Abstract
In her first book, entitled Mothering in the Age of Neoliberalism, editor and author Melinda Vandenbeld Giles presents 20 different cases of mothering in the global neoliberal context; each is written up as a short chapter. The purpose of the volume is to center mothers within neoliberal discourses in order to promote material change for mothers worldwide. The book is designed to contribute knowledge, bearing witness to struggles for economic justice and demands for change, as well as to document the strength and resiliency of mothers around the world. Giles sees this project as unique in that it does not focus specifically on low-income and minority mothers, but instead captures a broader view of how mothers affect and are affected by neoliberalism. The chapter authors are established and emerging scholars, mostly from Canada and the USA. Giles is a feminist activist, mother, and doctoral student in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Toronto. I want to summarize the key features of the volume, explore what early childhood educators and researchers might learn from this book, and comment on a few of its weaknesses as well.
First, some general comments on the book and its structure. The book cover sports the beautiful art of Giles’s seven-year-old daughter, Maya. Through her colorful drawing, Maya invites prospective readers to look more carefully at the intricate details of the diverse mothers whose labor and discourses support and shape the current global sociopolitical climate of neoliberalism. In the weighty and somewhat repetitive introductory chapter, Giles explains her conception of mothering as one that is broad and multiple, yet that recognizes the gendered reality of mothering globally. She defines neoliberalism as a system that “recognizes only individual market actors” (3) and that, contradictorily, places mothers at its moral core. In the introduction, Giles also outlines the format of the book. She explains the conceptual orientation towards the local. The project is one of collecting local cases that are unified because they use feminist and sociocultural theoretical orientations, as well as feminist ethnographic methods, to show the particular and personal details about how neoliberalism affects and is affected by mothers and mothering discourses and practices.
The remainder of the book is divided into four major sections, each organized to examine a different conceptual orientation towards neoliberalism. The first and longest section is about “Mothering and neoliberal labor” and is broken into two subsections: “Flexible labour and care work” (three chapters) and “The entrepreneurial mother” (three chapters). Specific topics in this section include migration and motherwork in Canada and the Philippines; balancing paid work and childcare in Ottawa; the role of doulas in mothercare in the USA; “yummy mummies” and mompreneurs in North America; sustainable motherhood in the USA; and mompreneurs in Trinidad and Tobago. The second section focuses on “Mothering and the neoliberal state” and is subdivided into a section on “Austerity and the silencing of mothers” (three chapters) and another section on “The making of ‘good’ neoliberal subjects” (four chapters). The chapter topics in the second section are homeless mothers in Ontario; the depoliticization of motherhood in Australia; public policy exclusion of mothers in the UK; “welfare queens” and “anchor babies” in the USA; the media and children’s therapy markets in South Korea; maternal propriety and body politics in Turkey; and school choice in England. The third section is about “Neoliberalism and the nuclear family” (four chapters) and includes chapters about redefining single motherhood in the USA; religious mothering and “REAL” women in Canada; neoliberalism and its intersection with second-wave feminism in the USA; and deserving children and “risky” mothers in Canada. The final brief section centers on “Countering neoliberalism through maternal activism” (three chapters) and the chapters are about maternalism as a political strategy in Nigeria; maternal activism in Bhopal, India; and low-income mothers’ organizing in Canada.
There is not space in this review to describe all of the chapter content, but suffice it to say that more than half of the chapters have clear connections to early childhood scholarship. Here, I will describe the few chapters that I believe are most relatable. These are chapter 4, “‘Doing it all … and making it look easy!’: Yummy mummies, mompreneurs and the North American neoliberal crisis of the home,” by Gillian Anderson and Joseph G Moore; chapter 11, “‘Educating’ mothers through media: The therapy market in South Korea and the making of ‘deviant’ children,” by Jesook Song and Yoonhee Lee; and chapter 19, “Maternal activism in the international campaign for justice in Bhopal (ICJB), India,” by Reena Shadaan.
Chapter 4 details “yummy mummies” (middle- and upper-middle-class cosmopolitan women who eschew careers in the market for the home and project a “hip” and “fit” image of motherhood) and mompreneurs (who run mom-promoting businesses from home while raising their children and being involved parents). This work takes Sharon Hays’ (1996) cultural contradictions of motherhood to a whole new level, showing how time and space collapse into a new conception of motherhood. This is motherwork “eviscerating all structural realities,” which may powerfully serve to deflect public policy attention from the plight of poor and working-class mothers, who are ever more silenced by the heightened capability of “having it all” at home leveraged through the capacities of the shifting global marketplace (97). This context is important for early childhood educators and researchers to pay attention to, as this entrepreneurial and “professionalized” work of mothers at home may extend to reconceptualized notions of childcare and early education, such as more desirable forms of in-home childcare and liberal homeschooling.
