The narratives and comments presented in this article are drawn from material
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presented shows a group of middle-class women engaged in a collective and individual
struggle to come to terms with their new role as mothers. Their utterances reveal
the ways in which they conceived of their identities as women prior to motherhood -
positive views of themselves in the world that (national) cultural/societal
expectations relating to motherhood unexpectedly threatened to undermine. Alcohol,
an important symbolic constituent in their identities as young (childless) women,
was important again in establishing and communicating their agency in relation to
their performance of their roles as mothers, an agency that allowed them to
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