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A mother by trade: Australian women reflecting mothering as activity, not identity

In Engendering Motherhood , McMahon argues that contemporary motherhood is ‘contested terrain’. McMahon suggests that as contemporary Western societies have focused on selfrealisation as the means to adulthood, the relationship between motherhood and adult femininity has been unsettled. This, in turn, has led to difficulty in thinking about motherhood. Angela Hattery suggests that this formulation of motherhood as a site of conflict in contemporary societies has tended to underpin many of the accounts of motherhood generated in scholarly and popular domains. Lisa Brooks’ review in 1996 of 12 feminist investigations of motherhood, entitled ‘Love, Toil and Trouble: Motherhood and Feminist Politics’, points to the difficulties faced by feminist scholars seeking simultaneously to challenge oppressive structures of mothering, recognise women’s work as mothers and rethink the activities of mothering. The ‘contested’ terrain of mothering is my focus in this article, as I draw here on data from two different research projects in which I have been involved. I suggest that contestation and role conflict, while prominent in the theoretical literature, are not so prominent in women’s accounts of their own mothering work. Anita Garey has suggested that mothering activity often gets neglected because motherhood is defined as a state of being, but these women describe their mothering as ‘doing’ not ‘being’. Rather than identity-based assertions about being mothers and what that entailed, women described the work that they did as mothers. It is of particular importance to locate this analysis in its social and historical context. The research projects on which I am drawing took place between December 2000 and October 2003, which marked a period in Australian society where discussions of motherhood were prominent for a number of reasons. Policy initiatives such as paid maternity leave, located in a discourse of falling birth rates, focused public attention on mothering and on feminism’s relationship to mothers. Articles with titles like ‘Mothering: Feminism’s Unfinished Business’; ‘The Feminists Kept Mum on the Real Story of Motherhood’; and ‘Feminism: the Evil Hand behind the Mummy’s Curse’ predominated in major daily newspapers. Debates occurred between ‘mothers’ and ‘non-mothers’ in the opinion columns. This discussion seemed to reflect substantial unease about the changing role of mothers in Australian society. Women’s workforce participation and desire for other activities in conjunction with, or perhaps instead of, mothering suggested that Australian Feminist Studies, Vol. 20, No. 46, March 2005