Capturing Capital to Negotiate the Intersections of Motherhood and Work

Abstract

Women are judged and judge themselves in response to cultural norms about motherhood and employment. While much has been written in sociology and other disciplines about the intersections of motherhood and work, there is not much on their ideals and the enactment of the ideals of womanhood and worker in connection to various forms of capital. In this paper, we review the literature on motherhood to explore the ways in which these ideals are related to the meanings of mother and worker. Further, we highlight how differential access to economic and non-economic capital due to one's social location influences a woman's ability to be viewed successful simultaneously as mother and worker.Social science researchers know that ideals exist for every social identity, and "mother" and "worker" are not exceptions (c.f. . Further, these ideals change over time and are context specific. In the contemporary United States, the ideal mother's time is expected to be tied up in mothering labor, yet due to economic realities and/or personal identity desires, women are in the paid labor market in growing numbers. In this paper, we review the literature on how women navigate the meanings of mother and worker identities through the lens of capital. 1 As we demonstrate in this paper, women have differential access to the various forms of capital, thus impacting their ability to navigate cultural understandings (or ideals) of their identities.Hegemony: the "ideal" mother and the "ideal" worker Hegemonic ideals about all manners of social life exist and constrain individuals. Williams (1977) refers to hegemony as a dynamic process in which people internalize the predominant view to the extent that it is often difficult for them to break free of the dominant discoursethereby continuing and maintaining their own subordination. Hegemony thus plays an integral part in the culturally and socially accepted positions people can play and what populations are viewed as "best" at these positions. It is important to note, then, that although people everywhere live under hegemonic understandings of cultural rules and roles, not everyone has an equal chance of enacting the hegemonic ideals. As Bourdieu and Passeron (1971) demonstrated in their work on the French educational system, some people are better poised by birth to succeed within the dominant framework because they already have access to or are well-versed in the dominant (and valued) forms of capital (i.e. children born into the dominant class enter the educational system already possessing a degree of working knowledge of the valued manners, dialect and vocabulary necessary to succeed in school). In an ethnographic study of families, Lareau (2003) found that there were social class differences in how parenting was approached. These families used different forms of cultural capital to accomplish their parenting; thus, middle-class parents imbue more beneficial cultural capital to their children. Middle-class children, therefore, are better situated to succeed in school because they know ho...

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