Motherhoods, Markets and Consumption

The Making of Mothers in Contemporary Western Cultures

Stephanie O'Donohoe, Margaret Hogg, Pauline Maclaran, Lydia Martens, Lorna Stevens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136758355
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

It takes more than a baby to make a mother, and mothers make more than babies. Bringing together a range of international studies, Motherhoods, Markets and Consumption examines how marketing and consumer culture constructs particular images of what mothers are, what they should care about and how they should behave; exploring how women's use of consumer goods and services shapes how they mother as well as how they are seen and judged by others. Combining personal accounts from many mothers with different theoretical perspectives, this book explores:

• How advertising, media and consumer culture contribute to myths and stereotypes concerning good and bad mothers
• How particular consumer choices are bound up with women's identities as mothers
• The role of consumption for women entering different phases of their mothering lives: such as pregnancy, early motherhood, and the "empty nest"

1 The making of mothers

Stephanie O'Donohoe, Margaret Hogg,
Pauline Maclaran , Lydia Martens and
Lorna Stevens

In Korean author Kyung-sook Shin's best-selling novel, Please Look After Mom, when an elderly mother goes missing in Seoul, her family are desperate to find her, but to no avail. The book revolves around their search, with each chapter narrated by a different family member and, finally, by the mother herself. As the chapters unfold, we realise that no-one in her family ever really knew her as a person: their relationship with her was based only on their own needs and the role she played, as wife or mother, in fulfilling these needs. The mother's chapter makes a surprising revelation: she too had desires, dreams and feelings that were secret from her family. In a poignant moment she admits that she also ‘desperately needed a mother’ her whole life.

For all that her novel is grounded in Korean life and culture, Shin's evocative account of the mother's predicament reminds us of the work of Nancy Chodorow, the American feminist sociologist and psychoanalyst, who wrote in 1978 about women's lot to be relational, focused on the needs of others, but expecting little nurturing in return. More recently, she has written that ‘for many women the personal and emotional investment and sense of what it means to an individual unique woman to be a mother should be recognized’ (in Metzl 2003). Above all, then, Chodorow's work over the past 30 years culminates in a plea for maternal subjectivity and maternal identity, and as such it complements this book's focus on what it means to be a mother, and what place the self has in constructions of motherhood in contemporary consumer culture.

In keeping with Shin's novel, this book highlights the universal yet multifaceted nature of motherhood (or motherhoods, a term we see as better reflecting the diversity and complexity it entails). Individually and collectively, the chapters in this book unpick the mothering role in its many different guises, exploring the tensions women encounter and the negotiations they make when mothering in contemporary consumer culture.

Put simply, it takes more than a baby to make a mother, and mothers make more than babies.

Marketing and consumer culture construct particular images of what mothers are, what they should care about and how they should behave. Women's use of consumer goods and services shapes how they mother as well as how they are seen and judged by others. Mothering practices also inevitably involve others – children, fathers, grandparents and wider social networks (Oakley 1992; Miller 2005; Miller 2011). Relationships between mothers and others are shaped at least in part by societal norms and values, regardless of whether these have been absorbed, reproduced or resisted, and they are often enacted through material goods. Thus, it is important to understand how intersections between people, norms and values are played out in marketplace interactions and consumption practices surrounding motherhood. In this chapter, we briefly explore both the making of mothers and what mothers make, before outlining key themes across the contributions in this book and introducing its four main sections and individual chapters.

What makes a mother?

Marketers have long been interested in family life over time, and the knowledge they have generated on domestic personae, like the housewife, has fed into product innovation, commercialization and marketing practices (Friedan 1963). As consumer culture has established itself as a normalized aspect of everyday life, markets play an important role in shaping cultural discussions about domestic practices, cultures and identities. Films, magazines, books, advertising and social media all contribute to the construction of motherhood and offer stereotypical maternal scripts (Commuri et al. 2002; Johnston and Swanson 2003; Douglas and Michaels 2004; VOICE Group 2010).

Ideas about motherhood, and everyday mothering practices, are also played out through consumer goods themselves, through a sedimented consumer consciousness, and even through forms of consumer citizenship (Clarke 2004, 2007; Cook 1995; Chin 2001; Miller 2011). Early feminist scholars highlighted the implications of new domestic goods and technologies for domestic life (Cowan 1983; Myrdal and Klein 1956). More recent work by anthropologists (Clarke 2007), sociologists (Warde 1997), and consumer researchers (Banister and Hogg 2007) has documented how at least some women resist the ‘encroachment’ of the market in everyday life and the stereotypical maternal scripts offered by the marketplace, their social position and their relationships with others. This raises questions about how (or whether) commercial scripts relate to women's cultural understandings of motherhood and practices of care (Hochschild 2001, 2003).

