Homelessness and becoming a mother: The continuing influence of Beverley Skeggs’ Formations of Class and Gender

Abstract

Beverley Skeggs’ landmark text Formations of Class and Gender was at the forefront of identifying how gendered and classed subjectivities are produced. This work changed the landscape of sociology, and it continues to open up opportunities for sociologists to consider how intersectional privileges and oppressions are instrumental in subjectivity construction. Building on Skeggs’ legacy, this article considers how women experiencing homelessness navigate the shifting and complex dynamics of this field in the construction of mothering subjectivities. Drawing on qualitative research conducted in Australia that explored women’s experiences of homelessness and pregnancy, this article discusses how mothering subjectivities are generated through constructed notions of the ‘good’ mother and the barriers mothers face in both enacting these discourses and in meeting the high moral standards of ‘good’ mothering without adequate resources and structural supports. We explore how, in an effort to overcome internalised shame and questions of respectability, they actively contest the negative associations which call into question their moral standing as good mothers by engaging in forms of invisible labour. By expanding on Skeggs’ theoretical framework, this article challenges hegemonic concepts of homelessness that neglect alternative subjectivities, and instead explores the processes and practices that are shaped by social positioning to reveal the punitive consequences and transformative possibilities involved in becoming a mother while homeless.

Introduction

The publication of Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable in 1997 was a pivotal moment for sociology. Sociologists were urged to (re)consider how the dual structural signifiers of gender and class interact and shape subjectivity construction. Beverley Skeggs (1997, p. 6) declared that class was becoming invisible in feminist debate, ‘that the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater’. In doing so she threw down the gauntlet to sociologists to redress this state of affairs because, she argued, ‘to ignore class or make class invisible is to abdicate responsibility (through privilege) from the effects it produces’ (p. 7). Skeggs’ landmark text continues to unlock opportunities to consider not only how gender and class, but also other intersectional privileges and oppressions, are instrumental in subjectivity construction. Here, we build on Skeggs’ legacy to explore how gender, class and other social structures coalesce for women experiencing homelessness. Specifically, we examine how women experiencing homelessness navigate these complex dynamics in the construction of mothering subjectivities. In the first part of this article we bring together the key works of a number of scholars of motherhood to highlight how modern conceptualisations of the ‘good’ mother have distinct associations with privileged class positions, whiteness, and patriarchal requirements on women to subjugate their identities to an all-consuming maternal role when they become mothers. Following this, we discuss the analytical value of Skeggs’ conceptual framework of subjectivity construction in different spaces. Skeggs (1997) shows us how class, gender and other social structures have pivotal functions in the construction of subjectivities, and this includes women experiencing homelessness. The oppressions of institutional classism and sexism articulated by Skeggs, alongside subjugations connected to other social structures, are further compounded for mothers without a home.

Drawing on qualitative research conducted in Australia that investigated women’s experiences of pregnancy and parenting without a home, we then focus on three salient themes that emerged from the research: firstly, the process of becoming a mother without a home, and how this highlights the value regimes, intersectional structures of oppression and questions of respectability that shape how homeless women prepare for and experience motherhood. Secondly, we examine the feelings of shame embedded in mothering while homeless and how the participants’ constructed notions of ‘good’ motherhood were incompatible with their homelessness, resulting in a sense of shame for not meeting these moral standards. Lastly, we draw attention to the invisible labour of becoming a mother without a home, and the ways the participants engaged in ongoing individual, and often transformational, labour in the absence of structural supports as they took up maternal identities. In our focus on these themes, we extend Skeggs’ conceptual framework of subjectivity construction to explore how mothering subjectivities are generated through the conflictual relationship between the contradictory social discourses of what ‘good’ mothering entails and the hierarchical regimes of value that diminish the social capital of women experiencing homelessness.

Mothering discourses

Becoming a mother brings with it ‘multiple, intersecting changes’, whether they be ‘bodily, biographical, relational [or] social’ (Johnston-Ataata, 2020, p. 297). Historically and cross-culturally, becoming a mother is an intensely embodied and emotional experience, in which women are required to navigate unstable and shifting narratives of what constitutes ‘good’ mothering. The experience of motherhood is intricately tied to dominant practices and identities of mothering, and these are ‘constructed as either good or bad, depending on a woman’s social position, as determined by factors such as her class, ethnicity, and sexuality’ (Kokanović et al., 2018, p. 146).

In Australia, Great Britain, Canada and the United States, where parenting practices are similar, scholars critically analysing pregnancy, birth and motherhood have identified dominant social discourses, or ‘moral maternal knowledges’ (Kokanović et al., 2018, p. 146), that dictate women’s experiences of mothering their children. In the current cultural context, an ‘intensive’ form of mothering is privileged, in which a woman’s devotion to her maternal role is expressed through self-denying forms of love and care that prioritise her child in ways that may harm her own wellbeing. Hays’ (1995) influential book on modern motherhood, The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood, defines intensive mothering as ‘child centred, expert guided, emotionally absorbing, labour intensive, and financially expensive’. Intensive mothering functions as a way of regulating women’s behaviour, but also serves to reinforce class hierarchies (Kokanović et al., 2018, p. 151). It has this effect by dictating that successful child-rearing must be contingent upon having the resources to access elite schools, child-maintenance accessories such as toys, books and clothes, extracurricular activities such as sports and dance lessons, and child-centric outings (Hays, 1995, p. 121). It is also the case that class intersects with race in mothering in important ways. Hill Collins (2021) notes that feminist theorising about motherhood has traditionally been written through a white, normative lens that conceptualises the interests of husbands and wives as incompatible within the patriarchal nuclear family model. Hill Collins emphasises that for Black families and families of colour, ‘the locus of conflict lies outside the household, as women and their families engage in collective-effort to create and maintain family life in the face of forces that undermine family integrity’ (p. 153).

