Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (JMI - York University)
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Creating a Tapestry: Motherhood and Womanhood Across Borders
Get PDFIn this essay, I examine three primary threads that connect my own biography with those of my grandmother and my mother. Grandma lived her entire life in a small Mexican village, where she raised five children without much help from her family or her husband. Mama, the youngest of Grandma’s children, left this village before her twentieth birthday and immigrated to the US, where she raised three children. I, Mama’s youngest child and only daughter, left her home and found a home in academia. As I illustrate, each of us managed difficult decisions, often in the face of our family’s expectations of us. Our ideas of what constitutes “home” entail geographic place, conceptual space and notions of self-empowerment. Moreover, our biographies highlight varying expressions of motherhood, each of which is complex in its own right. While it is easy to point out how our lives are different, these stories highlight the need to acknowledge how each thread in our family story relates to each other
Women’s Experience of Resignation from Paid Work in Response to Motherhood in an Australian Setting
Get PDFDespite workplace rhetoric moving towards provision of family-friendly employment environments, in Australia, approximately one fifth of working women resign from paid work at the birth of their child (Australian Bureau of Statistics). Research exploring this experience, whilst scare, is necessary to facilitate understanding of resultant expertise loss within the workplace, and implications to mother’s mental health. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with ten Sydney-based women who had resigned from paid work in response to motherhood in the last twelve years. Data was analyzed using relational methodology (Brown and Gilligan) giving consideration to co-created intersubjective space (Bradley; Slater). Results suggest that, as women move from the psychosocial space of employed individual into that of mother, they experience anger, guilt, substance abuse and/or depression and/or personal growth facilitated by agency and permission
Sex Work, Street Vending and Implications for Mothers and Daughters in the Global Economy: A Feminist Analysis of Political Economy
No full textUsing a feminist analysis of political economy, this paper discusses the mother-daughter relationship as portrayed in the Jamaican film Dancehall Queen to explicate the complexities of mothering in the global economy. Dancehall Queen can be viewed as a microcosm of how mothering is actually shaped by women’s lived experiences at multiple sites informed by race, class, and gender within hierarchies of global economic structures. We assess the film for its articulation of how neoliberal economic policies often push African Caribbean women towards informal work just to survive and the implications that this has for the mother-daughter relationship. What poor mothers do to make ends meet often challenges normative ideologies about “good mothering.” This paper discusses the protagonist’s work as a street vendor, undercover dancehall participant, and her attitude towards her daughter’s sexuality as a potential source of income, to discern what these may mean for living at the nexus of motherhood and poverty in the global economy