Doing the right thing? UK lone mothers on benefits and their sense of entitlement to leisure

Abstract

This article presents findings from a qualitative study on the subjective well-being of UK lone mothers, and explores how their sense of entitlement to leisure and leisure activities are shaped by their experiences of being benefit claimants. Twenty lone mothers with recent experience of living on social assistance benefits were interviewed. Their leisure activities were analysed in terms of purposive and enjoyment-oriented activities. The findings reveal purposive leisure was given higher value and a greater share of mothers’ free time than enjoyment-oriented leisure. Purposive activities were justified as a meaningful use of leisure time which supported mothers moving off benefits and into paid work and enjoyment-oriented activities were often framed as a waste of time. The findings suggest that the socio-political discourse surrounding benefit claimants in the UK contributed to shaping the values mothers assigned to each activity type therefore illustrating social policy operating as an instrument of social control.

Keywords

leisure lone mothers sense of entitlement social assistance benefits

Introduction

Many studies perceive leisure as a right albeit a right with unequal levels of access (Coalter, 1998; Veal, 2015). Mothers’ leisure in particular has been found to be ideologically constrained by both the ethics of care and structural difficulties across time and space (Brown et al., 2001; Condon, 2005; Deem, 1982; Kay, 1996, 2000; Lloyd et al., 2016). While evidence reveals mothers’ sense of entitlement to leisure to be lower when they are not in paid employment (Henderson and Dialeschki, 1991; Shaw, 1991), less discussed is the effect that living on social assistance benefits (and of therefore not being in paid work) might have in producing additional barriers.

Lone mothers in the UK have been supported as full-time care givers since the enactment of the National Assistance Act 1948 (Davies, 2014). However, with the implementation of the Lone Parent Obligation (LPO) 2008, entitlement underwent phased reductions so even for lone parents with younger children, there is an expectation to become work-ready through attending Work Focused Interviews¹ and engaging in Work Related Activities² as soon as their Age of Youngest Child reaches one year (DWP, 2017). Benefit sanctions³ are applied for non-compliance and have become increasingly punitive (Fletcher and Wright, 2018).

As Harrison and Hemingway (2014: 24) remind us, the welfare state, especially when dealing with unemployment benefits, has always conditioned access on the basis of lifestyles and behaviours that seem ‘appropriate’, which therefore has underlying disciplinary and moralising features. However, the widening of conditionality and the imposition of sanctions in the British welfare reforms since 1996 are deeply concerning. This is due to the adaptation of ‘coercive behaviourism’ which relies on “deterrence, surveillance and graduated sanctions in order to modify behaviour” (Fletcher and Wright, 2018: 326). More importantly lone parents – whose care-giving has been acknowledged as a productive contribution to society by the welfare system in the past – have now been conceptualised as unemployed people in need of ‘activation’ (Davies, 2014; Wright, 2014).

These policy measures developed for lone parents in the UK send a clear message that continued benefit entitlement is conditional upon ‘right behaviours’. Dominant political discourses have persistently set out what it means to exhibit ‘right behaviours’. Patrick (2016) highlights how, during the 2015 general election, discourse emphasised the protection of those ‘doing the right thing’ – namely hard-working taxpayers – while portraying ‘welfare dependency’ as problematic and ‘the wrong thing’. Associations with child well-being were also presented as good parenting became “tied to (re)employment, financial independence and offering a productive role model to children” (Smith, 2013: 162). Through such discourses, welfare dependency is depicted as an illegitimate burden on society and taxpayers (Daguerre and Etherington, 2014; Wiggan, 2012) and as an individual failing tied to moral and behavioural problems (Hudson et al., 2016), and above all, bad parenting.

According to the British Social Attitudes survey, two-thirds of the British public believe unemployment benefits are paid at too high a level and discourage people from finding jobs (Shildrick and Macdonald, 2013: 297). Gingerbread (n.d.), a charity for lone parents that launched a ‘let’s lose the labels’ campaign in 2010, highlighted misconceptions about lone mothers in the UK, such as their being stereotyped as raising criminals, contributing to the erosion of ‘traditional values’ and ‘scrounging’ off of ‘hard-working taxpayers’. Such negativity is being acknowledged by lone parents themselves. As Gingerbread (2009) reports, 89% of 800 single parents found themselves being pictured as ‘scroungers’ and ‘bad mothers’. Harkness and Skipp (2013) also found lone mothers aware of negative rhetoric from both government and the media.