Today, the idealised Australian ‘good mother’ is ‘a selfless carer and nurturer with an all-encompassing commitment to motherhood’ (Kokanović et al., 2018, p. 9). This is perhaps best exemplified in the stay-at-home mother who forgoes wages and career advancement to be with her children full-time; however, this presumes the presence of a partner, typically a husband, who has earnings substantial enough to support the family, a dimming prospect in today’s economy. There are social penalties for mothers who transgress and fall outside of this figuration, regarded as deviant for being too self-interested or disconnected from their children – they are dismissed as maternal failures (Kokanović et al., 2018, p. 148). Conversely, there is feminine social capital to be gained in adopting a new form of neoliberal feminism, partly realised ‘through the ubiquitous figure of the middle-class professional wife and mother’ who invests heavily emotionally and materially in motherhood and marriage (McRobbie, 2013, p. 119). The expectations on the professionalised mother are burdensome, necessitating an identity caught between ‘new gender expectations as women without children in the public sphere and old gender expectations as mothers in the private sphere’ (O’Brien Hallstein, 2021, p. 498). This is delicate terrain for women to traverse, given that motherhood and femininity are intimately connected, so that gender is ‘done’ through mothering (West & Zimmerman, 1987). Hirsch (2021) traces the conflation of motherhood and femininity to the advent of industrial capitalism, ‘as the private sphere was isolated from the public under industrial capitalism, and as women became identified with and enclosed within the private sphere, motherhood elevated middle-class and upper-class women into a position of increased personal status, if decreased social power’ (p. 132). As people became more atomised within an impersonal economic system, motherhood came to represent ‘a repository of society’s idealism’ (Badinter, 1981, p. 180). While women’s roles shifted dramatically in the last century, the essentialising assumptions about ‘natural’ motherhood and women’s innate maternal capacity have remained stubbornly intact, requiring mothers to negotiate their role within constrained notions of acceptability. Some women have managed this by ‘bargain[ing] with patriarchy’ (Kandiyoti, 1988), using their maternal role as leverage in masculine domains.

There has been a broad shift under neoliberalism to individualise and to ‘cast parenthood as a private choice rather than one that merits state support’ (Kokanović et al., 2018, p. 193). The neoliberal paradigm ‘necessitates mothers take on the primary role of caregiving with the depletion of state resources’ (Vandenbeld Giles, 2021, p. 686). This means mothers are given the impossible task of resolving structural deficits through individualising actions. As inequality increases across the globe, leading to social unrest, ‘there is nothing easier than to make social deterioration look like something that is the sacred duty of mothers to prevent’ (Rose, 2018, p. 27). Neoliberal policies have contributed to the feminisation of poverty, and at the same time play a central role in reinforcing ideologies of intensive mothering. This image of the perfect mother, totalised in her devotion to her children, is subverted by the increasing majority of working mothers. This represents a muddying of gendered norms that leads to at once an underemphasis and overemphasis on gender; as Vandenbeld Giles (2021, p. 688) explains: ‘the working mother becomes degendered within a framework of equality while the mythical intensive mother becomes fixed within biological gendered assumptions’.

Pregnancy and motherhood as embodied experiences influenced by dominant discourses of mothering have been the focus of several canonical feminist texts. In Rich’s (1976) ground-breaking work, Of Woman Born, she argues that a crucial distinction must be made between motherhood as experience and as institution. Reflecting on her own first pregnancy, Rich describes a sense of alienation from her ‘real body’ and ‘real spirit’, not by the fact of motherhood, but by its institutional mores (p. 39). Motherhood, Rich explains, ‘has a history . . . an ideology’ involving the legal and technical control by men of ‘contraception, fertility, abortion, obstetrics, gynaecology, and extrauterine reproductive experiments’ that are fundamental to the patriarchal system (p. 34). This is distinct from the experience of motherhood, which Rich argues is the one aspect of women’s lives in which they may have felt power for the first time – in the authoritative domain of motherhood where power, at least in the patriarchal sense, can be tacitly realised in the rearing of children. Herein lies a tension between power and burden, or between fulfilment and distress (Arendell, 2000). For women of colour, for instance, choosing to have a child can be a way of reasserting their power, as it ‘challenges institutional policies that encourage white, middle-class women to reproduce’, and ‘discourage[s] and even penalise[s]’ low-income, ethnic minority women from becoming mothers (Hill Collins, 2021, p. 159).

