Negotiating working motherhood and doing work from home at the intersection of class, gender and crisis in India

Abstract

The paper explores the experiences of Indian middle-class and upper-middle-class women managing working motherhood in the context of pandemic-induced remote work. The increased paid and unpaid work during the COVID-19 crisis amplified the tensions between becoming a ‘good mother’ and an ‘ideal worker’. The collapsed boundaries between work and home, resulting from flexible work that gained momentum in the pandemic, threatened the carefully negotiated boundaries by women. Using an interpretive qualitative approach, the present study investigates how women negotiated the meaning of working motherhood in the face of frequent boundary violations. The findings show how classed and neoliberal maternal subjectivities of Indian working women manifested during the crisis. When forced to integrate maternal with professional, working mothers claimed identities that aligned with middle-class values that were appropriately modern and global, at the same time rooted in patriarchy. Concurrently, the findings reveal the classed and gendered nature of remote work, which manifests as an extension of gendered organization and neoliberal ideology within the homes of working mothers, fortifying their role as caregivers.