How, then, does this pressure on lone mothers shape a basic but unequal social right, like leisure? Given the weight of negative social images and political discourses around ‘right behaviours’, is lone mothers’ sense of entitlement to leisure shaped by their benefit status? This article highlights the complex and nuanced control being enacted on leisure for lone mothers who receive social assistance. The next section discusses the literature on ideological constraints to mothers’ leisure associated with ethics of care and paid work. The subsequent section then conceptualises leisure and discusses the analytical framework of the article.

Ethics of care, paid work and mothers’ leisure

Mothers’ ideological constraints to leisure have been theoretically and empirically discussed within the ethics of care and ethics of paid work. Both concepts are closely related to social and political constructions of what it means to be ‘a good mother’ in any given society.

Ethics of care

Gilligan (1982: 62) first defined ethics of care as “an activity of relationship, of seeing and responding to needs, of taking care of the world by sustaining the web of connection so that no one is left alone”. She claims that masculine ethics of justice therefore cannot fully explain women’s moral development, as women prioritise relationships and responsibilities over rules and rights. Although Gilligan theorises ethics of care not to explain gender difference but to examine moral development beyond justice, much evidence published since then understood care as an ethic which women are more socialised with than men (Henderson and Allen, 1991).

Ethics of care shapes a view of self, relationships and social order that may be incompatible with the behaviours of placing “their own personal interests first without feeling guilty” (Wimbush, 1986: 60; Tronto, 1987). Indeed, empirical studies provide evidence on mothers’ feelings of guilt when pursuing their leisure activities. Wattis et al. (2013) report a working mother expressing concern about using time for yoga lessons and reasoning that it could not be easily justified versus spending time on work or care. Similarly, Cunningham-Burley et al.’s (2006) qualitative study on working lone mothers reports that mothers bear the burden of guilt for not being good enough, even when they lack the time and energy to care for themselves and feel ‘shattered’ as a consequence. In Quinn’s (2010: 759) study based in Dublin, ideologies of motherhood in the home function as a “reminder of how things should be” and constrain (lone) mothers’ leisure even when children are not around.

As a consequence, mothers place the needs of their family before those of their own. McHardy (2012) identifies lone parents living in poverty acknowledging their own emotional well-being, activity choice and health as secondary to the needs of their children. Henderson and Dialeschki’s (1991) work details how women’s leisure is placed at the lowest priority even when their socio-economic characteristics allow for leisure time separate from work and family. Ethics of care therefore produces a moral basis for motherhood by setting the ideal character of the ‘good mother’ (Sevenhuijsen, 2004: 13).

The notion of good mothering, however, is socially, politically and culturally constructed rather than being confined to one particular format of care-giving (Christopher, 2012). The constructed notions in a given society then assign mothers particular roles and attitudes. For example, in Freeman et al.’s (2006) study, women belonging to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints felt entitled to leisure but chose to give up their free time as they chose to be stay-at-home mothers. This ‘choice’, however, was grounded in religious and cultural contexts where provisions of direct care are strongly valued. The notions of good mothering may also be shaped by one’s marital or financial status. In particular, Condon (2005) found for some lone mothers in Australia, work/life balance was highly impacted by desires to ‘make it all work’. This notion spanned all areas such as studies, work and in-family management to mitigate negative judgements made in relation to their parenting status. Richmond’s (2018) research on the experiences of mothers on welfare programmes argues that welfare can function as social control over mothers’ behaviours by expecting them to provide means and care for their children while working towards a job and education.

Public policy plays a vital role in constructing the notion of good mothering by making paid employment the primary obligation of citizenship, while downplaying care (particularly of children) in entitlement to benefits (Kay, 2000; Williams, 2001). And women, especially those who depend on state provision, are more likely to be impacted by the ideological and practical consequences of public policies (Kay, 2000). Debates around ethics of care have therefore moved away from normative understandings to framing in public policy and vis-a-vis citizenship. The next section on ethics of paid work will focus on how public policy and framing relates to notions of citizenship.

