‘I Can't Settle If It's Not Tidy; I Blame that on My Mum’: Exploring Women's Relational Household Work Narratives

Abstract

Household work literature has highlighted the importance of mothers to their daughters' accounts of their household work practice, arguing that women can both aim to emulate and avoid particular practices in their own household work. This paper further explores this topic, drawing on a small-scale qualitative study to explore the self-narratives that two generations of mothers construct around the theme of household work. It looks particularly at how accounts of household work practices are incorporated into broader stories of growing up and taking responsibility, and the relevance of discourses of individualisation, and the notion of reflexive biographies to these explanations. This article also draws on theories of connectedness to show how self-narratives around the theme of household work reflect different forms of relationality, and to argue that a concept of relational selves is useful for making sense of these narratives.

‘I didn't want to pass that on to my child, being afraid to go to the dentist': making sense of oral health through narratives of connectedness over the life course

“…Adulthood is associated with taking personal responsibility; ‘childish dependency on parental care is expected to give way at a certain age to independent adulthood' (Hockey and James : 167). Part of being a parent is acting to facilitate these values in their children (Kettle ). However, as Yvonne acknowledged her son questioned this later in life, and had to ‘come to terms' with the appearance of his teeth.…”

“…Building on this, we follow Smart who argues for a greater focus on thinking, feeling and imagining, the interior processes that are entwined with the practices that constitute family (and the non-familial relationships that are part of our personal lives). 1 Smart's 'connectedness thesis' (2007: 189) has been used to explore family experiences of living with life-threatening illness (Ellis 2013), narratives of household work practices (Kettle 2016) and family use of commercial ultrasound (Roberts et al 2017). These authors have shown how the concepts of memory, biography, embeddedness, relationism and the imaginary (Smart 2007) can be used to theorise how family is created through social action.…”

Becoming a mother and mattering in early 21st century Australia: An exploration of women's perinatal transitions and equity in wellbeing

“…Natasha Mauthner and Andrea Doucet (1998) adapted and expanded on the VCR method, primarily for application in projects that included a sociological focus (Byrne et al, 2009;Kettle, 2016). Mauthner and Doucet's (1998) adaptation of the VCR method explored "individuals' narrative accounts in terms of their relationships to the people around them and their relationships to the broader, social, structural and cultural contexts within which they live" (p. 126).…”

“…While recommendations have been made to report the socioeconomic status of research participants (Brunton et al, 2011), socioeconomic class is a complex issue and there are difficulties in unambiguously assigning a class location to women on the basis of education and/or occupation over time (Kettle, 2016). While some studies have used income and education as an indicator for socioeconomic status (Toohill et al, 2018), other studies have used private health insurance coverage as a proxy measure for socioeconomic status (e.g., Yelland & Brown, 2014), or not assigned mothers to a socioeconomic class at all (e.g., Porter, 2008b).…”

“…Langley (2015) referred to this process as a form of thematic analysis. Like Mauthner and Doucet (1998), other scholars using the VCR method have sought to find patterns across their entire data sets after first analysing transcripts for individual participants (Kettle, 2016;Langley, 2015).…”