Mothers experience diminished opportunities for advancement in the workplace, but it is unclear how particular occupational conditions help or hinder their attainment of occupational authority. In ...the current study, I analyze data from a panel survey of contemporary U.S. workers to examine the link between motherhood, women's power and authority, and their underrepresentation in time-intensive occupations. Analyzing data from the U.S. Department of Labor's Occupational Information Network and 15 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, I find that even when mothers remain employed full-time, they are less likely than childless women to work in occupations that require a lot of time. Occupational time intensity explains about forty percent of the motherhood gap in occupational authority. If childless women and mothers were equally likely to work in time-intensive occupations, almost half of the motherhood gap in occupational authority would disappear. In contrast, there are fewer differences between mothers and childless women in the likelihood of working in highly stressful, competitive occupations or those requiring a lot of work effort or persistence.
Bringing together the writings of women from various walks of life - authors, artists, academics and ordinary people - this volume presents their experiences of being mothers and daughters. The ...complex emotions women go through, as a mother or a daughter, are portrayed in a variety of ways. The contributors provide humane, intimate and compelling real life narratives. The collection includes true stories on adoptive motherhood, step-mothering and single-motherhood within a South Asian context.
Based on in-depth interviews with twenty-three Israeli mothers, this article seeks to contribute to an ongoing inquiry into women’s subjective experiences of mothering by addressing an understudied ...maternal emotive and cognitive stance: regretting motherhood. The literature teaches us that within a pronatal monopoly, threatening women that they will inevitably regret not having children acts as powerful reproducer of the ideology of motherhood. Simultaneously, motherhood is constructed as a mythical nexus that lies outside and beyond the human terrain of regret, and therefore a desire to undo the maternal experience is conceived as an object of disbelief. By incorporating regret into maternal experiences, the purpose of the article is twofold: The first is to distinguish regret over motherhood from other conflictual and ambivalent maternal emotions. Whereas participants’ expressions of regretting motherhood were not bereft of ambivalence, and thus were not necessarily exceptional or anomalous, they foreground a different emotive and cognitive stance toward motherhood. The second purpose is to situate regret over motherhood in the sociopolitical arena. It has been suggested that the “power of backward thinking” might be used to reflect on the systems of power governing maternal feelings in two ways: first, through a categorical distinction in the target of regret between object (the children) and experience (maternity), which utilizes the cultural structure of mother love; second, by opposing the very essentialist presumption of a fixed female identity that naturally befits mothering or progressively adapts to it and evaluates it as a worthwhile experience.
By the early 21st century, most high-income countries have put into effect a host of generous and virtually gender-neutral parental leave policies and family benefits, with the multiple goals of ...gender equity, higher fertility, and child development. What have been the effects? Proponents typically emphasize the contribution of family policies to the goals of gender equity and child development, enabling women to combine careers and motherhood, and altering social norms regarding gender roles. Opponents often warn that family policies may become a long-term hindrance to women's careers because of the loss of work experience and the higher costs to employers that hire women of childbearing age. We draw lessons from existing work and our own analysis on the effects of parental leave and other interventions aimed at aiding families. We present country- and micro-level evidence on the effects of family policy on gender outcomes, focusing on female employment, gender gaps in earnings, and fertility. Most estimates range from negligible to a small positive impact. But the verdict is far more positive for the beneficial impact of spending on early education and child care.
This is a personal reflection, as a female academic during COVID‐19, on how women's academic productivity seems primarily to be discussed in relation to a different kind of productivity — motherhood. ...A recent procedure in a maternity hospital evoked feelings and associations of mothering and being mothered, and how these associations hover over relationships regardless of whether wombs are productive or not. My hope in writing this piece is that every woman's fear and anxiety may be productively contained (regardless of how she is seen from the outside or momentarily construed from within) during this time of extraordinary turmoil.
Rufus’s mother features in Paul’s concluding list of church leaders such as Phoebe in Romans 16. Paul calls her his own mother. I argue that Rufus’s mother’s inclusion indicates higher status and ...influence within the Pauline house-churches, building on Elmer’s notion of corporate Pauline authorship.
The idea and practice of going “into the field” to conduct research and gather data is a deeply rooted aspect of Geography as a discipline. For global North Development Geographers, among others, ...this usually entails travelling to, and spending periods of time in, often far‐flung parts of the global South. Forging a successful academic career as a Development Geographer in the UK is therefore to some extent predicated on mobility. This paper aims to critically engage with the gendered aspects of this expected mobility, focusing on the challenges and time constraints that are apparent when conducting overseas fieldwork as a mother, unaccompanied by her children. The paper emphasises the emotion work that is entailed in balancing the competing demands of overseas fieldwork and mothering, and begins to think through the implications of these challenges in terms of the types of knowledge we produce, as well as in relation to gender equality within the academy.
This paper critically engages with the gendered aspects of fieldwork mobility, focusing on the challenges and time constraints of conducting overseas fieldwork as a mother. The paper emphasises the emotion work of balancing the competing demands of overseas fieldwork and mothering, and thinks through the implications of these challenges in terms of the types of knowledge we produce, as well as in relation to gender equality within the academy.
Fertility intentions are associated with achieved fertility; therefore, understanding the factors associated with fertility intentions is important. Considerable research has examined factors ...associated with fertility intentions, but no one has explored the importance of motherhood to women. Guided by life course and identity theories, we use the National Survey of Fertility Barriers, a data set collected from a random sample of U.S. women aged 25-45 in 2004 through 2007, to assess the relationship between importance of motherhood and fertility intentions. Adding importance of motherhood to a model including other variables associated with fertility intentions increases the variance explained by 6.4 percent. Importance of a motherhood identity mediates the association of fertility intentions with such demographic and social correlates of fertility intentions as gender attitudes, valuing leisure, valuing career, religiosity, and family profertility messages. It is therefore helpful to explicitly include the importance of the motherhood identity in models of fertility intentions.
The assumption that, during early motherhood, there is an intense physical and psychological connection between mother and infant and a sense that the infant belongs to the maternal body ego has long ...been a matter of theoretical discussion in the psychoanalytic literature, yet empirical evidence has been scarce. This exploratory study investigated first-time mothers' experiences of bodily connectedness with their babies and perception of their body boundaries. To gain an in-depth understanding of mothers' experiences, semi-structured interviews were conducted with five first-time mothers, whose babies were between 18 and 29 weeks old, and were analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). Findings highlighted the importance of skin-to-skin contact in bonding with the baby; a blurring of body boundaries - especially when the baby is in distress; and emotional challenges of adapting to numerous changes involving the maternal body. This study was conducted just before and during the first lockdown in the UK in response to the outbreak of COVID-19, offering a unique opportunity to consider the pandemic and associated restrictions as a contextual factor.
PDF
