Gender, Mothering And Relational Work

Abstract

Relationships are fundamental to the work of teachers, nurses and social workers. Women by and large staff these occupations which are also called ‘relationship work’. In this article we compare the feminine ideal (often implicitly derived from a maternal ideal) with the ideal held by female relation workers. We suggest that taken for granted ideals of perfectionism in mothering are carried into relation work by the female relation workers themselves and the society at large. As a consequence, female relationship workers have a constrained portrait of themselves, leaving little opportunity and permission to explore the difficult emotional and situational complexities that they experience in their professional practice. Psychoanalytic and feminist perspectives allow challenging of these constraining implicit ideals. We argue the need for an expanded ideal that allows for negative feelings, creativity and uncertainty in professional relationships.

Keywords:

• gender
• professional relationships
• relation work
• object relations theory
• feminine ideal
• professional development

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a 12-month (2008/2009) Canadian government Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship (a programme in Foreign Affairs and International Trade-Canada) at McGill University, Montreal, Canada for Ellen Ramvi.

Notes

¹ This comparison has a long tradition in object relations theory (e.g. Klein, 1959; Money-Kyrle, 1961; Salzberg-Wittenberg, 1970).

² The researcher spent 326 hours over 99 days in fieldwork. Twelve individual teacher interviews were conducted at one school (some of them several times, eight women and four men), and eight individual teachers at the other school (some of them several times, seven women and one man). Four focus groups were also conducted, two at each school.

³ PISA: The OECD Programme for International Student Assessment.

⁴ Vanheule and Verhaeghe have studied professional burnout (Vanheule et al., 2003; Vanheule & Verhaeghe, 2004) from a Lacanien point of view of intersubjectivity.