What do mothers make?

Mothers have long been characterized as ‘homemakers’, but mothering also involves the making of identities and relationships as well as more tangible entities such as family meals.

At this point, there is a body of work exploring how women perform their mothering roles in the context of pervasive cultural prescriptions, their more immediate material and social relations, and their life course experiences and life stages (Martens 2010; Hogg et al. 2004; Layne 1999). Against this broader cultural discourse about motherhood, women create and develop their own particular maternal identities, experiences and relationships through everyday consumption practices and rituals. Previous research has explored, for example, how mothers create normalized and localized mothering cultures by adopting similar consumption orientations around children's birthday parties (Clarke 2007); how differential access to monetary resources shapes mothers’ participation in consumerism (Pugh 2004; Vincent and Ball 2007); and how mothers and children negotiate around fashion (Boden et al. 2004). Taken together, such studies highlight the many different ways there are of ‘doing’ motherhood, and the necessity for women to choose their own path through the diverse, often conflicting, cultural scripts and social norms surrounding mothers and mothering.

Contemporary research on motherhoods, markets
and consumption

Although motherhoods, markets and consumption have each been subjected to considerable research attention from many different disciplines, few books have considered the relationship between them, and fewer still have taken an interdisciplinary perspective. Building on our recent ESRC-funded seminar series Motherhoods, Markets and Consumption, this book brings together a range of studies, spanning many disciplines within the humanities and social sciences and drawing on a wide range of theoretical frameworks and qualitative research methods. These diverse chapters explore the role of markets and consumption in the making of mothers and, importantly, in the experience of mothers. Many of the following chapters are based on research undertaken with women in Western, developed markets, but some are based on research with women less closely related to mainstream (consumer) culture in those countries, such as low-income mothers in Britain and Northern Ireland, or Bosnian refugees living in Sweden. Other chapters explore discourses and representations of mothers and motherhood in films, advertising and popular culture, and we suggest that even if these discourses do not do justice to the great diversity of mothers’ lives and relationships, they circulate constantly in contemporary consumer culture, shaping to some degree women's experiences of motherhood and mothering.

We see this book as making a distinctive contribution to knowledge in three respects. First, it draws on a wide range of disciplines in exploring the connections between motherhoods, markets and consumption in contemporary Western culture. In addition to marketing/ consumer researchers, contributors are drawn from disciplines including sociology, anthropology, ethnology, geography, political science, design, communication and cultural studies. Second, this book examines the making of mothers in two respects: how mothers are ‘made’ through representations of motherhood in historical narratives, cultural practices and marketing discourses in consumer culture, and how this relates to what mothers ‘make’ – the identities and relationships that they construct through their everyday consumption practices. Third, the chapters draw on a wide range of methodologies. In addition to indepth individual interviews – in some cases longitudinal – and focus groups, our contributors have used diaries, visual discourse analysis, ethnographic studies, netnography and participant-driven photo elicitation. Individually and collectively, the contributions to this book offer many insights into how a wide range of qualitative methods give voice to mothers’ experiences and enhance understanding of the relationship between motherhoods, markets and consumption.

Part I, Motherhood as an Ideological, Mediated Project, deals with cultural and market ideologies of motherhood. Myths endure around maternal archetypes that imply certain behaviours, norms and taboos (Thurer 1994; Forna 1998; Douglas and Michaels 2004), and social and cultural constructions about what constitutes a ‘good mother’ proliferate in the marketplace (Thompson 1996; Prothero 2002). Furthermore, significant markets have grown up around the ideology of the nuclear family and the central role of the mother in maintaining it. Contributors in this section consider maternal archetypes and stereotypes in culture, marketing discourse and consumer culture, showing how they are articulated not only in advertising and the media, but also through the goods bought and used by them as part of their motherhood projects.

