Search Results

This chapter introduces Part III of the book. Women who have managed to free themselves from the social norms of married motherhood have done so as reluctant revolutionaries. They did not set out to break new ground, but wanting a child before time ran out took precedence over following tradition. They relieve themselves of the burden of chasing marriage, only to be shouldered with the new trials of single motherhood. Today, women can be single mothers as an alternative to the nuclear family, with one catch: making this choice means making a promise to stay below the radar. That is to say, as long as they and not the government finance their motherhood; as long as they make their children fit society, not force society to fit their children; and as long as they reshape their individual jobs, not the workplace as a whole, they can be single mothers.

This chapter concludes Part II of this book. While American society has reached a new marital low point and has begun the reconstruction of family life, it has not seen the demise of the master narrative that still privileges the two-parent heterosexual genetic family. At the epicenter of the master narrative is the father, the patriarchal puppeteer of the family. Part II highlighted how women craft families to make their own look more like the “ordinary” American family. Single mothers begin to cut the strings en route to motherhood, only to find themselves dancing, on behalf of their children, to the master narrative once again.

This chapter addresses two closely woven issues: that of harmonizing (making compatible) the dual aims of careers and motherhood that most European women now pursue; and that of achieving full gender neutrality (equality) in the allocation of opportunities, life chances, and welfare outcomes. The main aspects addressed in investigating the multi‐dimensional compatibility problem are: the heterogeneity of women's preference sets (family centred, career centred, or dual role), public support for working mothers, the job supply, the role of wages, and motherhood. The main aspects addressed in investigating gender equality across the life course are: gender segregation in the labour markets, gender differences in pay, female life choices, and the extra costs and risks of employing women. It is argued that neither social nor labour‐market policy will solve these gender inequality issues, and the possibility of a domestic solution is discussed.

The first two sections of this chapter summarize feminist and lesbian critiques of the family, marriage, and motherhood. The third section critiques lesbian‐feminist reasons for eschewing a political agenda that endorses family, marriage, and mothering. The fourth section traces the historical construction of lesbians and gays as outlaws to the family. In the concluding section, it is argued that making the family a political priority is not, as sometimes argued, a conservative move.

This essay explores some aspects of the cultural construction of breasts in a male-dominated society, seeking a positive women’s voice for breasted experience. It begins with a discussion of the dominant culture’s objectification of breasts. Relying on Irigaray’s suggestive ideas about women’s sexuality and an alternative metaphysics not constructed around the concept of object, an experience of breast movement and sensitivity from the point of view of the female subject is presented. It asks how women’s breasts might be experienced in the absence of an objectifying male gaze, and discusses how breasts are a scandal for patriarchy because they disrupt the border between motherhood and sexuality. Finally, the question of objectification is revisited through reflections on a woman’s encounter with the surgeon’s knife at her breast.

This chapter focuses on the initial entry of professional women on Wall Street. It locates women's accounts of corporate life in relation to historical factors, including and encompassing the context over women's legitimate place on Wall Street and the transformation of gendered relations amid the upheaval in institutional structures produced by global capitalism in the 1970s and 1980s. Drawing on life-history interviews, the chapter analyses the ways in which the first cohort of women in research drew on natural attributes of American femininity, such as conservative risk-averse behaviour, to legitimize their relationships with clients. It also examines the ways women pioneers in investment banking drew on supposedly masculine characteristics of calculated rationality and risk-taking to construct themselves as authoritative financial subjects. The chapter argues for historians to analyse the discourse of executives, including their talk about corporate culture, as a window onto the gendered construction of business on Wall Street.

This chapter examines the next generation of Anglican women's mission work in Madagascar through the growth of the Mothers' Union, particularly under the leadership of Gertrude King. The MU supplemented women's evangelism in two ways. First, it offered a means of building a corporate Christian community that mitigated the secularist effects of French colonial policy. Second, it conceived a sacred, ritual function for motherhood in ‘high‐church’ terms that engaged both Malagasy and British religious expression and crafted a new basis for female authority in the mission church. However, the moral regulation of membership, particularly centred on divorce, exposed the limits of the MU as an inclusive, multiracial body.