Young’s (2005) work delves further into the experiential aspect of reproduction, emphasising the ‘decentred’ and ‘split’ nature of subjectivity during pregnancy: ‘pregnant existence entails . . . a unique temporality of process and growth in which the woman can experience herself as split between past and future’ (p. 47). She too experienced her body as ‘herself and not herself’, owing to the other being inside of her; ‘yet they are not other’, Young contends, rather there is a split subjectivity (p. 46). Responding to the demands of children requires a ‘conceptual scheme’, a unity of ‘reflection, judgment, and emotion’ that Ruddick (2021, p. 62) calls ‘maternal thinking’. Motherhood practices are culturally specific and change over time and are bound by shifting gendered norms dictating femininity and mothering. It should not be surprising, therefore, ‘that what counts as good mothering may also change with time, as gender relations take different formations in the course of late capitalism’ (Kokanović et al., 2018, p. 150). Nevertheless, Ruddick (2021) posits that some features of the mothering experience are invariant and nearly universal, and this is governed by a mother’s desire to foster her child’s preservation, growth and acceptability (p. 62). This intrinsic need to hold and preserve shapes mothers’ way of seeing the world and engenders a distinct political and ethical consciousness.

Research that specifically interrogates processes of becoming a mother in the context of homelessness is somewhat scarce, particularly in Australia. As Zufferey (2020) contends, literature on homelessness and mothering mostly began to emerge from the United States in the 1990s (e.g. Hausman & Hammen, 1993; Koblinsky et al., 1997) with an emphasis on individual deficits and a tendency towards ‘mother blame’ (p. 118). For mothers whose homelessness is compounded by substance use issues, mental ill health and/or those victimised by family violence, individualising discourses of mothering mean their circumstances are viewed ‘only in terms of maternal responsibility rather than deprivation, trauma or support needs’ (Bimpson et al., 2022, p. 275). It is the case that for women experiencing homelessness ‘dominant standards of good mothering can become another source of injury for women whose circumstances render such standards impossible to achieve’ (Barrow & Laborde, 2008, p. 159). More recently, research has focused on the ‘stressors’ of mothering and homelessness, or on discrete cohorts such as young mothers, single mothers and mothers without accompanying children (see Zufferey, 2020). In Australia, Keys’ (2007) research is noteworthy for challenging negative stereotypes about young homeless mothers, and instead demonstrating that becoming a mother can be a significant motivation for positive change. Zufferey (2020), also writing from an Australian perspective, argues that there is an absence of political feminist analysis that connects mothering without a home with broader intersectional oppressions. Mothering, Zufferey (2020, p. 119) contends, ‘is a dynamic process that adapts to changing economic, geographical, demographic, social and political conditions’, which cannot be isolated from ‘individual and environmental circumstances that can socially disadvantage or privilege different groups of women’. In Australia, we too have sought to apply a feminist intersectional lens specifically to pregnant women’s experiences of homelessness to illustrate how exclusionary practice frameworks exacerbate their invisibility and perpetuate oppression (Theobald et al., 2023).

Constructing subjectivities: Homelessness and motherhood

In this article, we are interested in understanding the processes through which women without homes become mothers. We do this by drawing together theorisations of mothering with the conceptual framework of subjectivity construction initially presented by Beverley Skeggs in Formations of Class and Gender. Casting a feminist lens on Pierre Bourdieu’s work, Skeggs’ progression of Bourdieu’s (1984, 1990a, 1990b) ideas, particularly his social capital framework, offers opportunities to account for the ways in which gender and class (and other social structures) intersect in the construction of mothering subjectivities for women who have experienced homelessness. As Skeggs (2004b, p. 21) later argued, Bourdieu’s work continues to offer ‘explanatory power’ for feminist scholarship in three areas: (1) connecting objective structures to subjective experience, thus linking structure and agency; (2) providing a metaphorical model of social space where capital is accrued and embodied to explain values and mobility; and (3) positioning reflexivity as central to understanding the production of knowledge. This resonates for homelessness and motherhood studies as both are sites that encompass and generate complex dynamics within diverse power structures (J. Watson, 2024).

Nonetheless, despite feminist interest and application of Bourdieu’s social capital framework, his under-theorisation of gender has been noted by many, including Skeggs (2004b), as being overly deterministic and for failing to recognise (or anticipate) the embedding of women in a wider range of fields, which has led to more complicated interactions within those spaces (e.g. Adkins, 2004, 2005; McNay, 1999; McRobbie, 2009). Homelessness, we contend, is one such field. As with other fields, homelessness comprises rules and regulatory practices, interacts with other fields, and shapes subjectivities (J. Watson, 2018). The influence of Skeggs’ work on homelessness scholarship can be observed in, for example, Farrugia’s (2011, 2016) examination of youth homelessness and subjectivity construction, Farrugia and Gerrard’s (2016) application of ‘the inequalities and subjectivities which constitute class relationships’ to the homelessness sphere (p. 278), and J. Watson and Cuervo’s (2017) study of youth homelessness and social justice. Moreover, by giving due attention to homelessness as a field, Skeggs’ concepts can be advanced to allow for the identification of previously hidden gendered subjectivities such as those related to mothering without a home.

