Social reproduction, interrupted? Motherly labour, educational aspirations, and the work for another life

Abstract

This article interrogates social reproduction theories and their emphasis on the maintenance of capitalist relationships. In a post-industrial city in Chile, working-class mothers use their care work and housework to ensure that their children, especially daughters, avoid domestic responsibilities and continue their studies as a secure path to a good life. In turn, school-aged girls and young women hope that through education they will become economically independent from future male partners while they help their mothers to ‘move forward’ from poverty and machista relations. This gendered intergenerational dependence evinces how dreams of social mobility are not merely individual aspirations – the aim is to build better collective futures. Ethnographic attention to how mothers’ and daughters’ daily work seeks to interrupt the maintenance of social class and gender relations illustrates how the labour of social reproduction is crucial, not only for the continuation of existing capitalist relations, but also for their potential transformation.