Higher Stakes: Generational Differences in Mother and Daughters’ Feelings about Combining Motherhood with a Career

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to illuminate differences in feelings and attitudes about managing motherhood and work between career women and their adult daughters. Intergenerational narrative interviews with 30 mother and daughter pairs are used to explore the relative influences of contemporary motherhood culture and the experience of being mothered by a woman who also worked full-time or close to full-time in a professional or managerial career. Almost all the daughters felt well-mothered and planned or had embarked upon a high-status career path. Despite this, a clear majority did not want to emulate their mothers and instead embraced a dominant idea that part-time work offers ‘the best of both worlds’. The daughters are strongly influenced by the contemporary culture of motherhood with its growing emphasis on ‘balance’ (measured by time), individualisation and parental determinism. It appears that the stakes have been raised to make it feel too risky to one’s child’s well-being and progress to emulate the more pragmatic attitude to combining work and motherhood demonstrated by many of their own mothers. Much research demonstrates that part-time work presents strong barriers both to career satisfaction and progress. This reinforces the need for organisations to offer more genuinely flexible ways of working in senior roles and for policy initiatives to facilitate the greater involvement of fathers in caring for their children. For individuals, I advocate challenging the idea of measuring good mothering by ‘balanced’ hours spent at work and at home.