The section commences with Elizabeth C. Hirschman's chapter on ‘Motherhood in the movies’. Locating her discussion in the historical, social and cultural landscape, she firstly demonstrates how the concept of motherhood is a complex historical phenomenon, surrounded by taboos, superstitions and elemental, primal associations. Turning her attention to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, she then offers a detailed deconstruction of motherhood in motion pictures. The movie genre has served as a cultural marker of motherhood, feminism, work and the home. Beginning with Mrs Miniver in 1942, Hirschman traces the impact of the Second World War on representations of motherhood, taking us through seven decades depicting motherhood in a series of classic Hollywood films. Her analysis culminates with The Kids are Alright in 2010, by which time concepts of motherhood, feminism, work and the home had changed beyond recognition, at least on the face of it. According to Hirschman, the new emphasis is on issues of self-fulfilment, often in the context of a non-traditional family unit. The self is a central issue in motherhood as an ideology, and it is a thread running throughout this section. Hirschman argues that the old archetypes of sacrificing Madonna and ‘phallic mother’ (Kaplan 1992) still persist, evidence of the power of ideologies and their cyclic, normative and pervasive nature in culture. The rise of consumer culture has also meant that economic imperatives and material culture have a significant effect on how one ‘does’ mothering, with gender inequality and the dilemmas facing working mothers very much to the fore. Contemporary motherhood is thus located in the troubling domain of love, work, relationships and self-determination, with gender inequalities in terms of work, childcare and the home continuing to frame the experience of motherhood in the twenty-first century.

In ‘How to be a mother: expert advice and the material subject’, Mary Jane Kehily continues to explore what it is to be a mother, the on-going construction or the material project of motherhood. Her focus is on the role of experts in helping expectant mothers ‘do’ motherhood. Expertise comes in many forms: advice literature, pregnancy magazines and childcare manuals; family, friends and other mothers; and medical experts such as doctors and midwives. All contribute to the body of knowledge gathered by acquisitive and inquisitive expectant mothers. Based on a study of 144 mothers in the UK, the chapter reveals the vast amount of expertise that has helped create conflicting, competing and often moral and pathological layers to the vast body of expertise available. Beginning with pregnancy and childcare manuals in the early twentieth century, it then turns an inward, psychological gaze on motherhood. Increasingly a democratic approach to wisdom, advice and expertise became evident, accelerated by the advent of the internet. The chapter analyses pregnancy magazines and their part in helping expectant mothers and new mothers adapt to their roles, as well as the vast array and various waves of books and childcare manuals available. The chapter ultimately argues that motherhood is a complex interplay between mediated knowledge, fashion, self-identity, social class, age, choice, taste and, above all, the ‘common culture’ of mothering that permeates contemporary culture. It also points to the key roles of coupledom, career and consumption in constructing motherhood, which act as key reference points for women that help them map out their ‘motherhood projects’.

The question of how one ‘does’ mothering is also addressed by Alison J. Clarke in ‘Designing mothers and the market: social class and material culture’. She discusses the specific role of modes of mothering in a hyper-consumptive context of objects, brands and goods. Drawing on contemporary models of motherhood in terms of taste, fashion and material practices, she explores how motherhood and its norms are shaped by social class as well as access to material goods. Aside from ‘yummy mummy’ and ‘slummy mummy’ stereotypes, the most popular amongst these various modes of motherhood is essentially the ‘consumptive mother’, defined according to her material acts. A new variant on the consumptive mother is the glamorous mother, a stereotype driven by consumption practices, consumer projects, expressive consumption and high fashion. The glamorous mother model transcends class, and is mediated and driven by popular culture forms, such as the gossip media and ‘fabloids’. She also locates motherhood in the context of self-expression, a concept that has always sat uneasily with that of mother in most cultures, as Chodorow (1978) has noted. New ideals of ‘achieved motherhood’ including its pinnacle, reproductive technologies, are also discussed in this chapter, demonstrating how material practices intersect with normative mothering prerogatives. Drawing on consumption practices in Greece, India and the UK, Clarke argues that whatever it takes to be a good mother is being remade as new, mediated, material practices of mothering and motherhood evolve alongside older, persistent cultural ideologies of normative motherhood. Significantly, however, the on-going project of motherhood is now located within a consumer culture of marketing practices, consumption and fashion, what Clarke evocatively terms ‘the cosmology of goods and taste knowledges’.

The final chapter in this section, ‘Negotiations of motherhood – between ideals and practice’, by Ma...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The making of mothers
• Part 1 Motherhood as an ideological, mediated project
• Part II Feeding motherhood
• Part III Motherhood, consumption and transitions
• Part IV Consumption and contested motherhood identities
• Index