SOC352H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Social Reproduction, Transnationalism, Invisibility
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Lecture 6 : Complicating motherhood
For Today:
• Recap: Valuing Childcare
o What are some of the ways childcare is viewed and does it effect how childcare is valued
• Ideological Constructions of Femininity and Motherhood
o “Good Mothers”
• Mothering Across Borders
o Transnational Motherhood
o How transnational motherhood complicating mothering
o What are some of the strategies mothers in different countries use to exert their parental
control
• Summary
Recap: Valuing Childcare
• How do we value formal childcare? What factors compound this?
• Uttal and Tuominen (1999): economic valuing and ideological valuing
o Explores two value systems
▪ Market system of wages and job status (economic perspective)
• How do we determine what kind of wage gets paid
▪ Looking at the ideological valuation of labour in caring for and caring about
someone
o How childcare is organized
▪ What role is passed down from parents to the caregiver
▪ How do we determine what work is who’s responsibility
o Tensions in childcare
▪ 1) Normative constructions of caregiving
• The expectation that Nurturance is innate and any caregiver has this
• But it will not threaten their own relationship with their child
▪ 2) child care as a labour of love
• masks the relations of power and inequality when paying for caregiving
• relates to wages of virtue (because childcare is viewed as a labour of
love, low wages are justified
o When hiring caregivers parents want someone that will develop a connection with their
children as it was their own child
▪ This kind of attachment is both expected and invisible
▪ Expected because it is seen as a women’s skill (nurturance) and not something
that is learned
• Part of the persona of the person that we are hiring
▪ Invisible because parents don’t want the relationship between the caregiver and
the child to overshadow their own relationship with the child
• On one hand they want a genuine bond between the caregiver and child
but it cant be a threat to their parent child relationship
• MacDonald (1996): shadow mothers
o Surrogates would care for the children like the mother would
o In such arrangements mothers make efforts to create rules that the childcare worker is
expected to follow
o But this limits the caregivers own style of caregiving because they are adopting the
parent’s style
o
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• Pratt (2003): rationalization of low wages
o Gendered loop
▪ Women is responsible for making arrangements for children
▪ Women often have to make the decision to work and pay for childcare or stay at
home because of their low income
o Devaluation of skills
▪ The skills necessary are seen as natural and innate and cannot be learned
▪ Seen as “soft” skills
o Childcare as “dead-end” work
▪ The belief that they don’t need to be paid well because it’s not a career
o Invisibility of social reproduction costs
▪ In the case of live in caregivers there is an assumption that they don’t need to be
paid as much because costs like food and rent are covered in the job
IDEOLOGICAL CONSTRUCTIONS OF FEMININITY AND MOTHERHOOD
• Industrialism: public vs. private spheres
o As production went to outside of the home, the work inside the home was not seen as real
work
• Rise of domesticity: “caring” vs. “work”
o Certain types of work were seen as masculine
o Eg. Work like making food and clothing was seen as caring and done inside the home
• Housewife ideal: 1950s nuclear family; short-lived phenomenon
o Because of events like the great depression and world war 1 and 2 and the idea of the
male breadwinner was not true until recently
o Post WW2 in the 1950 the male breadwinner model and stay at home mothers began to
occur
▪ Was the first opportunity that it became possible for this structure of work to
occur
▪ There was an economic manufacturing boom (eg. In automobiles)
• Men returning from the war had the opportunity to work and sustain their
families on their sole income
▪ The cold war created the belief that creating strong family structures would
protect them from the communist ideals
• The term nuclear family comes from this arms race where different
countries would try to create more nuclear weapons than the other
countries
▪ With the rise of second wave feminism women started to reject the role of a
housewife and middle class women want to go into the workforce
• The lower class women were already working at the time
• Women were not always housewives before the rise of second wave
feminism
▪ Growth of suburbs
• There is now a clear distinction between home and work
• There is now a geographical divide between where work was located and
where the homes were located
• Q: How is “good” mothering normatively defined? How would you characterize a feminine
concept of caregiving?
o Nurturing
o Emphasis on place in the home; being physically there
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Lecture 6 : complicating motherhood: what are some of the ways childcare is viewed and does it effect how childcare is valued. Ideological constructions of femininity and motherhood: good mothers , mothering across borders, transnational motherhood, how transnational motherhood complicating mothering, what are some of the strategies mothers in different countries use to exert their parental control, summary. In such arrangements mothers make efforts to create rules that the childcare worker is expected to follow: but this limits the caregivers own style of caregiving because they are adopting the parent"s style. In the case of live in caregivers there is an assumption that they don"t need to be paid as much because costs like food and rent are covered in the job. How would you characterize a feminine where the homes were located concept of caregiving: nurturing, emphasis on place in the home; being physically there.
