Abstract
The intention of this book is to explore the impact of a successful working mothers on the lives and career choices of their daughters. The interview data focus on the views of mothers who work(ed) in professional and managerial careers and their adult daughters (31 of the interviews), several of whom have gone on to become mothers themselves. Many of the interviewed women can be seen as pioneers representing women in the workplace and as such demonstrating women’s progress. The intergenerational work, based on 88 interviews conducted with middle-class professional women in the United Kingdom, is deeply grounded in the social science literature. Notable literatures are gender studies (gender identities and roles, and how these are constructed and ‘performed’), feminist work, the sociology of work and social construction of identities specifically in the form of motherhood, women, families, career and workplace cultures and how all these intersect.
The underpinning theoretical framework (described as conceptual pillars) draws attention to the (in general) man-made work culture in which women have had to operate and even now, while clearly things have changed across generations, the still assumed need for women to ‘fit in’, ‘be fixed’ and do ‘work on self’ in order to get on. From my own position, this is something I note regularly, even in mid-2018, as part of directing a leadership programme for senior women – women wanting to ‘buy’ or being ‘sent to get’, more confidence, self-belief and resilience in order that they can better survive the slings and arrows of the (still-male-dominated) workplace. Confidence and resilience are approached as a need-to-have commodity to get on in the workplace with little attention often paid to the systemic reasons why these attributes are (supposedly) lacking or have ‘taken a hit’ in the first place. It didn’t escape my attention that Armstrong’s sample of daughter interviewees appeared to gain their self-belief, that is, no immediate lack of resilience or confidence, from their fathers. Male validation seemingly still being hugely significant.
Across nine chapters (each concluding with a summary of key points), the book explores how daughters felt about having grown up with a mother mainly working full-time or close to full-time. The enquiry pursues how this has impacted on and influenced their own career choices, how ambitions for the workplace may be thwarted (often by trying to manage the pregnancy and child care dynamic) and how daughters hope to (or already do) combine work with their own desires to be or experience of being a mother. The contemporary culture of motherhood, with its emphasis on time spent at home versus time spent at work, is key to this. Equally, the crucial role of partners (husbands, fathers) within the dynamic is scrutinised. The book concludes with a summary of the findings which explore the tensions between current career ambition and expectations, maternal guilt (exacerbated by current social scripts around women and good parenting), ongoing gender inequalities within organisational culture and what this all means for the advancement of gender equality in careers. She submits 12 recommendations from the work and the insights it has offered, the most compelling for me being around advancing the narrative of equal moral personhood. I take this to mean at its most basic interpretation (and I may be wrong here), the notion that everybody (male or female) has an equal responsibility for playing their part in the ‘citizenship’ agenda which includes parity for all including how the work, domestic life and parenting roles are negotiated enacted.
I’m struck by the timeliness of the work given current attention to gender, inequality, power dynamics, male/female pay gap issues for women in the workplace and their (still) underrepresentation in senior leadership positions and positions of power. This social and corporate context, as suggested, is a significant backdrop to Armstrong’s work, that is, the combination of careers with motherhood (given the well-documented complexities of this) is at the crux of the book.
Significantly, her study illustrates that the ongoing inequalities experienced by women cannot be accounted for in terms of a backlash by daughters reacting against their mothers’ career choices and experiences in the workplace. ‘Something else’ is going on. This ‘something else’ is complex and difficult to crystallise but appears to include cultural and systemically entrenched (so virtually predetermined) expectations of women – their preferences, behaviours, roles, skills, abilities, strengths and limitations, as perceived through a ‘masculine’ lens.
As a working mother (with a working daughter), this was a fascinating read and I felt a deep recognition for many aspects of the ‘struggle’ documented here, particularly that associated with ‘lone mothering’. Equally I was fascinated by what I saw as the active choice of many of the daughters in the study to choose not to work full-time which I thought was possibly more nuanced than the ‘social script of good mothering and work/life balance / limited alternatives’ discussion offered. I wondered if it was more of a positive choice than comes across, that is, young women had deliberately chosen not to continue the ‘fight’ with often in-hospitable organisational cultures. They had, potentially, made an informed choice to exit (or never even apply for) the higher echelons of corporate culture because of what this, in reality, means in terms of expectations and behaviours and the price paid to comply or fight with these. Armstrong hints at this but I suggest it merits more attention than it gets. My concern here is that there is a feint suggestion in the work that some of the daughters are a bit passive – they don’t fully understand all their work options, for example, flexi-time, and have been overly influenced by a contemporary script around mothering. This may of course be true but equally, there may be other explanations.
I was also aware that Armstrong is working (as she makes clear) with a very particular familiar family setup/dynamics … women who have or have not been influenced by their career women / role model mothers and who in the main feel ‘well mothered’ as well as encouraged and empowered to be all they want to be in the workplace. Brava to this and how fortunate. I wonder what the legacy is for those women who have not been mothered at all.