Ethics of paid work

Since the late twentieth century, paid work has increasingly been regarded as the primary obligation of citizenship in many Western societies. Individuals’ access to social insurance was given in exchange for their ‘productive contribution’ to society through paid work (Lister, 2002: 521). Such ethics of paid work preoccupy welfare reforms in recent British politics, especially since the New Labour government. Williams (2001) observes an increasing emphasis on equal worth and mutual respect in political discourses. Policy measures are designed to boost self-sufficiency and are politically justified based on work ethic, productivity and competitiveness. For lone mothers, an engagement with paid work became a condition to access welfare, more so since the introduction of the LPO 2008. Paid work was also tied to good mothering – the best route out of poverty and the best positive role model for children (Williams, 2001). As the LPO recategorised lone parents as being unemployed – by removing entitlement to benefits once the youngest child reaches five – care is placed as being of lesser value than paid work in public policy.

Mothers’ leisure and their sense of entitlement to it has been significantly impacted by this ‘ethics of paid work’ upheld by public policy (Kay, 2000). As leisure tends to be understood as a right that is earned through paid work, homemaking and care work is less recognised as a meaningful contribution deserving of leisure. Harrington and Dawson’s (1995) study on women’s employment and time use argues that homemakers suffer from both a lack of leisure opportunity and a fear to pursue leisure time, because they believe leisure is only for men. This poor self-image also functions as a leisure constraint for the mothers in Deem’s (1986) research, as women perceive themselves as less worthy of leisure time. Women’s subordinate social and economic positions which produce such practical and ideological constraints to their leisure space and activities are largely associated with the fact that women’s responsibilities for domestic labour and childcare are not acknowledged as an economic activity and are undervalued in society (Deem, 1982).

The existing literature demonstrates how both ethics of care and ethics of paid work could contribute in defining what it means to be a good mother. The notion of good motherhood is critical when mothers negotiate ‘the proper thing to do’ (Williams, 2004: 74). Therefore, leisure for ‘good mothers’ becomes something that cannot be placed as the primary priority as well as something that must be earned as a contributing citizen. Therefore, trying to be a good mother, whether it is pursued through ethics of care or ethics of work, means placing leisure as the last priority.

Conceptualisation of purposive and enjoyment-oriented leisure

The traditional dichotomy of work and non-work has weakened as boundaries between leisure, work and care become increasingly blurred. Paid work often becomes indistinguishable from leisure as it provides opportunities to socialise, affirm identities and increase self-esteem, as well as to allow a break from domestic work (Kay, 2001; Lewis, 2003; Perrons, 2000). Traditional work environments can be more rewarding and satisfying than domestic labour which can be monotonous (Hochschild, 1997). Compared with domestic labour which can be monotonous. Childcare or domestic work is often mixed in with leisure activities when it is felt to be enjoyable or satisfying, such as walking in the park or watching a football match with children (Perrons, 2000).

Conversely, leisure activities constitute features of work. Stebbins (2013: 341–342) resists the narrow understanding of leisure based on hedonistic enjoyment and proposes leisure of the ‘serious’ kind as ‘intentionally-productive’ and ‘personally and socially rewarding’ in “either a satisfying or a fulfilling way (or both)”. Serious leisure refers to an activity that incorporates both unpaid work and leisure, and is distinguishable from casual leisure due to its intentionally “generat[ing] something of value for both self and other (non-family) individuals including group or community” (see Stebbins (2013) for three types of leisure – serious, casual and project-based). The concept of serious leisure is useful not only because it challenges the dichotomy of work and non-work boundaries of leisure, but more importantly because it opens up the possibility to discuss, a) where one’s leisure activities may not be solely driven by hedonistic enjoyment; and b) where they may be negotiated or even justified for serving other purposes, including the demands placed on mothers.

