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4 - A Return to Normal

Becoming the ‘Expert’?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 November 2023

Tina Miller
Affiliation:
Oxford Brookes University
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Summary

This chapter explores the women’s experiences as their child approaches their first birthday and reflects on the changes and overlap between findings in the original motherhood study and these later contemporary accounts. By this point, a return to the workplace and working motherhood provides a dominant theme, but the language of ‘balancing’, ‘sharing’ and ‘50:50’ is much less evident in these interviews. Often complicated and precarious care arrangements are put in place in order for the women to be able to afford to work, as UK childcare costs are prohibitive. The chapter also traces how a backdrop of neoliberal expectations and digital amplification, together with the demands of more intensified parenting, patterns caring in couples. Taking this focus and using real-time narratives, the process of becoming more practised and the (relative) expert on your own child is also examined across this chapter, providing a contemporary view of maternal agency and selfhood. Are women ‘having it all’ as lazy assumptions about working motherhood have asserted, or just doing it all?

Type
Chapter
Information
Motherhood
Contemporary Transitions and Generational Change
, pp. 84 - 111
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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  • A Return to Normal
  • Tina Miller, Oxford Brookes University
  • Book: Motherhood
  • Online publication: 17 November 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009413367.005
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  • A Return to Normal
  • Tina Miller, Oxford Brookes University
  • Book: Motherhood
  • Online publication: 17 November 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009413367.005
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • A Return to Normal
  • Tina Miller, Oxford Brookes University
  • Book: Motherhood
  • Online publication: 17 November 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009413367.005
Available formats
×