Skeggs’ (1997) theorisation of how subjectivity is inextricably tied to exchange value, and how for women this is profoundly attached to their femininity and their capacity to hold respectable distinctions, provides a framework for understanding how mothering is negotiated in the context of homelessness. For Skeggs (1997), the primary marker of class is exclusion. Continuing this assertion in Class, Self, Culture, Skeggs (2004a) contends that citational processes such as class categorisations are never neutral:

Discerning how positioning, movement and exclusion are generated through these systems of inscription, exchange and value is central to understanding how difference (and inequalities) are produced, lived and read. (p. 4)

Both homelessness (J. Watson, 2016, 2018) and mothering (Banister et al., 2016; Lo, 2016) have been distinguished as sites where women’s subjectivities can be devalued and where feminine capital is mobilised through context-specific strategies in attempts to attain respectability in hostile environments. Femininity as cultural capital has been identified in the homeless field as one of very few resources available to young women to deploy through sexual transactions to survive the privation of homelessness (J. Watson, 2018). Likewise, feminine capital and respectable distinctions have been noted by Lawler (2000, p. 112) in how ‘motherly and daughterly’ selves are produced in conditions of precarious class status, and that there are mobility implications for ‘getting’ these roles ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. Parsons et al. (2024) apply Skeggs’ value-exchange framework to mothers on low and limited incomes in the UK using ‘food work’ – the work to feed their families – to meet the dominant values of good mothering through maintaining respectability and avoiding a devaluation of their cultural capital. And Banister et al. (2016) investigate the complex and contradictory relationship low-income young women can have with mothering and how they manage this through ‘maternal identity work’ (p. 655). For mothers without a home specifically, Savage (2022) extends Skeggs’ concepts of classed femininities and caring identities to include nurturing capital – the ‘time and resources that people receive from others throughout their lives . . . as individuals, from within communities, or through state activity’ (p. 18). Savage argues that the accrual of nurturing capital is impeded by homelessness whereby the lack of a home deprives mothers of the resources to ‘do care and love work’ (p. 17).

In this article, we show how Formations of Class and Gender continues to hold weight and to inspire scholarship in new spheres such as homelessness and mothering through offering fresh ways to understand the processes of subjectivity construction. We take up Skeggs’ (2011) later challenge to move beyond the limitations of a theoretical gaze focused only on ‘abstractions of the bourgeois model of the singular self’ (p. 509). If maternal subjectivities are only considered through the classed lens of ‘good’ motherhood (among other structural privileges), we will never, as Skeggs (2011) argues, ‘be able to imagine or understand how value is produced and lived beyond the dominant symbolic and will repeatedly misrecognise, wilfully ignore and de-grade other forms of value practices, person-value and personhood, by default performatively relegating them to the void of the valueless’ (p. 509).

The interplay, initially presented by Skeggs in Formations of Class and Gender, between subjectivity, subject position and discourse within social structures, and the gendered implications therein, offers conceptual depth to the processes through which women experiencing homelessness become mothers. It is precisely the process of becoming that highlights the value regimes, intersectional structures of oppression, questions of respectability and invisible labour that shape how homeless women prepare for and experience motherhood. Moreover, while calling attention to the constraints associated with these limited subjectivities, as will be discussed, there are also possibilities for contestation and transformation.

The study

This article is derived from research exploring perspectives of women who experienced homelessness while pregnant in Victoria, Australia (Murray et al., 2020). Participants were recruited through housing, health and pregnancy agencies in a purposive manner. Interviews were undertaken with 14 participants who were pregnant, or had been, while homeless in the previous two years. All participants were cisgender women. This was not a requirement of the study, but it does mean the findings and discussion are framed through cisgender identities.

While acknowledging the ‘fluid terrain of meanings and discursive practices’ of homelessness (S. Watson, 2000, p. 159) and the politics of representation (Farrugia & Gerrard, 2016), for the purpose of sampling, homelessness is defined in this study according to the cultural definition of homelessness (Chamberlain & MacKenzie, 1992), which remains the model most widely adopted by the Australian homelessness sector. This definition is considered ‘cultural’ because it includes literal homelessness and inadequate housing, and it locates these in socio-historic contexts (Chamberlain & MacKenzie, 1992). The participants described living in a range of inadequate forms of accommodation while pregnant and parenting including rough sleeping, sleeping in cars, motels, couch surfing, rooming houses, crisis accommodation, transitional (short- to medium-term subsidised) housing, youth refuges, specialist young women’s refuges and specialist women’s family violence refuges.

All participants lived in metropolitan Melbourne and were aged between 21 and 36 years. Three were still pregnant at the time of interview. Although the focus of the research was on recent experiences of pregnancy, parenting and homelessness, the full birth histories of the participants revealed that there had been a total of 25 births, and all but one of the participants had experienced homelessness during each of their pregnancies. However, none of the participants had other children currently in their care. At the time of interview, 10 participants remained homeless including two of the pregnant women. The majority of participants were born in Australia (11), including two Indigenous women. Three women had migrated: from the Middle East (2) and from Sub-Saharan Africa (1).

The research question that informed this article was: how do homeless women construct mothering subjectivities? The interviews were conducted in an in-depth and semi-structured manner. This approach provided the participants with opportunity for reflection, as well as flexibility to expand on issues that were raised alongside an ‘exchange of ideas and meanings’ (Bauer & Gaskell, 2000, p. 45). The interviews were digitally recorded and professionally transcribed following consent from the participants. Transcripts were analysed through open coding to identify emerging themes (Gale et al., 2013) and the participants have been provided with pseudonyms. The research received ethics approval from the Human Research Ethics Committees of RMIT University and La Trobe University.

