaining mothers, and were particularly vulnerable to social isolation, abusive partners, and the effects of poverty. They also experienced surveillance and intervention from helping professionals and multiple structural barriers to accommodation. The women’s stories highlight ‘disability embodiment’, the interaction between their corporeal issues and the social, political and economic aspects of disability, which deeply affect disabled women’s mothering.
The identities of mothers are interwoven into their multiple roles, and are often caught in between their individual identities and collective identities, their sense of belonging and their parental duties. Mothers constantly negotiate their identities by facing economic hardships, social, cultural and racial stereotypes, and are challenged by societal expectations of parenting styles. Societal expectations of the role of mothers are high, but what does it mean to live up to these expectations in a disadvantaged area of England while providing children with what they need? This chapter focuses on the findings from a biographical study of mothers of primary school children in a disadvantaged neighbourhood in Greater London, UK. Biographical narrative analysis contributes to an imaginative dialogue between two mothers on life choices, the meanings of mothering, parenting and mothers’ identities.
This research draws on interviews with Irish women who consciously decided to forego the motherhood mandate, opting instead to pursue a life without children. The study examines the motives that influenced the women in their decision making, considers the ways in which society reacts to the women’s decision making, and the strategies and identity management techniques that women engage in to preserve a positive sense of self. The women’s narrative accounts document the complex and ambiguous development of a life trajectory based on personal desires and ambitions, free from the commitment and responsibilities involved in raising children.
The legal and social situation of foster care and the role expectations of foster parenthood embody a variety of tensions. In many foster families, mothers experience their role as ‘the mother of the foster child’, and foster mothers want to be ‘good mothers’ – often even ‘better mothers’ compared with the child’s birth mother. Accordingly, foster mothers tend to exhibit intensive mothering. However, if foster care placements break down, the affected foster mothers experience the breakdown not only as an end of their role as foster mothers, but as a shattering of their entire identity.
The chapter is based on a study conducted in Switzerland, Germany and the UK on ‘Breakdown in Foster Care’ and focuses solely on the German sample. A brief introduction to the structural context of foster care in Germany is provided, and structural ambivalences and contradictions reagrding foster care from the German-language literature are presented and discussed. In the context of the aforementioned project, partial biographical interviews of the various actors involved were conducted, and multi-perspective case studies were reconstructed. The chapter draws on two contrasting case studies of foster mothers and their foster sons.