While the value of serious leisure beyond hedonistic enjoyment is identified in most research, the ways in which serious leisure is negotiated and justified are rather varied. For example, Miller and Brown (2005) found women who engaged in active leisure justified their fight for access to leisure time by incorporating their leisure into good mothering, helping them become supportive wives and mothers. Surfing mothers in Spowart et al.’s (2010) research positioned their leisure alongside and in contrast to their responsibilities as mothers. On the one hand, they understood surfing in terms of ‘protecting and reaching the self’, but also justified the activity as important to being a happier mother or partner. Raisborough (2006) found women engaged with the Sea Cadet Corps consciously claimed access to leisure but were also affected by normative femininity. Quilting women in Stalp’s (2006) study quilted for themselves at first but later rendered the activity legitimate by having it serve the needs of the family. While the concept of serious leisure captures how leisure activities with high commitment are negotiated, it also associates leisure with self-actualisation, enrichment and enhancement of self-image rather than with social contexts (Rojek, 2005; Shaw and Dawson, 2001). It typically explains “amateurism, hobbyist pursuits, and career volunteering” as activities that allow people “to express their abilities, fulfill their potential, and identify themselves as unique human beings” (Stebbins, 1982: 251).

Some scholars have sought to engage with leisure in social, cultural and political contexts. Rojek (1995) for instance, understands leisure as a socially conditioned concept where individuals’ beliefs and values that shape their freedom, choice and self-determination are drawn from a mix of institutions and traditions. This mix is the result of how regulative mechanisms allocate resources and prestige to thereby shape their leisure practices. Indeed, a number of studies have contextualised women’s serious leisure in gender, social, cultural and political contexts. To contextualise high-commitment leisure activities in family settings, Shaw and Dawson (2001: 228) introduce an alternative concept of ‘purposive leisure’ to refer to activities that are “planned, facilitated, and executed … in order to achieve particular short- and long-term goals”. They may not typically be freely chosen, intrinsically motivated, nor necessarily enjoyable (Shaw and Dawson, 2001). The term ‘serious leisure’ is therefore considered to be inadequate for describing family leisure, as it focuses more on leisure as a means of personal identification and effort rather than how leisure is culturally, socially and politically shaped.

In aligning with the notion that leisure serves social, cultural and political demands, this article adopts the term ‘purposive leisure’, conceptualised here as: activities employed by lone mothers for specific goals and values which serve social and political demands. Other leisure activities that seek immediate and intrinsic reward fall into ‘casual leisure’ defined by Stebbins (2013: 340) and will be termed ‘enjoyment-oriented leisure’ to emphasise its primary purpose in hedonistic enjoyment.

This distinction provides a useful framework in analysing lone mothers’ leisure because the reasons mothers gave for engaging in the two types of activities were different. Purposive leisure reflected what it meant to be a good mother and moral citizen based on socially and politically constructed ideologies. Enjoyment-oriented leisure functions relatively independent from such ideologies, making it a far lower priority for lone mothers’ leisure. It is important to note that the division between the two activities and reasoning behind them can often be blurred. For example, volunteer work can be about refreshing work experience and paying back society, but also about socialising and distracting oneself from boredom. Nonetheless, this division helps us better conceptualise the analysis, as the data extracted was grounded on the primary purpose of an activity.

The study

This article explores how lone mothers’ leisure activities and their sense of entitlement to them relate to social assistance benefits, based on findings from a qualitative study on the subjective well-being of UK lone mothers (Jun, 2015). The study was exploratory in nature and based on constructivist epistemological assumptions which argue that it is impossible to discover an external world independently from concepts, theories, background knowledge and past experiences (Blaikie, 2007). Only after social actors construct their reality by conceptualising and interpreting their own actions and experiences can social scientists socially construct their knowledge of social actors’ realities. Interviews are therefore an important research tool in social inquiry, allowing us to access the perceptions of social actors. The interviews explored a wide range of themes in lone mothers’ lives, covering finance, health, achievement, relationships, safety, future security and leisure – domains borrowed from the Personal Wellbeing Index (International Wellbeing Group, 2013). Among the aforementioned themes, lone mothers’ leisure and its relationship to benefits was one of the key themes that emerged. While existing knowledge provides a thorough understanding of mothers’ leisure in relation to ethics of care and work, an additional barrier created through their benefit status has received much less attention.

