Connecting Motherhood to Work: Teaching Resources and Strategies

In this essay we consider how to teach the connections between women's roles as mothers and as paid workers. Our interest is to identify curricula and pedagogies that can illuminate how societies define what working mothers should (or should not) do and the ways that institutionalized arrangements shape women's experiences inside and outside the home. Although this topic can be of interest to a variety of audiences, our primary focus is on strategies for expanding the awareness of traditional-age college students on the ways mothering and employment intersect and how these intersections are shaped by cultural and policy frameworks.

Kathleen Gerson (2001) observed that young women are entering adulthood taking for granted the pursuit of paid work and mothering. Their expectations are that they can "have it all," that a heavy commitment to paid work will result in personal satisfaction, and that eventual efforts to raise children will inevitably lead to satisfying family lives. As numerous analyses of the intersection between paid work and parenting reveal, the career mystique that underpins these expectations is not so easy to fulfill, because existing arrangements often pit family against work, resulting in negative spillover, strain, and exhaustion (Moen and Roehling 2005). Although work-family scholarship commonly focuses on the dark side of the intersections between home and work, equally important are observations that employment and new ways of working can result in enhanced experiences for mothers-employees and their families (Bailyn et al. 2006). Thus, in teaching gender and work-family, overarching goals are to help students learn about the emergence and current realities of institutionalized arrangements, the challenges that these arrangements present, and the possibilities that alternate arrangements may hold. Discussing the concept of motherhood and mothering—as it intersects with concerns about establishing a career—opens numerous opportunities to highlight the ways social structures and expectations shape lives and life chances (Omolade 2002; Sweet et al. 2008).

The provision of care, one of the most important components of motherhood, is a central issue in work and family scholarship. This is evident in the economic value placed on care work (Crittenden 2001; England, Budig, and Folbre 2002), the ways mothering fits into frameworks that separate home from work (Boris and Lewis 2006), the role of conflicts that result when mothers engage in work outside the home (Hochschild 1997; Moen 2003), the impact of various care arrangements on women's and children's lives (Crouter and Booth 2004), and the tradeoffs that mothers make as they navigate work and family careers over the life course (Stone 1997; Sweet and Moen 2006). Analysis of these topics can result in complex sets of understandings of how motherhood intersects with life experiences and social policy. For instance, students can readily recognize that the outsourcing of care work to other paid workers can ease the strains experienced by professional women. But they are less likely to immediately grasp that this approach to managing the maternal dilemma shapes transnational labor flows and undermines the quality of care that contracted workers can extend to their own families (Glenn 2002; Mohanty 2003). These are the types of micro-macro linkages concerning motherhood that work and family teachers hope to cultivate through their classes.

The pages of this journal (and others) have offered a number of interesting approaches to teaching students about mothering and employment. For example, Jodi Vandenberg-Daves (2002) described a class activity in which students engaged in oral history projects that helped them understand how motherhood was tied to a cult of domesticity. Alternately, others have described how films helped students consider the cultural production of images of mothering, critically analyze those images of motherhood, and better understand gendered dynamics (Arredondo 2002; Baker-Sperry, Behringer, and Grauerholz 1999). Perhaps most important is the observation that exposure to course content (curriculum) concerning "family values" may have very limited impact on student's political stances concerning social policies as they relate to mothering (Magdol 2003). However, pedagogy (how something is taught) matters considerably, as attitudes can be strongly influenced by the way in which students...