This chapter examines the next generation of Anglican women's mission work in Uganda through the growth of the Mothers' Union. Concerns about ‘nominal Christianity’ persisted after the institution of the Church of Uganda, and the MU provided a new way to interrogate the relationship between outward, corporate manifestations of Christianity and inner spiritual life. The fluidity of Christian and non‐Christian parameters and the persistence of polygamy made missionary women confront their prior understandings of marriage, domesticity, ‘progress,’ and national identity. British and African women approached motherhood as a shared medium of religious and social authority, and used prayer and revivals to construct a hybrid discourse of evangelicalism that appropriated male clerical functions. The MU's influence in the mission church and its potential to transgress clerical and social boundaries were revealed by the widespread resistance to the organization by African men.

This chapter analyzes rights claiming done in the context of AIDS policy debates in the United States and South Africa. It illustrates how rights claims made, particularly on behalf of HIV-positive pregnant women, challenged dominant conceptions and practices of motherhood in ways that enabled women’s political subjectivity and democratic participation.

From de Beauvoir to Wittig, Friedan and Millett to Butler, radical feminist theory has for many years ironically manifested a somatophobic strain. The separation of gender from sex has resulted in an anthropological rupture in which the flesh is either marginalized or politicized — in either case, divested of its personalistic and semitive status. By contrast, the personalist philosophy of Lublin Thomism brings together realist metaphysics, biblical nuptuality, and gender complementarity in a perspective that affirms the full creative potential, and revelatory trajectory, of both and each of the sexes.

This chapter investigates the effect that parenthood has on wealth for men and for women. Whether married or single, women who become mothers are placed in a “no-win” situation. For every year a woman is a full-time caregiver, she must work five extra years to make up for the lost income and pension benefits. Even if she goes back to work full-time, she will face a motherhood wage penalty. This chapter also discusses a “motherhood wealth tax,” which is greatest for nonmarried mothers because they are likely to have custody of children and to have less disposable income to save or invest. As a consequence, the gender wealth gap would continue to exist even if men and women had equal incomes simply because women are more likely to have custody of children.

This chapter presents Eyad's story about double forms of emergence—both technological and masculine. On the one hand, new forms of reproductive technology are continuously emerging, and once they reach the reproductive marketplace, they are being rapidly discussed, debated, and, in most cases, deployed in Middle Eastern IVF settings. Egg donation is a case in point: after entering Iran in 1999, it spread within a year to Lebanon, where Shia Muslim couples were the first to access this reproductive technology. The willingness of Middle Eastern husbands such as Eyad to accommodate egg donation is a powerful marker of their emerging masculinities. These men have effectively prioritized their wives' own motherhood desires and their conjugal happiness over religious orthodoxies and various practical obstacles and apprehensions.

This chapter suggests that most women are neither steadily rising to equal representation in top positions, nor dropping out in large numbers. Research shows that highly educated women rarely leave their chosen profession entirely. Instead they become caught in a “second tier” within or allied with their profession where they take breaks for family needs but return to work, sometimes on a reduced schedule but frequently full time, until retirement. It is between ages thirty and forty that women change career direction, and this is the decade when women are mostly likely to drop into the second tier. The discussion argues that the key to advancement is figuring out the “mother problem.” Children are a wonder and a blessing, not a problem; but motherhood is.

This chapter suggests that the decade between thirty and forty is when women today make the hardest choices: whether to seek a fast-track position after securing their degree; whether to have a child; whether to stay on the fast track after having a child or to leave the race and find a less competitive role. They face new and formidable challenges, and there are rarely second chances if they opt out. This is also the decade when the career and family trajectories of men and women distinctly diverge. Many women leave the fast track during these years to accommodate motherhood, but few men do so for fatherhood. Men who remain on the fast track are more likely to have children than career women. In both work and family measures, men and women are no longer on an equal footing.