Stability/Change in Women’s Talk about Maternity Leave Experiences

• In Event: Ghosts, Clocks, and (Re)Production: Strands in the Tapestry of Stability/Change in Motherhood

Abstract

In her seminal article, Martin (1990) conducted a feminist deconstruction of a male CEO’s speech about a female employee’s birth experience and maternity leave. Similarly, in their textual deconstruction of an organizational maternity leave policy, Peterson and Albrecht (1999) firmly situated maternity leave as a gendered site worthy of scholarly inquiry and critique. Yet, in the past two decades since the onset of feminist research on maternity leave few studies explore the actual lived experience of women who have taken time off work to give birth and then returned to the workplace (e.g., exceptions include Meisenbach, et. al. 2008, whose pentadic analysis focused on women’s talk about arranging maternity leaves) . Hence, this present study continues the investigation of the entire maternity leave experience as a complex site where women’s narrative strategies in telling their stories often reveal struggles with maintaining any sense of stability in the midst of overwhelming change(s). This study highlights the narratives of three women—one who returned to the workplace to unrecognizable change; one who returned to a stable workplace but voluntarily chose to resign a few months later; and, one whose current struggles with stability/change after her return to work cause her to vacillate daily in a sea of uncertainty.

Works Cited
Meisenbach, R.J., Remke, R.V., Buzzanell, P.M., & Liu, M. (2008). “They allowed”:
Pentadic mapping of women’s maternity leave discourse as organizational rhetoric. Communication Monographs, 75, 1-24.

Peterson, L.W. & Albrecht, T. (1999). Where gender/power/politics collide:
Deconstructing organizational maternity leave policy. Journal of Management Inquiry, 8, 168-181.

Author

• Lori Peterson, St. Edwards University