The Creativity of Mothering: Intensity, Anxiety, and Normative Accountability

Abstract

Explanations of the continued emotional intensity and strain experienced by mothers in an era of formal gender equality tend to focus on the ongoing difficulties of combining infant and child care with paid employment (e.g., Ridgeway and Correll 2004). The strains are explained as a consequence of continuing expectations of the unencumbered, implicitly male employee, who prioritizes paid work over family commitments and is available full-time, often for long hours throughout the year (Hodges and Budig 2010; Williams 2010). Childcare presents a major challenge to this model of the ideal worker, given the relative unpredictability of children’s everyday needs. Furthermore, the organization of children’s education, involving short school days, long holidays, and irregular school closure days, tends not to fit easily with expectations of regular, unbroken involvement in paid employment. These conditions make the coordination of employment and family life especially unwieldly for those who continue to bear the burden of care, mostly women (Stone 2007; Williams et al. 2013). The underlying difficulty of subjecting the care of infants and children to the logic of rationalization makes it a problematic feature of a social world that is principally coordinated in this way.