Becoming a mother without a home

Subjectivities, argues Skeggs (1997, p. 12), begin to form through ‘the conditions of being subjected to frameworks of regulation, knowledge and discourse and constructing subjectivity in the process’. A central aspect of subjectivity construction is recognition of social positioning and perceived exchange value (Skeggs, 1997, 2004a). Women experiencing homelessness are socially excluded, their exchange value is diminished, and they are positioned as abject others (J. Watson, 2018). Subjectivity construction is further complicated by motherhood. The process of becoming a mother typically commences prior to childbirth – during pregnancy, or even pre-pregnancy – through preparation for the baby’s arrival and anticipating the future with a child. For women without a home, this preparation is circumscribed by limited capital and reduced social power, most demonstrably signified by lack of housing, which inevitably informs how mothering subjectivities are generated. How homeless women construct their mothering subjectivities and the practices they engage in are thus shaped by conflicting discourses of what it means to be a mother and the barriers they face in enacting these discourses. The most obvious barrier is material: the lack of safe and affordable long-term housing available to pregnant women experiencing homelessness. This denies women the opportunity to create and inhabit environments in which to provide for and nurture their babies. At a time when it is presumed women are planning for their babies to arrive and imagining their futures as mothers, the participants in this study described being preoccupied with not only surviving the privation of homelessness, but also with trying to secure appropriate housing. Donna, who had previously slept rough, moved into transitional housing a month before giving birth. She was still attending housing appointments after her baby was born:

She was not even three-days-old, and we were basically on transport, every day travelling to the city and back, so I barely get to spend any time with her and enjoy the newborn things because obviously appointments, travelling. I spent the majority of that time travelling. I couldn’t really complain ’cause I had a roof over my head, I guess. You just had to do whatever you had to do.

Trying to secure housing was not only destabilising for Donna, it also took time away from bonding with her baby and enjoying new motherhood. Donna’s experience highlights how the structural oppressions that devalue certain women who are pregnant are reproduced in the homeless field whereby their accrual of nurturing capital (Savage, 2022) is undermined and their legitimacy as mothers-to-be is damaged by the housing system’s failure to recognise and respond to impending motherhood sufficiently.

A particular challenge noted by the participants was the lack of uniformity among housing providers in accounting for pregnancy, if at all, in service provision. In the state of Victoria, where this study was conducted, there is no consistent point in time across housing providers when the gestation period is taken into account in the allocation of family accommodation; typically, this only occurs late in pregnancy or following birth (Murray et al., 2018). The reason for this is lack of resources, which results in suitable housing being allocated to families with existing children to maximise use of limited housing supply (Murray et al., 2018). Hence, even in the homelessness field, mothering is informed by intersecting social structures that privilege and disadvantage different groups of women (Zufferey, 2020), with those who have children in their care receiving (relatively) greater recognition. While understandable within a severely under-resourced sector, the effect is a system that impedes pregnant women from inhabiting a safe and secure environment in which they can imagine and get ready for their lives as mothers.

Sarah and her partner sought support from a housing provider when they were forced to leave a share house due to expecting a baby. They subsequently stayed in a private rooming house before being admitted into specialist crisis accommodation housing six weeks before the baby’s due date. They were finally accepted for a public housing property three months after the baby’s birth. Sarah described the confusion and anxiety provoked by not having her pregnancy acknowledged by housing providers:

I thought [the private rooming house] will get us far enough through the pregnancy for [the housing provider] to be able to like seriously help us. [. . .] Until you’re over six months pregnant there’s very little that they can do for you. Yeah so – but by that stage of your pregnancy you’re like I don’t really have that much longer to go and you start to get really nervous about ‘where am I going to end up?’ [. . .] They can’t guarantee that they’re going to move you somewhere that’s safe until your baby is actually born, which is the most stressful idea.

The systemic problem of not being allocated long-term housing in a timely way increased the pressure Sarah and her partner felt to demonstrate their worthiness as reliable tenants. This brings to the fore, as argued by Skeggs (2004a, p. 75), ‘what can be exchangeable, propertizable, exploitable, appropriable, and what can be used as a resource or asset’. That Sarah and her partner endured several months in a substandard private rooming house to prove their exchange value, the only accommodation they could afford, demonstrates how capital can be enabled or constrained according to value regimes in the symbolic homeless economy. A ramification of this housing instability and of needing to prove herself as worthy in this economy was the further compromising of Sarah’s preparation for motherhood: she could not foresee where she was ‘going to end up’.

In contrast, receiving permanent housing well before her baby’s due date freed Melanie from much of the stress and anxiety the participants in more acute housing stress had to endure. This provided the conditions for supporting greater subjectivity stability for Melanie as a mother-to-be:

I was extremely lucky to – I had time before my baby was due to settle and prepare and nest, I suppose. [. . .] I can’t imagine not having – ’cause I was so – like pulling her clothes out and refolding them 10 times before she arrived, it’s just such a natural part of it and I think it’s something that every mum should be able to experience and that sucks that some mums can’t.

Being afforded permanent housing meant that while facing impending motherhood Melanie was able to consciously and intentionally prepare for motherhood. Housing was so integral to Melanie’s subjectivity construction that, as she described, she could not imagine how she would have prepared for motherhood without it. As Skeggs (2004a) contends, for a subject position to achieve legitimacy, it requires an identifiable public value. The acquisition of housing signified that Melanie (and her pregnancy) had received at least a degree of recognition from the institutional structures that regarded her as worthy of support. Permanent housing and the subjectivity stability it fostered gave Melanie ‘time before my baby was due to settle and prepare and nest’. Having a place to call home also allowed Melanie to ‘mentally prepare’ for motherhood. It also meant that, in the lead up to the birth of her baby, Melanie had the capacity to contemplate questions such as ‘who are they going to be?’ and ‘how can I be the best parent?’ and thus to begin constructing her maternal identity.

