‘I’m so much more myself now, coming back to work’ - working class mothers, paid work and childcare.



Mothering and work

The government message that being part of the labour market should be a positive and
defining aspect of every adult’s life has thus been taken aboard by many of the
mothers we interviewed. In this framing, work provides diversity and offers an
independent adult identity as compared to the sameness and lack of autonomy and
status experienced by many mothers, when caring for their young children. As we
mentioned above, Duncan and Edwards (1999; Duncan et al. 2003) and Reynolds
(2001; 2005) offer a concept which emphasises paid employment as being an integral
part to ‘good’ mothering. Thus we examined our data to see whether and how the
mothers in our sample described their paid work as benefiting their children. It is
worth pointing out that the inner urban setting of our research, with its heterogeneous
population and (at the time) ready availability of paid work, is likely to shape the
overall picture of attitudes towards working mothers which we describe here. More
traditional attitudes towards mothers’ paid employment may well be found in other
locations where communities lack a relatively buoyant local economy or are more
homogenous.

Duncan and Edwards and Reynolds argue for a link between mothers’ attitudes and
practice as to the acceptable balance between paid work and home life and mothers’
ethnic backgrounds. Similarly, ethnicity also emerges as an interesting variable in our
study. In our, admittedly small sample of 70 families, just over half (55%) of the
white mothers were in employment, the same proportion as the black mothers in the
study (16 out of 29 white mothers and 15 out of 27 black mothers, see appendix table
3). However, the white group of respondents were twice as likely not to be in paid

15



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