Is Intensive Mothering a Cross-National Ideology? A Qualitative Study of Maternal Guilt Among Working Mothers

• In Event: 551 - Section on the Sociology of the Family. Gender, Work, and Family

Abstract

A wealth of sociological research shows that mothers across race and class lines in the United States feel guilty about their inability to live up to cultural ideals of the “good mother” embedded in intensive mothering ideology. I ask in this article: Do mothers outside the U.S. also feel a sense of maternal guilt? Is intensive mothering a cross-national ideology? Using 135 in-depth interviews with middle-income working mothers in Sweden, Germany, Italy, and the United States, I demonstrate that this ideology exists across western welfare states, but its nature and the resultant guilt vary from culture to culture. Drawing on Pascoe’s (2005) work on gender, identity, and power, I argue that mothers’ sense of guilt is tied to a constant effort to avoid the label of “bad mother” and enact an identity of a good mother, which have multiple meanings depending on the gendered political and cultural context. I find counterintuitively that although the definitions of intensive mothering differed in each country, a feeling of guilt helped to define “good mothering” in all four fieldsites. I argue that maternal guilt is a central feature in the making of contemporary femininity across western industrialized countries. It is also a vehicle for gender inequality: it perpetuates a system in which women remain primarily responsible for their children. I conceptualize maternal guilt as a form of internalized oppression and discuss the implications for research on motherhood, employment, and gender inequality.

Author

• Caitlyn Collins, Washington University in St. Louis