Becoming a mother and feelings of shame

The connection between respectability, social position and legitimacy – foundations of Skeggs’ (1997) subjectivity construction framework – was intrinsic to the participants’ formation of mothering subjectivities. Women experiencing homelessness can carry pejorative associations of unbridled sexuality (Laverty, 2017) – a situation that is amplified for women of colour whereby sexualised stereotypes are applied differently to white and black women – of which becoming pregnant is emblematic. Banister et al. (2016) argue in relation to young working-class women that ‘motherhood sets up a contradictory and more threatening social position’, in contrast with many others for whom social position is reinforced (p. 653). Respectability, therefore, is largely a concern for those who feel its absence rather than those who ‘do not have to prove it’ (Skeggs, 1997, p. 1). Pregnant and parenting women experiencing homelessness start from a position of deficit, or lack of respectability, and therefore must actively contest these negative associations, which call into question their moral standing as ‘good’ mothers. ‘Knowing’, argues Skeggs (1997, p. 29), ‘is always mediated through the discourses available to us to interpret and understand our experiences’. The participants held ideas, informed by dominant discourses, of what constituted ‘good’ motherhood and often considered themselves lacking due to homelessness, resulting in a sense of shame for not meeting these standards.

Carolyn, who was eight-months pregnant, was living in public housing and had extensive experiences of homelessness dating from her teenage years. She was living in emergency accommodation due to intimate partner violence when she found out she was pregnant, and her partner, with whom she was still in a relationship, was incarcerated shortly after. Carolyn had two children in foster care and had previously experienced a still birth. She specifically associated the stress of being homeless as a burden that would have to be endured by her baby, a burden for which she felt responsible. For Carolyn, then, becoming a mother was shaped by the possibility that she would be the trigger for her child experiencing lifelong mental health problems, or even be the cause of the baby dying in utero:

I’m going to stress myself out too much and bub’s going to die [. . .] or this baby’s going to survive but she’s going to be filled with all these negative chemicals, these brain chemicals of anxiety, depression, stress, all this stuff, she’s not going to get the positive chemicals. [. . .] Then that’s going to start a similar like mental health lifestyle for her, if she’s born with that excessive amount of chemicals then when she gets older that chemical imbalance is going to be there and like I kept saying to them I don’t want my child to be like me. [. . .] Listen, I don’t want my baby waking up as an adult every day wanting to die because they’ve got to take pills and they’ve got to do this and do that and like have depression.

Regardless of social standing, all mothers navigate the shifting terrain of the ‘good’ mothering subject position. However, the current favouring of intensive mothering through devotion to the maternal role regulates women’s behaviour and reinforces class hierarchies (Kokanović et al., 2018, p. 151). Discourses of good mothering do not include homelessness, and without the nurturing capital (Savage, 2022) associated with class advantage, mothers experiencing homelessness have few opportunities to meet societal expectations. Failure to do so creates subjectivity instability through a sense of shame because, as Skeggs (2011) reminds us, those without exchange value are ‘the abject, the use-less subject who only consists of lacks and gaps, voids and deficiencies’ (p. 503). Carolyn’s sense of shame for possible poor birth outcomes was compounded by having used drugs during her pregnancy, which she attributed to causing the previous still birth. Alcohol and other drug use during pregnancy was a distinct source of shame for other participants, too. Jenna, for example, spoke about how the combination of alcohol use and intimate partner violence prohibited her from acknowledging the pregnancy and therefore accessing antenatal support, which she feared had harmed her baby. Despite entering drug rehabilitation prior to her baby’s birth, and subsequently parenting her child successfully, feelings of shame due to previous homelessness and AOD use and the potential effects on the baby persisted:

I was never sober and never not in a violent situation to actually go ‘I’m pregnant, can you help me?’ That never happened. I was either drunk or I was either bruised up, black eye. [. . .] When I started sobering up and I went into detox, that’s when it kicked in, ‘I’m pregnant, I’m having a baby’ and I was just a mess because I felt terrible about what I’ve done and I still do. [. . .] I went to the hospital, I got my blood tests done, I got everything done, I did everything properly, went on vitamins, I did everything properly for the last six weeks but it still is not good enough in my heart. I get him checked for foetal alcohol syndrome every couple of months, he’s got nothing.

Being unable to provide ‘appropriately’ for one’s child ‘tangibly and intangibly’ due to homelessness can provoke feelings of shame (Kirkman et al., 2015, p. 735). Shame due to homelessness, despite stemming from structural oppression, is an individualised and embodied process that emanates from the subjective core. The bodily inscription of Jenna’s circumstances – intoxication, injury and pregnancy – marked her as unruly and thus lacking respectability, amplifying the abjectness of homelessness. Moreover, there is the physical transformation whereby the maternalising body alters how others respond, placing women under more intense scrutiny. Within western discourses that emphasise children’s innocence and vulnerability, and the prioritisation of their welfare, mothers whose bodies and behaviour are not seen as ‘in the best interests of the child’ (Gordon, 2008, p. 322) due to, for instance, managing the adversity of homelessness, are also subjected to greater surveillance and contempt. The experiences of the participants in this study reinforce the point that motherhood only holds societal value for certain groups.

