Enacting motherhood: time and social change in Chile

Abstract

Motherhood is changing. An increasing number of women are deciding to remain childless, having fewer children, postponing their transition to motherhood, and simultaneously pursuing careers. These changes are deeply embedded in a reconfiguration of the times of motherhood. Although the intersection of motherhood and time has been widely acknowledged by gender and feminist studies, less attention has been paid to how in the making of motherhood women reproduce, negotiate and subvert time mandates and norms. This article aims to underscore the importance of time and how it relates to the enactment of motherhood in contemporary societies by analysing the planning, timing, sequencing, and simultaneity of the transition to motherhood in Chile. Through the analysis of 15 life story interviews with urban women from Santiago de Chile, this article addresses the intersection between social change, motherhood and time by showing how in the making of the transitions to motherhood women reproduce, negotiate and subvert traditional and emergent cultural mandates and social norms on the times of motherhood.

Keywords:

• Motherhood
• time
• social change
• Chile

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding

This work was supported by Comisión Nacional de Investigación Cientifica y Tecnológica (CONICYT) Chile [grant Fondecyt N°1110402], and under the Programme Becas de Magíster en el Extranjero Becas Chile.

Acknowledgements

This article presents part of the findings of my MPhil dissertation ‘Enacting motherhood: Self and temporality in the life course of urban women from Santiago de Chile’, submitted to the Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge. I would like to thank Pedro Güell for the encouragement to work on time and for granting me authorisation to use data from the Projecto Fondecyt N°1110402, and Mónica Moreno Figueroa for valuable comments through the research and writing process. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on a previous version of this article.

Notes

1. Santiago is the capital city of Chile and Región Metroplitana. Data shows that the reconfiguration of motherhood in Chile has been more profound for women living in urban areas of Región Metropolitana (SERNAM & INE, 2004, p. 73). This region has one of the lowest fertility rates and highest postponements rates in the country (SERNAM & INE, 2004, p. 123). In 2010 women from Región Metropolitana had an average of 1.77 children, located below the national average (MINSAL et al., 2014, p. 27), and data from INE (2007, p. 2) shows that in 2004 this region had the highest percentage of mothers aged between 30 and 39 years old.

2. In translating the verbatim quotes of the interviews from Spanish to English for this article, the language was standardised and the pauses and non-verbal utterances eliminated to provide coherence to text. In doing this, I aimed to maintain the literalness of the expressions and respect the meaning intended by the interviewees.