Abstract
Motherhood has been widely studied in sociology. Does the discipline need another book on the transition to motherhood? Yes. Tina Miller’s Motherhood: Contemporary Transitions and Generational Change makes an important contribution: it uses high-quality data to offer a detailed study of women’s unfolding understandings of the transition itself. Miller conducted qualitative longitudinal interviews with 26 employed new mothers in the United Kingdom. She interviewed participants at three points in time: first, in late pregnancy; then, a few weeks following the birth; and finally, when the baby was 9–10 months old. Her analytical focus is on participants’ accounts, constructed narratives that are simultaneously agentic and conditioned. The author leverages the longitudinal interviewing method to examine how meaning-making and self-understanding change across mini-milestones in this transition to motherhood.
Miller finished conducting interviews in December 2019. After COVID-19 lockdowns began in March 2020, she reached back out to participants to ask them to keep structured diaries over the next year. In addition, she compares the interviews in the current book with those she conducted 21 years earlier (in the late 1990s) using a similar longitudinal design (Miller 2005). Miller attends to how changing social structural factors have transformed some aspects of motherhood, while other aspects have proven more durable and resistant to change.
Across both books, the author finds that in late pregnancy, cultural narratives about the “good mother” loom large; normative expectations include non-medicalized births, breastfeeding, infant-centered caregiving, and essentialist mothering duties alongside a feminist choice narrative. Interviewees await their births with eagerness and trepidation. Many are nervous about being “good” enough and so scan the internet as an ever-expanding source of information and advice. Miller argues that the expectations for “good mothers” have become even more intense in the past two decades. As participants discuss in the current book, the internet now offers a regime of app-based digital monitoring of mothers’ health and their babies’ development as well as heightened expectations for narrating and curating ideal pregnancy journeys on social media.
In some ways, the 21 years between the two studies have provided expanding agency and choice for new mothers. These include the demographic trend in the UK and elsewhere of later first births, reflected in the older average age of participants in the second study (32.4 years). Waiting longer to become mothers allows women more time to complete education and establish careers and then to enter parenthood on a more equal professional footing with the other parent (mostly fathers in this study). Most participants anticipate a joyous period of bonding during the maternity leave followed by a happy balance between caregiving and employment. Yet the establishment of significant careers before parenthood renders maternity leave interruptions more costly. Although new mothers in the United Kingdom are entitled to up to 52 weeks of maternity leave (39 weeks paid), several participants feared that a long maternity leave would imperil their careers. They strove to hide their pregnancies from employers for as long as possible, to limit their planned leaves, and to express gratitude to supervisors for simply allowing them to use their statutory entitlements.
In Miller’s third set of interviews in the current book, the babies are 9–10 months old. By this time, contradictions between good mothering expectations and good worker mandates, which were only glimpsed during pregnancy, have now become difficult lived realities. Many interviewees are exhausted, are isolated, and mourn their former professionally connected selves. Staying home all day with the baby is “miserable” for some; others cannot afford to stay home financially or psychologically. Yet returning to paid work brings waves of guilt for the child’s long hours in day care and makes, as one interviewee explains, one feel “like a failure at everything you're doing" (p. 94).
In the generation between Miller’s two projects, expectations for fathers’ participation in childrearing seem to have increased far more than their actual practices. In the current book, cultural narratives about involved fathers (for the 21 women partnered with men) initially helped sustain the expectations of interviewees when pregnant that they would ultimately find work-family balance. Yet once their babies are nine months old, the women are taking on the lion’s share of caregiving work. To account for this, interviewees marshal essentialist understandings, sometimes linked to breastfeeding. They also cite the caregiving expertise they developed during their longer maternity leaves, while men’s vastly shorter leaves (one to two weeks) exempted them from developing this proficiency and taking on this responsibility.
Other social changes in the 21 years between the two studies include, in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, expanded LGBTQ+ civil rights and advances in fertility treatments. These developments have created a more inclusive range of family types and family options. Five of Miller’s research participants are women in same-gender marriages, whose paths to motherhood included intrauterine insemination or in vitro fertilization.
Although the study’s number of interviewees with same-gender partnerships is too small to generalize from, this group’s experience seems distinct from that of women partnered with men. Interviewees partnered with women describe more egalitarian relationships, in which both mothers are highly involved in their child’s daily care. For example, one woman distinguishes her experiences from the “horror stories” she hears from heterosexual friends about their husbands’ minimal involvement. In contrast, she says that when it comes to sharing infant care, “my wife is the most helpful person. . . . And even my mum [says], ‘thank God you've got a wife’” (p. 98).
Some of the structural changes of the past 20-plus years do not bode well for mothers and families. Miller argues that intensive motherhood ideals present in the 1990s have become even more exacting and have been amplified by social media. Other structural factors that make motherhood even harder include workplace expectations of rising neoliberal individualism and more invasive digital work tasks.
No book can do everything. Although the author briefly mentions persistent normative cultural ideas of good mothers as white, heterosexual, and middle class, the book surprisingly offers little social class analysis and no race analysis.
The book’s qualitative longitudinal method and comparative historical approach are key strengths. Yet this empirical complexity (plus the writing style) makes the argument hard to follow at times. The author tends to present lengthy, theoretical expositions followed by long strings of extended quotations. It provides a thought-provoking analysis for faculty and advanced graduate student specialists yet is less useful for undergraduate courses.