The ‘stay-at-home’ mother, postfeminism and neoliberalism: Content analysis of UK news coverage

Abstract

This article analyzes the construction in the UK media of the ‘stay-at-home mother’, a maternal figure who received increasing visibility during the recession and its aftermath. Based on a content analysis of UK national newspaper coverage of stay-at-home mothers (2008–2013), this article argues that the stay-at-home mother emerges from its press coverage as a neoliberal postfeminist subject. On the one hand, the coverage complicates claims about antifeminist backlash and women’s harking back to passive femininity. On the other hand, it fails significantly to undermine maternal femininity’s entanglement with neoliberalism, and reinforces the process described by McRobbie as ‘disarticulation’, by separating between middle-class mothers and working-class mothers.