The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood

by Sharon Hays

Working mothers today confront not only conflicting demands on their time and energy but also conflicting ideas about how they are to they must be nurturing and unselfish while engaged in child rearing but competitive and ambitious at work. As more and more women enter the workplace, it would seem reasonable for society to make mothering a simpler and more efficient task. Instead, Sharon Hays points out in this original and provocative book, an ideology of "intensive mothering" has developed that only exacerbates the tensions working mothers face.

Drawing on ideas about mothering since the Middle Ages, on contemporary childrearing manuals, and on in-depth interviews with mothers from a range of social classes, Hays traces the evolution of the ideology of intensive mothering―an ideology that holds the individual mother primarily responsible for child rearing and dictates that the process is to be child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor-intensive, and financially expensive. Hays argues that these ideas about appropriate mothering stem from a fundamental ambivalence about a system based solely on the competitive pursuit of individual interests. In attempting to deal with our deep uneasiness about self-interest, we have imposed unrealistic and unremunerated obligations and commitments on mothering, making it into an opposing force, a primary field on which this cultural ambivalence is played out.

Genres: Parenting, Feminism, Nonfiction, Gender, Psychology, Sociology, Womens Studies

288 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1996

Reviews

[Ingeborg]

I expected more from this book. The author has a peculiar way of defending her arguments and sometimes I couldn't follow her line of thought. She poses a very good question: why do stay-at-home mothers as well as working mothers choose to be intensive mothers? Is this a choice or an ideology? Would it not be easier for working mothers to relax their mothering style? Her answers are not very convincing though. Intensive motherhood as a last resort against the harsh coporative world, against he world that keeps running for material gains, world of unstable intimate relationships, full of selfish individualistic interests ... The picture seems nice, but somehow unconvincing.

On the other hand, I find it worrysome that the book is written in 1996, and I have the feeling that nothing for mothers has changed. Nothing. They are left to themselves to live - and survive - through social and subjective contradictions in the impossible task of "having it all". And I think that is part of the reason we have "mommy wars" between stay-at-home and working mothers. Because part of that survival is that each women wants to convince herself that she has made the right choice.

[Soubhik Karmakar]

Simplistic and Faulty American Pragmatic Discursive Writing.

[Stephanie Spence]

Sharon Hays’ The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood completely changed the way I understand modern motherhood. Her concept of “intensive mothering” explains something many women feel in their bodies long before they have words for it: the expectation that a mother must give endless emotional, psychological, physical, and moral labor while somehow appearing fulfilled, selfless, and grateful throughout the process.

What struck me most is that this ideology doesn’t only shape mothers — it shapes entire societies. It quietly trains women to measure their worth through emotional exhaustion and trains culture to normalize female self-abandonment as virtue.

Reading this book, I kept thinking: how many women lost contact with their own inner life because they believed disappearing into caregiving was what love required?

Hays doesn’t attack motherhood. She exposes the impossible contradictions surrounding it. And once you see them, you cannot unsee them.

This book deserves to be read far beyond academia. It explains so much about modern womanhood, burnout, guilt, identity, and why so many mothers carry invisible emotional weight in silence.

[Zoe]

I don't know for sure when I acquired this book or whether I read the whole thing, or if I merely enjoyed the title and clever cover design and meant to read it someday when my kids were grown up. It was published in 1996. I'm glad this book is out there, but it is written in an academic style that no longer speaks to me, and I also suspect there have been subsequent writings on this topic by the same author and others, that are now more relevant. Goodbye, perfect-book-jacket-to-look-at-every-day!

[Meg]

I'm sure this is good sociology, but as a parent I had a hard time with it. She never really convinced me to be surprised that parents (mothers) don't apply the logic of capitalism to childrearing.

[Kelly]

DNF