Isolated Housewives and Complex Maternal Worlds — The Significance of Social Contacts between Women with Young Children in Industrial Societies

Abstract

This article reconsiders the picture of the mother of young children in industrialised societies as the ‘isolated housewife’, suggesting this notion is by no means straightforward. We suggest there is considerable evidence for the existence of mothers' social contacts and their significance both as ‘work’ and ‘friendship’ in industrial societies. A pre‐occupation with the notion of the ‘isolation’ of ‘housewives’ has led social researchers to neglect sustained examination of the social relationships within which many/most mothers are involved on a day‐to‐day basis. Complexities of interpretation, for example what ‘isolation’ can actually mean, need to be drawn out from the existing literature. Evidence presented from two recent ethnographic studies shows patterned opportunities/constraints occurring in relation to mothers' social contacts within localised settings, whether through organised groups or other personal ties. The complex nature of individual women's social contacts is thus brought out. Some key questions are raised for the importance to sociology, anthropology and social policy of these apparently insignificant or invisible women's networks.

How women use family networks to facilitate migration: A comparative study of Irish and Polish women in Britain

“…Within the sociological literature on motherhood and childcare it has been noted that becoming a mother tends to change women's networking strategies as they form more localised networks through nurseries, mother and baby clubs and schools (Bell & Ribbens, 1994;Dyck, 1996). However, there has been little research on how migrant women in Britain may access these localised networks (for a fuller discussion see Ryan, 2007).…”

Fürsorge und Pflege in der britischen feministischen Diskussion

“…Es geht darum, daß »sich vermutlich die Warenförmigkeit der Pflege und die Warenförmig-keit der Behinderung in der Pflegebeziehung durchsetzen« (Ungerson 1995, 50 (Bell/Ribbens 1994;Balbo 1987;Wenger 1984 …”

Mothers who Make Things Public

“…And yet, because the maternal can also be understood as an ethically constituted relation with a dependent other that cuts across notions of solitude, the maternal necessarily deforms non-place; the visibility of maternal work makes her 'out of place' in non-space, as she labours away in the streets or cafés of advanced capitalist global cities, in buses or on the escalators of tube-stations, in large public spaces such as leisure centres, civic squares and shopping arcades, in the aisles of supermarkets, and the transit points between the supermarket and car park, the car park and cashmachine, the cash-machine and train station. These are not, after all, the immediate localities that women are supposed to become imbedded in when they become mothers, and through which mothering can, and often is experienced as a shared endeavour that creates home, neighbourhood, and community (Bell and Ribbens, 1994;Holloway, 1998). I am not here describing the playgroup, for instance, the crèche, the children's playground, the library, the post-office, the doctor's surgery or even that peculiarly overdetermined stretch of street outside the school gates.…”

“…Hill, 1987;Bell and Ribbens, 1994;Dowling, 1998;Holloway, 1998), rather than the relation between the maternal and public space (Aitken, 2000). This may be in part due to the ways that mothers themselves are conceived of as 'place' -the unthinkable and unnameable place we come from and return to, Kristeva's 'ambivalent principle y that stems from an identity catastrophe that causes the Name to topple over into the unnameable that one imagines as femininity, non-language or body' (Kristeva, 1977: 161-162).…”