The participants spoke of actively needing to contest the lack of respectability associated with homelessness and mothering even after long-term housing had been secured and there were no remaining overt signifiers of homelessness. Sarah, whose baby was now 15 months old, discussed her experience of joining a parents’ group:

All of the mothers in that group have no idea that we’re in public housing. They’re like rich mums and that’s fine, it’s totally cool but it’s also like a point of shame. Like I don’t want anyone to know that I live in public housing, they won’t let their kid play with my kid like I feel like it’s kind of like that. [. . .] If they’re going to judge you for that then they’re not going to be your friend and that’s cool but it’s still a very hard like bridge to cross. So yeah, it’s been really – I don’t know, I feel so like disconnected from everything at the moment. Sorry. [. . .] But I don’t know, it just feels like I’m not being 100% upfront with somebody about who I am. [. . .] I’ve tried being upfront about who I am, honest about it all and a lot of the times it hasn’t gone as planned and people change the way that they behave towards you.

Mothering subjectivities that are formed through homelessness do not immediately stabilise when housing is secured, and feelings of shame can be difficult to shift. Skeggs’ (1997, p. 94) contention that ‘Identities are continually in the process of being re-produced as responses to social positions, through access to representational systems and in the conversion of forms of capital’ was made clear by Sarah’s experience of joining a parenting group. Despite living in public housing, she felt obliged to negotiate her subject position as a ‘good’ mother while concealing the homeless conditions that had informed the processes of becoming a mother, creating subjectivity instability and leaving her feeling ‘disconnected’. Sarah’s experience exemplifies Banister et al.’s (2016, p. 655) argument that, ‘The interaction of different identity categories can result in complex and contradictory social positioning and associated identity work, contrasting with the reinforcing social positioning of middle-class new mothers.’ Not only did Sarah feel obliged to conceal that she had previously been homeless, she also did not disclose that she was living in public housing. This was prompted by her fear of being judged for poor parenting and that the revelation of her circumstances could be detrimental to how the other parents would interact with her and her child, a fear that was not unfounded based on previous encounters. Although Sarah undertook this strategy as a protective measure, it also had the contrary effect of causing Sarah to feel ‘disconnected from everything’ as she felt unable to be ‘100%’ herself.

The labour of becoming a mother without a home

The hardship of homelessness, inadequate housing resources and the inherent shame of being homeless require women to undertake additional and invisible labour to manage their difficult conditions and to meet the ideal of ‘good’ motherhood. Skeggs (2011) emphasises how material conditions circumscribe the possibilities for the value accrual. For the participants, resolving the structural barriers to becoming a good mother and improving their mothering capital involved managing their circumstances through ongoing individual work. This labour does not necessarily reflect a solidarity with dominant discourses of mothering, it can also signify exclusion from them. In oppressive circumstances, women may activate their limited capital not only to manage their current difficulties, but also to avoid further decline in their material and cultural conditions (Bullen & Kenway, 2005). Bianca, for example, was living in a car with her partner when she found out she was pregnant. She described how being homeless initially made the possibility of motherhood unfathomable to the extent that despite being ‘against abortions’ for herself, her situation provoked the consideration of this option. Nevertheless, previous fertility problems including a miscarriage prompted Bianca to proceed with the pregnancy. Despite becoming pregnant in conditions where Bianca perceived having a baby would likely produce a greater deterioration in her circumstances, she decided to contest her exclusion from dominant mothering discourses and to work at becoming a good mother. Now 35-weeks pregnant, Bianca was living with her partner in transitional housing:

I was like oh shit, we’re in the car. What do we do? Do I keep it? Then like I’m so against abortions so like I feel abortions should happen if they need to happen, if – yeah, I guess if they need to happen. [. . .] I was told that I could never have kids, to being pregnant, having a miscarriage, and then being pregnant again all within like two months of miscarriage and pregnancy, I was like no, I’m keeping it. Don’t care what situation I’m in I will find somewhere before the baby’s born and that was my goal. Here I am, my goal come true. So I worked my arse off until I got somewhere.

Jenna, too, spoke of the extra labour involved in becoming a mother while homeless. For Jenna, creating a safe and secure environment in which to raise a child involved not only getting sustainable housing, it also required her to access support to address her alcohol consumption. Jenna needed support to detoxify from alcohol while pregnant, as well as access to rehabilitation services to assist with ongoing sobriety. This was not any easy process, with support only occurring because Jenna ‘demanded help’:

It’s ’cause I put my foot down and I demanded help, I demanded it. I was very serious about it, ‘I want to go into rehab. I’m not leaving this detox until I get into rehab.’ I really put my foot down and I was calling places – I was doing it myself. [. . .] I’m pretty good at putting it all behind me ’cause I’ve got a beautiful son and when I’m with him I just – I don’t think about that crap. When I talk about it like I’ll still think about it for maybe half an hour when we finish talking but then I’ll be – I’ll snap out of it. I’m good at that now. I won’t dwell on it. Because then he’ll feel it and then I don’t want that and it’s just best for me to just be a happy mum.

