Intensive Parenting Alone: Negotiating the Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood as a Single Mother by Choice

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• Professor Linda Layne (Visiting Fellow, Centre for Family Research, University of Cambridge)
• Tuesday 28 February 2012, 13:00-14:00
• Room 606, Centre for Family Research.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Naomi White.

In her book, The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood (1998), sociologist Sharon Haysargues that working mothers in United States are faced with the challenge of being nurturing and unselfish while engaged in child rearing at home, and being competitive and ambitious at work. Hays maintains that the ideology of “intensive mothering” exacerbates this tension. Working mothers in the 1990s face the challenge of being both nurturing and unselfish at home while engaged in child rearing, and competitive and ambitious at work. This text argues that an ideology of “intensive mothering” has developed that only exacerbates the tension working mothers face. Communication scholars, Annis Golden and Cheryl Geisler (2006, 2007) also address the tension between work and family life and the “ideological dilemma” that flexible work arrangements pose for American knowledge workers (regardless of their gender). In this paper I use a case study approach to further explore these and other cultural contradictions. Drawing on structured interviews, participant observation, and an activity analysis of one week of digital personal records (phone and email logs, daily planner, electronic bill pay, and time/dated photographs), I describe how one American knowledge worker practically and discursively manages the demands of intensive parenting as an intentionally single mother.

In prep: What’s new about ‘parenting’? Comparative studies in kinship, self and politics. Charlotte Faircloth, Diane Hoffman and Linda Layne, eds.

This talk is part of the Centre for Family Research Seminar Series series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• All Talks (aka the CURE list)
• Cardiovascular Epidemiology Unit Special Seminars
• Centre for Family Research Seminar Series
• Department of Public Health and Primary Care
• PublicHealth@Cambridge
• Room 606, Centre for Family Research

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