Weaving Work and Motherhood (review)

Weaving Work and Motherhood. By Anita Ilta Garey. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999. 239 pp., $19.95 paper.

Anita Garey proposes that we think about employed mothers in a new and better way—not as women whose choices reflect either a work orientation or a family orientation, but as weavers of identities that, like cloth, are formed of interwoven threads. In order to examine the way that mothers in the work force construct their identities as workers with children and as mothers at work, Garey carried out in-depth, open-ended interviews of 37 women, most of whom worked in the medical-surgical wards of a large private hospital. This group represented women of diverse ages, ethnicities, work schedules, education/training, income, and household makeup.

Garey poses her basic research question as: how do employed women with children think about their lives and about the ways in which work and motherhood fit into those lives given that work and family are portrayed as conflicting with each other? According to Garey, the dominant model of motherhood in our society, with its strong cultural expectations about how mothers are supposed to behave, is defined in opposition to employment. Thus employed women have to reconcile their definitions of self as mother and as worker. In connecting their actions with the social selves they are trying to be, they weave their various roles into a whole.

I would argue with Garey's notion that there is such a thing as a clear, dominant set of expectations regarding what is expected of mothers in our society. In the same year Garey was carrying out many of her interviews, the National Study of the Changing Workforce conducted a national survey of working people in the United States and found that around 44 percent of men and 54 percent of women either disagreed or disagreed strongly with the statement that mothers with young children should not work. The political activities of both feminist organizations and groups like the Promise Keepers suggest that we are in the midst of a political struggle to renegotiate cultural norms of women's appropriate role(s). While I applaud Garey's effort to unify the study of work and family in women's lives, the weaving that women do is not against a static social backdrop that only values motherhood, nor a static conception of the appropriate role of fathers in parenting.

Garey's depiction of the lives of working-class women was especially valuable given the unfortunate tendency by the media in the 1990s to depict working women as predominantly upwardly mobile professional women. The women she interviewed affirmed what other research has shown — that working women value their work lives and do not wish to be stay-at-home mothers. However, within the financial constraints they faced, these women sought ways to balance their work commitments with time for their children. For some, part-time work was possible; for others, working full-time night shifts provided the means to be with their children after school and in the evenings.

At long last, in the final three and half pages of the book, Garey comes to the insight that all the individual weaving in the world cannot create a social fabric that supports both motherhood and the right of women to earn a decent living independently. There has to be some collective weaving for that to happen. This commentary on institutional change was a bit too little too late, in my opinion.

I guess I would like to read another book, one that looks at how women's identities are woven not just individually, but collectively. I would like to hear the stories of how they struggle together, in unions and other organizations, to bring about the changes they need on the job and in their communities, and in the process, affirm their pride in themselves both as workers and mothers.