Hays, Sharon

Sharon Hays is a sociologist whose research focuses on motherhood, gender relations, economic rationalism, individualism, welfare reform and, more recently, young collegiate women's sexuality. Since her first major academic work, The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood (1996), Hays has demonstrated an interest in the conflicting ideologies of femininity and individualism; specifically, the opposition between self-sacrifice and self-interest. This contradiction is brought into sharp relief in the contemporary culture of motherhood, with its emphasis on loving devotion at the expense of women's individual gain.

Hays is interested in the problems she identifies as the unfinished business of feminism, including the unintended consequences of feminism's achievements. Hays examines how the new freedoms ushered in by second wave feminism have generated conflict and contestation at both the cultural and individual level, with women typically moving between contradictory spheres (work and home) and contradictory modes of self (mother and worker, student and sexualized glamour girl).

Hays' first book, The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood, set out to explore the peculiarities of contemporary mothering. Her research encompassed three main sites: historical and cross-cultural accounts of motherhood; dominant child-rearing manuals (by Penelope Leach, Dr. Benjamin Spock, and T. Berry Brazelton); and semistructured interviews with 38 U.S. mothers of mixed class and race backgrounds. Analyzing these different texts, Hays traced the emergence of the ideology termed intensive mothering. This ideology stipulates that mothers invest large amounts of time, money, energy, and effort into child rearing at the expense of themselves. Hays found intensive mothering to be dominant across all race and class groups in her study. Moreover, she generalized that intensive mothering is a characteristic feature of contemporary Western societies.