137 SEVEN Working motherhood across generations Chapter themes The findings of my research corroborate existing research evidence that if a daughter observes her mother combining work with motherhood, it is more likely that she will do the same (see, for example, Moen et al, 1997; McGinn et al, 2015). This chapter examines more closely the influence the mothers and grandmothers have had upon their daughters’ views about the hours they intend to work when they become mothers or, in the case of the ‘daughter mothers’, the hours they are working now. The
Drawing on her long experience as an academic researcher and writer, Ann Oakley develops a sociology of the research process itself, telling the story of how a research project is undertaken and what happens during it, to both researchers and those who are researched. This remarkable book focuses on a topic of great importance in the provision of health services – caring and social support.
Setting neglect of this topic in the wider context of an ongoing crisis in gendering knowledge, Social support and motherhood is now reissued for a contemporary audience. It has much resonance for social science researchers and others interested in the experiences of mothers, and in the relations between social research, academic knowledge and public policy.
117 SIX Daughters’ aspirations for working motherhood Chapter themes This chapter switches the focus onto the daughters and examines how they expect to combine working with motherhood. The extent to which the daughters who are currently child-free are anticipating motherhood is explored, as is the effect this may have on their career progress. Their views are compared with the nine ‘daughter mothers’ in the sample who have at least one child under five years of age. This chapter develops a key finding of this research that over half the daughters are
159 8 Making Motherhood, Careers and Flexibility Work Motherhood, careers and balance Professional women who are mothers do not see themselves in terms of ‘or’ but in terms of ‘also’; few would describe themselves as career- oriented or family-oriented and yet persistent binaries dominate academic and public debate about professional women’s employment. Work–life orientation models that position all women along a spectrum with family and career at opposite ends of the axis limit women’s potential to be anything other than either/or because occupying the
41 FOUR Comparing transitions to motherhood across contexts Ann Nilsen, Maria das Dores Guerreiro, Siyka Kovacheva and Janet Smithson introduction As the average age of the birth of the first child has increased significantly for women in most European countries, and the transition period between youth and adulthood for many has been prolonged, the transition to motherhood must be seen in relation to other life course trajectories and discussed with reference to social class and educational level, as well as institutional arrangements such as welfare
127 SIX Gendering reproduction: women’s experiences of motherhood and mental wellbeing Introduction: women and mothering This chapter discusses motherhood,1 which we understand to be one of the defining or ‘enduring’ (Hartman, 2004) features of women’s lives, whether or not they choose, or are able, to become mothers themselves. Women in British society have progressed in ways our mothers and grandmothers could not have imagined. The advent of reliable and available contraception means that for many women motherhood has become a matter of choice in a
117 Part 3: Childbirth, motherhood and medicine Beyond the presumptions of knowledge and value-neutrality that medical and social science project, lies unveiled a repertoire of patronizing moral precepts about women’s nature; but the nature of women must also be described by women themselves.... Having a baby is essentially a kind of social transition, one source and cause of life change.… Tracing the con- nections between women’s reactions to birth and their social circumstances in this way suggests a new interpretation of the manner in which women become
499 Families, Relationships and Societies • vol 7 • no 3 • 499–514 • © Policy Press 2018 Print ISSN 2046 7435 • Online ISSN 2046 7443 • https://doi.org/10.1332/204674317X15034137417334 Accepted for publication 14 August 2017 • First published online 25 August 2017 article ‘Celebrating diverse motherhood’: physically disabled women’s counter-narratives to their stigmatised identity as mothers Anita Lappeteläinen,1 anita.lappetelainen@jao.fi Eija Sevón, eija.sevon@jyu.fi Tanja Vehkakoski, tanja.vehkakoski@jyu.fi University of Jyväskylä, Finland This study
Introduction ‘I feel that those around me think that [because] I am a lone mother, I have two children, and I work during nights, too, it is like, oh my God, she is a bad mother.’ (Emma) These words are those of a lone mother interviewed for the present study and aptly illustrate how, according to prevailing cultural understandings concerning ‘good’ motherhood in Finland and many other Western societies ( Hays, 1996 ; Perälä-Littunen, 2007 ), lone mothers’ work during non-standard hours (e.g., evenings and weekends) can be seen as posing a triple risk to
373 Families, Relationships and Societies • vol 3 • no 3 • 373–85 • © Policy Press 2014 • #FRS Print ISSN 2046 7435 • Online ISSN 2046 7443 • http://dx.doi.org/10.1332/204674313X670214 research Emphasising motherhood through informal saving networks: women, gamiyyaat and marriage obligations in Egypt Nashaat Hussein, andromeda21982@hotmail.com Misr International University, Egypt This article aims to investigate the way low-income married women utilise informal saving networks – commonly known as gamiyyaat – as a social mechanism to correspond to the