For early childhood educators and scholars interested in how global discourses of neoliberalism contribute to the “culture of expertise” (Novinger et al., 2005) by relying on therapists and experts to fix “problem” children, Song and Lee deliver a very interesting chapter that adds nuance to that arena. These authors explain how the Asian debt crisis has contributed to mothering for self-entrepreneurship and upward class mobility by engaging the tools of education and market-driven therapies such as the wildly popular South Korean television show U-A-Dal (My Child Is Changed).
Researchers and educators who are interested in studying more about the context of mothers’/othermothers’ and children’s activism around the world will be inspired by the women and children of Bhopal, India, who have challenged environmental racism and gender boundaries by engaging a social-movement “flame” through a padyatra (“journey on foot”) to Delhi, walking 747 kilometers/464 miles in order to bring government and public attention to the people of Bhopal and the ongoing birth defects, disabilities, medical problems, and community effects caused by the pre-neoliberal 1984 Union Carbide disaster, in which more than 500,000 poor residents were devastated through chemical poisons. The mother and child activists were so determined to struggle for their community that, when their slippers wore out during the journey, they wrapped their feet in leaves and continued walking.
Regarding my positive evaluation of the text, most of the chapters provide thick local descriptions of mothering, and many provide snippets of interview data and observation showing the mothers’ voices and lived experiences. Overall, I enjoyed reading the book and have shared it with several doctoral students as part of guided independent studies on mothers and neoliberalism, and/or to help support their dissertation research. I have also found many new tidbits that will enrich my own theorizing in the early childhood context. As a researcher from the USA, I appreciated learning more about Canada; it seems that information about the Canadian context is not always widely dispersed in the literature—at least not as much as information about the USA and Britain. Likewise, compelling to me were the chapters from international settings like Trinidad and India, in which globalization and interconnected processes have powerful influences also mediated by mothers in unique cultural contexts.
While I do think that the pros of this book outweigh the cons and that many of the chapters would be of interest to early childhood researchers and advocates, I have several criticisms of this volume related to the content included in the project. First of all, the methodology description was missing from some chapters and not well developed in others. This is a problem for graduate students and new researchers seeking examples of feminist ethnography. To this end, I would have been more satisfied by a book with fewer chapters that were each a bit longer and more developed, especially in regard to methodology and data presentation. A second weakness is that some of the data/cases are older (e.g. from 2007). Because a goal was to highlight the context of mothering since the 1990s, I wonder what is new in the past nine years that has been missed because of the age of the cases. A third point is that the book would have been improved by including more chapters directly related to education. Only one author (Talia Esnard from Trinidad and Tobago) seemed to be affiliated with an education department. Educators bring a unique perspective to the study of mothering. There are some important mothering contexts in neoliberal globalism that have not been written about much and that would have added substantively to this volume. For example, motherwork in homeschooling and virtual school contexts is a rapidly growing area globally—not only in Canada and the USA, but also in many other nations (e.g. see Brabant, 2013; Guo-ping, 2014; Molnar, 2014; Olatunji, 2014; Rothermel, 2015; Sherfinski and Chesanko, 2016). Another important area not included in this book was mothers’ resistance to surveillance of children in schools—for example, the large-scale collection of medical information, test scores, and research data. Finally, expanding the final activism section might be a good project for future editions.
I also had some concerns about the scope of the project. Although one of the stated goals of the book was situating the issues across all mothers instead of targeting low-income and minority mothers, there were gaps in this framework. For example, there was no discussion of the elite mothers who are important players in social and cultural reproduction. Also, because demographic information about those studied was not included in some of the chapters, it was sometimes impossible to understand how the mothers presented in those chapters fit within the larger framework. Also, specific literature from early childhood was not cited much in the chapters when it was relevant and could have enhanced them.
A final critique is about the writing and organization. There is repetition of the unifying concepts in each section. However, a brief introduction to each section would scaffold readers and justify lightening up the introductory chapter. A large compilation like this is unlikely to be read straight through, and so the insertion of introductions would be useful for readers who have particular interests. As is expected when many authors have contributed to an edited volume, the writing styles are uneven. While most chapters were very readable, a couple of them were dense and dry.
The book brings up a number of important questions that may be of interest to other early childhood educators and scholars. These are: Are we (am I) still stuck on Sharon Hays (1996) and the same conceptions of cultural contradictions, even though time and space are continually being reconstituted in messy ways that are locally constructed while globally influenced? How might we become more mindful of the contemporary global realities related to mothering within neoliberalism as it pertains specifically to critical issues in early childhood? Are we doing enough? How might we better reach out and collaborate to produce scholarship that will benefit young children and their families? How might mothers’ stories of activism from below inspire more early childhood activism that is responsive to local contexts? How can teacher education support early childhood educators and mothers? (Is it our job to support mothers and, if so, what is the best way?) Is centering mothers and motherhood really the best approach for early childhood—in what contexts, how and to what degree? This volume, or at least many of its chapters, may help us to better approach these questions and to articulate new ones.