Mothers' emotional care work in education and its moral imperative

Abstract

This paper seeks to build on feminist and egalitarian critiques of the traditional allocation of care work to mothers, particularly in relation to understandings of educational care work. It seeks to locate the emotional support work carried out by mothers in the educational field within their daily routines of care, and to make visible the inalienable nature of this gendered work. The paper draws on key findings from an in‐depth qualitative study carried out with a sample of 25 mothers in Ireland. It explores mothers' perspectives and understandings of emotional caring within their diverse social positionings, at the time of their children's transfer to second‐level education. The findings suggest that mothers, irrespective of their differences, are subject to a moral order of care that necessitates the performance of a great deal of emotional work. This moral imperative is ubiquitous, operating through deeply internalized gender ideologies, and mothers' understandings of care as love. It cements mothers as moral workers, which frees men for other activities. This is a serious issue for women's equality and development, one that must be heard beyond the private space of the home, one that must claim space in public discourse, including the field of education.

Acknowledgements

I would like to express thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions on this paper. I would also like to thank colleagues for their support in this research, The Gender Equality Unit of DES for grant aid, Professor Kathleen Lynch of Equality Studies at UCD for ongoing support, and Maggie Feeley and Anne Lodge who read and commented on a first draft of this paper.

Notes

1. Until 1973 there was a marriage ban in operation in Ireland in the public service requiring women to leave their paid employment upon marriage. Even though the marriage ban was removed, traditional gender roles and conceptions of mothering are still upheld in the Irish Constitution. Moreover, in the 1980s until the 1990s Ireland experienced a serious economic recession with unprecedented levels of unemployment. It is only in the last two decades that Irish mothers have increasingly entered/remained in paid employment, and proportionately it is younger mothers with school‐going children who particularly are engaged in paid work.

2. Foucault (1987) in The uses of pleasure (chapters 1–3) discusses the significance of a sense of a moral self to our identity. While we can comply with rules and moral codes in performing moral actions, there is also a deeper sense in which we construct ourselves as moral subjects in developing attitudes or dispositions to act in the interests of good. This may be understood as an ascetics of moral subjectification.

3. In Ireland labour statistics suggest that the majority of married women with children are engaged in part time work (Labour Force Survey, 1996). Moreover, the difficulty of finding middle class women not engaged in paid work with strong care dimensions reflects the reality of employment for women in Ireland (Fahey et al., 2000).

4. Giddens (2001) suggests that in late modernity women have developed the capacity and been socialized to build and construct themselves in relation to love narratives that describe their emotional lives. In general, men have not been socialized in this way and cannot construct their identities relative to an emotional narrative.