Abstract
We often think of our home and work lives as occupying separate spheres. But for me, Jill Armstrong’s ‘Like Mother, Like Daughter? How Career Women Influence their Daughters’ Ambition’ pulls them together. In her monograph, Armstrong investigates how mothers’ professional and managerial careers influence their daughters’ career thinking and career-making. As I read, I reflected on my research into women’s careers in light of my home life; and at the same time, I thought more deeply about my relationship with my two daughters and the impact of my academic career on their working lives. And what a pleasure this has been.
Armstrong’s qualitative study is based on fieldwork conducted with 30 mother–daughter pairs. The fact that some of her daughters were also mothers brought ‘daughter mothers’ and grandmothers into the mix. Armstrong sought to understand something of her respondents’ lived experience (Van Manaan, 1988): how they ‘self-reflexively ascrib[ed] meaning to experiences’ (p. 27). The result is a fascinating exploration of mother–daughter dynamics, the interplay of home and work lives, and of how individual and family biographies unfold across generations.
The scene opens with Rose, a university student whose mother is a public sector CEO:
I’m really interested in what my mum does. I really admire her career … If I were to have a career anywhere near as good as hers, I’d be very happy. Half as good.
In these few lines, Rose introduces some of Armstrong’s main concerns: how much daughters know about their mothers’ careers and how they know it; how mothers shape their daughters’ careers; the extent to which daughters measure and judge their own career lives against their mothers’ lives; and lurking in the background are questions about what counts as ‘good’, and even feasible, at a particular moment in time. Armstrong stays with Rose for a full two pages, as she does with other respondents along the way. Stylistically this is interesting and effective. Rather than moving between decontextualized fragments, she offers rich extracts from her participants. In the course of our reading, we get to know these women and begin to understand a bit about what they have done, and what it means to them to have done it this way.
Armstrong introduces four conceptual pillars on which her intergenerational study is based: a focus on the interplay of historical and biographical time; a notion of the family as a ‘site of social practices and a receptacle for memories’ (p. 7); values as transmitted and transformed across generations; and the intersection of gender and generation. These pillars are woven throughout the text and provide some tantalizing insights. For example, as the narrative progresses, we see how cultural scripts on motherhood evolve. In Chapter 2, Armstrong focuses on daughters’ accounts of being mothered by women who worked long hours. Five key themes that coalesced in daughters’ feelings of being ‘well-mothered’: the importance of the household routine; mothers’ attending important events; being cared for at home after school; mothers being fully present when at home; and the importance of daughters’ independence.
However, as the daughters are becoming mothers, they are confronting a different script. Contemporary imperatives, variously termed ‘parental determinism’ (Furedi, 2002) and ‘intensive parenting’ (Hays, 1996) see parents (mothers in particular) as responsible for their children’s well-being and success. Instead of nurturing, caring and socializing, today’s good mothers plan and monitor. And like projects to be managed, mothers are scrutinized and harshly judged when their children do not appear to measure up. Notwithstanding their admiration for their mothers’ career success, such changes appear to be having profound consequences for daughters’ career thinking and acting.
There is clearly a great deal to contemplate, savor, and wonder about here. However, a misgiving is that although Armstrong’s pillars offer rich theoretical possibilities, to my mind these are not always fully realized. I offer two examples.
First, in Chapter 5, Armstrong explores ambition, an issue which I see as associated with her third and/or fourth pillars. Although many mothers in the sample had achieved prestigious and senior positions, they were reticent to talk about ambition or success. This gap between action and talk, and the importance but relative absence of the latter, recurs at several points in the text. These are great data. However, on a conceptual level, this mismatch between what respondents’ action and talk might have been more fully developed. Indeed, studies such as (Benschop et al., 2013) analysis of discourses of ambition does just this—highlighting the relationship of these discourses with cultural norms and their implicit gender asymmetries. Armstrong’s findings are enhanced by reference to her theoretical scaffolding. Conversely, it would be interesting to learn what insights they might offer into the workings of the pillars themselves.
Second, to me, one of Armstrong’s compelling themes concerns the ongoing dialogue between historical and biographical time. An aspect of the former that Armstrong draws on extensively is feminist thinking. In the accounts she heard, there is a striking contradiction between mothers who worked long hours with full-time contracts and many daughters who upon becoming mothers (or anticipating motherhood) preferred to work part-time. She explores this pattern in relation to first and third wave feminist scripts. While many of the mothers in the sample had been influenced by first wave, liberal perspectives that highlighted structural inequities in organizations and sought to challenge the notion of the mother as primary carer, daughter–mothers were more influenced by third wave, post-feminist scripts of individualism, choice, and intensive parenting. Notably, notwithstanding the challenges they had faced, Armstrong’s mothers felt that things were harder for their daughters.
This is certainly a vivid example of the confluence of historical and biographical time. However, it would have been exciting to see what theoretical contributions these empirical findings might offer. One approach would be to more fully interrogate the concept of ‘cultural script’ itself. Armstrong uses the concept extensively but does not fully examine its possibilities, or the relationship between structure and agency that underpins it (Barley and Tolbert, 1997; Heracleous and Hendry, 2000). Such considerations could lead to new insights about how these competing scripts work on people’s ‘career imaginations’ (Cohen, 2014) such that certain trajectories become feasible, legitimate, and even desirable, while others are dismissed, or even proscribed.
In the last chapter, Armstrong considers implications of her study for families, organizations, and policy. As the daughters in the study became mothers, many significantly reduced their working hours in an attempt to have ‘“ the best of both worlds”—meaning good motherhood is being equated with finding an (elusive) optimum balance between hours spent at home versus hours spent in the workplace’ (p. 175). Armstrong calls for a shift in focus from the individual to the organization, greater structural flexibility and, above all, for highly skilled jobs to be re-thought and redesigned to better accommodate the lives of a diverse workforce. This way, at home and at work, mothers can be good enough.