Working Mothers

Historical Overview of Working Motherhood

During the 1970s, the issue of motherhood and employment was at the center of political and feminist debate. Mothers felt torn as they responded to new opportunities in the labor market while attempting concurrently to meet the social ideals of the good mother. In 1977, in her seminal text Of Woman Born, the American feminist scholar Adrienne Rich highlighted the debate on working motherhood from a personal perspective, observing how the vision of the perfect mother at home, no matter how idealistic, made working mothers’ lives a misery.

In the 1970s, on both sides of the Atlantic, while the debates about mothers’ right to work were raging, governments began to implement new laws and policies relating to equal opportunities and equal pay for women. This legislation was supposed to protect women from being treated unfairly at work, either due to their gender and/or because they were mothers. However, during the period when the equal opportunities laws were enacted, the notion that mothers should be encouraged to go out to work-and the idea that employed women should be paid the same as men-were seen as highly controversial.

This controversy was due to assumptions that women's destiny was motherhood and that motherhood was incompatible with paid work. In the 1950s and 1960s, an image of the ideal housewife and mother was perpetuated within popular culture. Women who fit this image were seen to be heterosexual, married mothers, whose central focus was their children and their home. These idealized notions of motherhood were reflected in the work of the American sociologist Talcott Parsons. Caroline Gatrell has argued that Parsons's vision of the nuclear family was influential in Britain and the United States because it presented family life as encapsulating the gendered division of labor-an ideal that the governments and industrialists of the time found very attractive. Fathers went out to work while mothers were anchored firmly in the home, raising children, doing the housework, and boosting the economy by shopping for food and domestic goods. Thus, prior to the 1970s, maternal work was understood only in terms of reproductive and household labor. The “correct” way of performing the work of motherhood was [Page 1589]thus socially defined and, as Rich observed, it did not include paid employment or work-orientation because these characteristics were associated only with men.

During the 1950s and 1960s, employment opportunities for women with dependent children were thus very limited. Not only was it seen as unsuitable for mothers to engage in paid work, but it was unlikely that they would be treated equally with men if they did so. Prior to the enactment of antidiscrimination legislation in the 1970s, it was legitimate to dismiss a working woman if she married or if she became pregnant. It was also legal to pay a woman less money than a man for doing an equivalent job-a phenomenon known as the gender pay gap.

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