Sampling and recruitment strategy

For the study, twenty lone mothers were recruited as ‘information-rich cases’, providing in-depth illustrations based on alignment to the research topic and objectives (Patton, 1990). They were recruited from across England and Wales. The mothers were aged 23 or over and had between one and four dependent children living with them with an age range of between 14 weeks and 24 years. The lone mothers in this study had already moved off benefits to paid work at the point of interviews. The interviews were therefore based on the recollections of their memories of on average 18 weeks previously, ranging from 2 weeks to 17 months. The youngest child of each mother was age 8 or less. This particular sample of lone mothers with young children has meaningful policy implications. As the LPO acknowledges lone mothers’ entitlement to Income Support until their Age of Youngest Child reaches five (DWP, 2017), this group of lone mothers with young children was under relatively less pressure to leave benefits for paid work than those who have older children. The mothers in the sample were therefore more likely to be self-motivated and less likely to be on benefits as a ‘lifestyle choice’, as dominant political discourses construct despite research evidence that demonstrates otherwise (Daguerre and Etherington, 2014; Patrick, 2014; Wiggan, 2012; Wright, 2014).

Indeed, many shared their strong orientation to paid work in the interviews, by illustrating how they ‘had always worked’ prior to their benefit period and ‘wanted to work’ whilst receiving benefits. Such comments provide both analytical as well as methodological implications: the comments show their desire to highlight that they were different from ‘others on benefits’ – which will be discussed with the concept of ‘othering’ later on. Methodologically, the comments illustrate mothers’ orientations to paid work – meaning many in this particular group of mothers could have understood paid work as “what is best and morally right for themselves as mothers and for their children” (Duncan and Edwards, 1999: 109). Such orientations could have shaped the way they confronted their status of being a benefit claimant and how they used their leisure hours. Keeping this in mind, however, the study also includes those mothers who had orientations to be stay-at-home mothers, but felt that they had been forced to move off benefits by the system. While it is not the main focus of this study to examine whether one’s orientation to paid work or direct care shapes one’s welfare-to-work journeys or leisure hours, what seemed clear was that the current system does not allow great room for mothers to pursue their orientations.

Recruitment took place using a call for participants disseminated through gatekeepers in a range of national and local organisations, including online sites, Yorkshire-based parenting and lone parent groups, and out-of-school clubs. Participants were selected on a first come, first served basis and immediately interviewed. When the point of data saturation was reached no more participants were recruited. This recruitment process clearly carries the risk of selection bias which occurs when people self-select their participation into a study (Institute for Work & Health, 2014) – a risk this researcher is acutely aware of. A comment made by one of the respondents, Amy, illustrates this risk. She expressed her desire to push back against the negative social images constructed against benefit claimants as a reason for volunteering in the study: “It has been very hard, which is one of the reasons why I was quite happy to do this interview, because … it’s not always the case of how it is on TV”. This demonstrates that some participants may have felt the weight of negative public discourses more acutely than the general population this sample is drawn from, thus calling into question the representativeness of the sample and its external validity.

However, it is not the aim of the constructivist epistemological position to gather a representative sample and generate a causal relationship to be applied to a wider population (Blaikie, 2007). Rather, it is interested in the intersubjective meanings produced by shared experiences, in this case of lone mothers and insights into the complex sense of leisure entitlement. In this way, these subsequent thematic findings help to provide more empirical strands in understanding the greater sum of experiences for lone mothers and their sense of entitlement to leisure.

The research involved meeting lone mothers during a period of critical change and carried some risks of raising unpleasant emotions for interviewees. In order to minimise the potential harm, the researcher informed participants of such risks and their rights in advance using an information sheet and an informed consent form. The consent form was verbally read, and then the participants were asked to sign a formal agreement on the conditions of the research, as well as being reassured of their rights in it. The consent was frequently checked during and after the interview process. Through the information sheet and the consent form, the research promised a firm protection of anonymity and confidentiality. In regards to moral judgements that emerged on the spot, the researcher followed the code of practice and principles addressed by the Department of Social Policy and Social Work, University of York. The study was granted approval from the ethics committee of the Department.

