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, Sociology, Psychology, Womens Studies

288 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1996

Reviews

[Ingeborg · Rating 2 out of 5]

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 · Rating 2 out of 5]

Simplistic and Faulty American Pragmatic Discursive Writing.

[Zoe · Rating 3 out of 5]

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 · Rating 3 out of 5]

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