Despite the challenges she had overcome, Jenna spoke about the importance of not ruminating on her prior circumstances. The shame associated with becoming a mother while homeless can be difficult to shift, but it is not impossible. Jenna described focusing on being ‘a happy mum’ rather than dwelling on the past. Even so, changing routines and feeling comfortable in new environments takes work. Positioning, and recognition, informs responses and is fundamental in processes of subjectivity construction (Skeggs, 1997, p. 4). For Donna, homelessness, and its associations with drug use and crime, meant that becoming a mother – ‘doing normal things’ – did not come naturally. As Skeggs (1997) notes, in relation to working-class women, recognition is intrinsically linked with value judgements, and women ‘are constantly aware of the judgements of real and imaginary others’ (p. 4). Donna expressed feeling anxious that she was perceptibly marked by her past experiences of homelessness and the associated drug use and that she would therefore be judged in these new environments for not belonging. Nonetheless, she still carried out this labour as she understood it as fundamental to making the transition to motherhood.

I started preparing myself, having her, getting stuff that I needed, actually making some time to treat myself to doing normal things instead of driving around, being on drugs, doing crime. It was kind of weird even walking through the shops and like I had this anxiety [. . .] ’cause I thought people’d judge me like I look like one of those junkies.

The additional work involved for women experiencing homelessness to become mothers is not labour that is recognised according to intensive mothering discourses that prioritise selflessness and nurturing (Kokanović et al., 2018); yet, the participants were primarily motivated to make changes in their lives, such as accessing housing services and seeking assistance with alcohol and/or drug use precisely for their babies’ wellbeing. Nor would this type of labour fit with the material and emotional investment in neoliberal discourses of working mothers (McRobbie, 2013); yet, the participants wanted to provide for and bond with their babies, and worked hard to achieve this. The participants described undertaking this labour in the context of a lack of affordable housing, an under-resourced homelessness sector, and a support service sector (for example, alcohol and other drug services) that was in short supply. This labour was carried out in spite of the structural and systemic failures they had endured, which was exhibited in how they framed their sense of individual responsibility for managing their circumstances. Bianca, for example, ‘worked my arse off’, Jenna ‘demanded help’, and Donna ‘started preparing myself’.

Notwithstanding the impediments involved, these participants provided clear examples of contesting negative connotations of mothering without a home. The outcome of this labour was validated through the significant life changes they had made in becoming mothers that defied the association of homelessness with ‘poor’ parenting practices. Rich (1976) argues that motherhood can offer power to women that was previously unavailable under patriarchy; for participants in this study, the labour of becoming a mother involved a reconsideration and adjustment of subject positions that, in the main, was affirming and indeed transformative. Likewise, Hill Collins (2021) points out in relation to women of colour that choosing to be a mother can be a way to challenge institutional discrimination. This ethos was evident in our study with all but one of the participants who had given birth at the time of the interview – in the face of multiple structural oppressions – having retained custody of their babies. Moreover, despite the hardship of homelessness, insufficient institutional support, and feelings of shame for not adhering to dominant discourses of ‘good’ mothering, the participants for the most part integrated narratives of hope and change into their life stories of becoming mothers: mothering offered a turning point. As Jenna articulated, in relation to overcoming the (ongoing) adversity of homelessness: ‘I’ve got this beautiful son and when I’m with him I just – I don’t think about that crap.’ These narratives indicate that, notwithstanding the fundamental importance of secure housing, subjectivities are flexible, contestation of discourse is possible, and becoming a mother can be transformative – beyond having a child – for women who have experienced homelessness.

Conclusion

Skeggs’ legacy of bringing to light intersections of class and gender continues to offer a meaningful lens through which to interrogate structural disadvantage. Formations of Class and Gender remains at the forefront of sociological analysis as scholars continue to grapple with questions of structure and agency, privilege and oppression, and identity. Skeggs’ ideas remain fresh, and her empirical and theoretical contributions can and are being explored by new generations of scholars in novel and exciting ways. In this article, by focusing on the processes through which women experiencing homelessness become mothers, we have demonstrated how Skeggs’ conceptual framework of subjectivity construction has applicability to the under-researched domain of homelessness and mothering. Specifically, we have shown how a lack of housing informs how women generate mothering subjectivities. This critical barrier denies women the opportunity to create and inhabit safe and secure environments to provide for and nurture their babies. Insecure housing and social exclusion in the homeless field produce a destabilising influence undermining women’s legitimacy as mothers-to-be alongside their ability to envisage future lives as mothers. In contrast, the provision of secure housing conveys institutional recognition of pregnant women as worthy of support and by extension fosters subjectivity stability – enabling preparation for motherhood and the associated identity development. The subjectivities of women experiencing homelessness are further mediated by good mothering discourses, which too often mark them as lacking respectability, particularly those whose homelessness is compounded by alcohol and other drug use and exposure to violence. Despite the structural origins of their oppression, this produces emotions of shame and subjective instability that is often sustained, even after housing is stabilised. This reinforces that motherhood is only afforded social value when it meets respectable distinctions. Inadequate housing resources, alongside the shame associated with being homeless, requires women to undertake ongoing work to negotiate conditions of hardship and to meet the ideal of ‘good’ motherhood. While this labour often remains invisible, and unrecognised, the narratives discussed here indicate that women are able to contest the negative discourses associated with homeless mothering. This opens up new spaces to challenge contradictory discourses of ‘good’ mothering and offers insight into the complex dynamics of becoming a mother without a home.