Lone mothers’ sense of entitlement dependent on types of activities

Activities lone mothers considered ‘leisure’ can be divided broadly into two categories: purposive and enjoyment-oriented activities. As conceptualised above, purposive activities refer to activities that are employed for specific goals and seek values beyond intrinsic or hedonistic rewards. They often inform personal identification, such as self-actualisation or the enhancement of self-image, serving social, cultural and political demands in both conscious and unconscious ways. Enjoyment-oriented activities on the other hand are conducted in pursuit of instant rewards and are valued for hedonistic enjoyment. This categorisation serves as a useful tool in explaining different levels of value mothers attached to each type of activity.

Purposive activities

Whilst living on benefits, more than half of the mothers were using the majority of their free time for purposive leisure. They considered self-learning/education courses, voluntary work and domestic work as leisure and referred to them as ‘leisure’, ‘my time’ and a ‘break’ from responsibilities and commitments. For example, Amy was learning how to crochet and referred to it as ‘my time’, but it was also a business item for her future. Hana, a mother of a five-year-old, used her leisure time for voluntary work which she claimed would prepare her for the labour market. As Hana explained:

I had small amount of leisure time when my daughter was seeing her father. I used to spend it volunteering most of the time. I felt that that was best thing for me to be doing when I went back to work. Then I at least had some current working experience.

All these activities were reported as intentional, motivated and satisfying. Underpinning their activities was a combination of various short- and long-term goals: a means of distraction from boredom; attaining a sense of achievement and productiveness in life; building economic security for the future; gaining new work experience and increasing future employability; and a way of paying back society for what they have received.

Along the same lines, three mothers reported leisure activities that partially served their responsibilities of childcare. One mother for example took her children along to a friend’s house, where they would enjoy tea or a bottle of wine while looking after their children together. Her childcare was woven into her leisure activity and was therefore ‘doubling-up’ her leisure and mothering responsibilities, as Deem (1986) suggests some mothers do. In Amy’s case, however, domestic work was separated from her mothering responsibilities and she pursued the former for its intrinsic enjoyment. Amy reported cleaning her friend’s house once she had finished cleaning her own. She believed it to be a good means of socialising in her free time.

Cleaning, I would expand it to friends, so I would go to a friend’s house, for a weekend and I’d clean the house to give them a break and to be with other people rather than just me.

When describing the purposive activities, there was a consistent emphasis on ‘being productive’, ‘meaningful’ and ‘constructive’. Sarah, a mother of two children, described her volunteer work in her leisure time with a sense of pride:

I was doing my volunteering in exchange for getting benefits. So, I kind of need to remember that very first few months [on benefits] when I wasn’t volunteering and I was getting money for nothing, essentially to feel like you are making a difference in the world. So, you could do that on benefits, like I did by volunteering.

These activities were therefore neither solely driven by a sense of enjoyment, nor freely chosen in isolation from responsibilities or commitments. Rather, they served to reinforce participants’ sense of being better mothers and contributing members of society. The activities were about refraining from what the political rhetoric had laid down as doing the ‘wrong thing’, such as being dependent on social assistance benefits (Daguerre and Etherington, 2014; Patrick, 2016; Wiggan, 2012).

In addition, the activities signified an attempt at creating a meaningful use of time as opposed to receiving support through benefits and ‘doing nothing’. One way of acknowledging this is through the lone mothers’ attitudes of ‘othering’, as a response to stigma and a reflection of shame associated with receiving benefits (Walker, 2014). The behaviour of othering is, according to Dervin (2011: 187), a process of imposing cultural elements to explain people’s behaviour, which in turn draws a boundary between sameness and difference in order to affirm one’s own identity. It differentiates an in-group and an out-group, and between the ‘self’ and others as a means of reinforcing and protecting the self. The mothers tried to show that, unlike others on benefits, they were unique in using their time in productive and meaningful ways, in investing in future progression, as worthy of receiving support, and in trying to compensate society for the money and time provided by the social security system. This othering was reflected in attempts by lone mothers to be separated from stereotypes. As Hana discussed:

You hear a lot about people in the media, who sat around on the benefits all the time, and all they do is drink and smoke, and bullied the state [for] money basically, I didn’t want to be one of those people, I didn’t want something for nothing, so me volunteering was me giving as much as I could back.

