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

Nisrine went back to work when her daughter was four months old and her mother
and mother-in-law took it in turns to visit from their home country for six months at a
time to look after the baby:

Yeah, [I wanted to go back to work] because the.. .it’s not that far from where
I live, and I’m quite friendly with my boss, and she knew that I would - I said
to her, ‘When my mum comes as soon as I can manage to come I’ll just start
working’. (Nisrine, one child, other ethnic background, married, ft beautician)

These women do not explain their involvement in the labour market as modelling a
positive role for their children as implied by the concept of the mother/worker
integral. Nor are they describing another of Duncan and Edwards categories,
‘primarily worker’ which suggests a prioritising of work over mothering. They are
workers for their children’s future and as new arrivals to the UK, they refer not to a
wider community of other mothers or families, but to the immediate and medium term
future of their own, often somewhat isolated, family unit. In the context of Duncan’s
(2005) writing on mothers’ choices around paid work as socially and culturally
created, as well as historically and geographically located, they find themselves in a
liminal space without being able to refer back to their own experience growing up or
refer forward to examples of other families just like them. Thus they make decisions
in relative isolation from the historical and geographic imperatives described by
Duncan.

Two other groups of mothers in our sample stood out as particularly closely defined
by their specific and long-established cultural and geographic locations. The ultra-

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