The cultural contradictions of motherhood

Resource Information

The work The cultural contradictions of motherhood represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in University of Missouri-St. Louis Libraries. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

The cultural contradictions of motherhood

Statement of responsibility

Sharon Hays

Creator

• Hays, Sharon, 1956-

Subject

• Berufstätigkeit
• Child Rearing
• Electronic books
• FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS -- Parenting | Motherhood
• Frau
• Gender Identity
• Könsidentitet
• Maternal Behavior -- psychology
• Moderskap
• Moederschap
• Mother-Child Relations
• Motherhood
• Barnuppfostran
• Mothers
• Mothers -- United States
• Mothers -- psychology
• Mutterschaft
• Mödrar -- psykologi -- Förenta staterna
• Sociologi
• Sociology
• Soziokultureller Faktor
• United States
• United States
• Women, Working -- psychology
• Motherhood

Language

eng

Summary

Working mothers today confront not only conflicting demands on their time and energy but also conflicting ideas about how they are to behave: 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 child-rearing 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

Awards note

American Sociological Association Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award, honorable mention, 1998.

Cataloging source

N$T

Dewey number

306.874/3

Index

index present

LC call number

HQ759

LC item number

.H37 1996eb

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

• dictionaries
• bibliography

NLM call number

HQ 759

NLM item number

H425c 1996