Enjoyment-oriented activities

Compared to purposive activities, enjoyment-oriented activities took up a much smaller portion of the mothers’ free time and were mostly done through informal and fragmented ways. Some regular activities included swimming or going to the gym, Friday DVD nights and regular single mothers’ group meetings. These were mostly undertaken by mothers who had informal and regular childcare support, for example from the children’s father and grandparents. Other irregular, informal and fragmented activities included watching television, listening to music, reading books and talking to friends on the phone in the evenings when the children were in bed, and visiting local charity shops and walking around town when the children were in school or care.

One interesting pattern identified was the way the mothers described such activities. The terminology employed indicated unproductivity or dissatisfaction, such as ‘doing nothing’, ‘just being lonely’, ‘nothing constructive’, ‘sitting on my bum’ or ‘bumbling around’. While these descriptions refer to a number of enjoyable activities, they were described as wasted time or as having ‘an absence of purpose’ (Corrigan, 1993). This indicates a reluctance to devote time to ‘unproductive’ activities, or a reluctance to be seen that way in the interviews. As mothers tried to highlight their productive and meaningful use of time via purposive activities, they devalued and negatively portrayed their enjoyment-oriented activities. While purposive activities seemed to lend legitimacy, and provide justification for using free time outside of their home where their responsibilities were placed, enjoyment-oriented activities did not.

This devaluation reflected their attitudes towards enjoyment-oriented activities. A frequent term that arose was ‘sacrifice’ of their time and needs, which suggested a low priority given to enjoyment-oriented leisure time and a low sense of entitlement to it. The mothers found little justification to pursue enjoyment-oriented activities, and seemed to accept, often willingly, their postponement. Barriers appeared to stand in the way of enjoyment-oriented activities, with a key factor being that they were claiming benefits and were dependent on ‘government money’. Lucy, a mother of a two-year-old, reported she had never been out for leisure activities since her child had been born. She explained:

Even if I was to have a babysitter, I wouldn’t be able to relax knowing that the money that is paying for my night out was coming from the government, it wasn’t my money.

Other mothers revealed an internal, moral obligation to prioritise the needs of children over their own needs for leisure. Ethics of care became evident in many discussions around ‘this is being a mother’. As Amy, a mother of two and Chloe, a mother of one indicated:

I don’t want to go out, again my children are my children, paying babysitters while I go out is not my thing, I can do as much as I like when they’ve left home.

It’s just what you do, shouldn’t mind really, you have to sacrifice a lot when you have a child.

Everyone had their own reasons for why they were ‘giving up’ their leisure time, including achieving a better future, raising children in what they perceived to be a correct manner, managing part-time work with care, and creating security in their routine. In all of the cases mothers prioritised these factors over their own enjoyment-oriented activities.

Concluding discussion

White (2000) questions whether it is fair to apply and enforce the same reciprocity principle and putative obligation for individuals to make a productive contribution exclusively through market-related work to the community, regardless of how assets and opportunities are distributed. He argues that this should not be the case, suggesting that “disadvantaged individuals… may have an enforceable moral obligation to co-operate in their own exploitation” (White, 2000: 515).

The lone mothers in this study were subject to two interrelated moral obligations. One was the need to be good mothers who prioritise the needs of their children over their own, and who provide financially. The other is the obligation to become responsible citizens by moving off social assistance benefits. The way purposive and enjoyment-oriented leisure was justified appears to serve this double moral obligation. Taking education classes or refreshing work experiences through volunteering were entangled with being a responsible citizen by building a way to become independent from ‘government money’ and to give back to society as much as they could. It would also support ethics of care, in terms of building their own potential for becoming better breadwinners in the near future. Purposive leisure therefore served the social and political demands of both being a good mother who provides for her children as well as being a responsible citizen rehabilitating herself into “a functioning member of society again”, as Sarah put it. Using the vast majority of their free time for purposive activities was an attempt to realise this, something the mothers were keen to make known to the investigator. This reflects the pressure placed on mothers to be active and productive agents whilst claiming benefits. On the other hand, enjoyment-oriented leisure is placed in fragmented time slots between other ‘right things to do’ and is mostly done in informal and irregular forms. The moral obligations lead to feelings of guilt about pursuing enjoyment-oriented leisure and consequently lead mothers to place such activities at a low priority.

While the purposive activities conducted by the lone mothers share similar characteristics with those in existing studies of serious leisure, such as taking education courses, teaching themselves useful hobbies and regular participation in voluntary work (Dilley and Scraton, 2010; Spowart et al., 2010; Stalp, 2006), there was an important difference in this study. Though the drivers of women’s commitments to serious leisure are largely associated with (but not limited to) self-actualisation, and even work as a form of ‘empowerment’ and ‘resistance’ against the normative femininity constructed around them, the findings suggest that lone mothers’ purposive leisure was much more a matter of compliance that served social and political demands. While women in studies of serious leisure fight for a leisure activity itself, the purposive leisure of the lone mothers was rather a means to an end.

Williams (2012) argues that prevailing discourse rules and forms the collective identity and the political voice of a group. When a group has little power and voice, like women on welfare, they respond to social pressure not by identifying the discourse as unfair but by refusing to identify themselves as belonging to this group. As political discourses separate deserving and undeserving poor, or ‘strivers and shirkers’ (Patrick, 2014: 707), and those in paid work and the unemployed, the mothers’ response was to ‘other’ themselves from ‘people on benefits’. They did this by assigning a different value and length of time to purposive and enjoyment-oriented leisure activities. Their attachment to purposive activities served as a standard by which they could show their behaviour did not conform to the conventional, stigmatising stereotypes. This shaped the time committed to enjoyment-oriented activities as a moral failing. The root of this othering lies in personal feelings of shame that come with claiming benefits. This ‘stigmatising badge of poverty’ is reinforced, if not created, through social as well as institutional sanctions, such as public opinion or political rhetoric that labels benefit claimants as ‘wasters’ and ‘scroungers’ (Scheff, 1988; Walker, 2014: 55). Othering, according to Patrick (2016: 246), is “a defensive form of citizenship engagement and claim-making that seeks to assert an individual’s own entitlement”. While othering may have been employed as a coping mechanism to secure their own entitlement and sense of deservedness, it ends up reproducing stereotypes. The lone mothers themselves were critical of what ‘others’ on benefits might have done to create negative pictures of all benefit claimants.

The findings suggest that the mothers’ justifications of both types of leisure are a way to mitigate the negative images of benefit claiming in the prevailing political and social discourses in the UK. Taking a wider angle, lone mothers may have bought into a number of public discourses against themselves, such as the moral underclass debate where raising ‘children without fathers’ is seen as a major contributor to a ‘Broken Society’ (Cameron, 2011; Daguerre and Etherington, 2014). As Richmond (2018) reminds us, the ways welfare programmes are structured reflect the values weighted by political undercurrents and function as a form of social control over recipients to elicit desired behaviours. How lone mothers shaped their leisure activities was therefore a consequence of a social policy employed as an instrument of social control.

What is perhaps more problematic is that the current design of benefit entitlement and related political discourses construct ‘the right things’ for lone mothers in a way to reinforce the order of paid work and care work, the latter being “inferior, special, or subordinate” (Sevenhuijsen, 2004: 49). As Folbre (1994: 27–29) reminds us, there has always been a historical reluctance to acknowledge women’s care work as an economic activity by calling it ‘natural’ or ‘moral’. Such an understanding takes care work for granted and maintains its invisibility, which then builds a reason to devalue care in the processes of social reproduction and refuses to acknowledge one’s own entitlement to full citizenship (Tronto, 2013; Williams, 2004). Indeed, by making lone parents’ entitlement to social security conditional to their labour market engagement, lone parents are now forced to escape from care and to submit themselves as ‘neutral beings’ whose only goal is to catch up with men, in order to have a legitimate place in society (Sevenhuijsen, 2004: 79). In the process, care work remains the moral obligations of mothers at the expense of the exploitation of their leisure time. Nevertheless, we still call lone mothers on benefits ‘dependent’, while it is largely the rest of society and the government who are depending on their labour to raise the next generation of our society.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Author biography

Miyang Jun is an early career researcher with research interests in family policy, welfare reform and conditionality, and social security benefits. She was awarded a PhD for her thesis on lone mothers’ subjective well-being over the transitions from welfare to work from the Department of Social Policy and Social Work, University of York. She now works as a research fellow for the Seoul Foundation of Women & Family.

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