Chapter 8 - Synthesis: overview and discussion
195
reveal that the ‘false’ starts they made as young adults seemed hard to restore
later in life. Yet, this classification does not do justice to their aspirations as
mothers, which were often clear, decisive, and frequently appeared successful.
Mothers who have a small part-time job (16-24 hours) while also suiting the
Dutch gender norm of parental self-care, were referred to as the ‘privileged’, most
importantly because they considered themselves privileged. Mothers with a large
part-time job and also trying to fulfil the parental norm of self-care to the very
best of their abilities, could be characterised as ‘balancers’. Mothers with full-
time jobs, with the most perceived
behavioural control, and (almost) symmetrical
gender roles with their partners, were called the ‘ambitious’.
Within a cross-sectional study it is impossible to find out how easy and often
mothers are able to switch from one category into another. Their narratives
disclosed that mothers do sometimes move from one category to another, but
such a move often seemed temporary, and they later returned to their original
paths relatively quickly. For example, some ambitious mothers could in the spirit
of the moment give up their job, because they were so ‘fed up’ with work. Yet,
this decision does actually suit an individual with much perceived self-control.
And, as their narratives continued, it became clear that they were just as able to
pick up their full-time career paths again.
The extent to which mothers’ different employment choices are
released from
society’s ties, as is argued by post-modernist theories, seems open to debate.
Stay-at-home mothers described how they were for various reasons not able to
work their preferred number of hours: they were led by negative (work)
experiences and by their partners’ ‘neutral’ attitudes towards their work
ambitions, which seemed decisive in directing them towards their role as full-time
homemakers.
Stay-at-home mothers also experienced a tension between their
own ambivalent decision to give up work and societal expectations to work part-
time. “
Stay-at-home parents expressed feeling society’s disappointment for not
doing more challenging and interesting work” (Zimmerman, 2000, p.343).
In addition, we should also question the extent to which it really is a free
choice when mothers ‘choose’ a life that fits society’s moral standards perfectly,
while working a small number of hours and being a good and present mother as
well, such as is the situation for the class of privileged mothers. And how do we
perceive the choice when mothers try to combine motherhood and work to the
maximum, and thereby sacrifice
leisure time and sleep, while they still carry the
main responsibility for the domestic unpaid tasks, and evidence of movement
towards equal role sharing at the home is limited to only a small group of
mothers? The findings lead to the conclusion that Dutch mothers’ heterogeneous
labour market behaviour cannot be understood as simple and varied expressions
of free choice, but rather as the mostly intentional, but also unintentional,
outcomes of mothers’ diverse – though always engendered – perceptions of
dominant norms, possibilities and constraints.
Socialized Choices - Labour Market Behaviour of Dutch Mothers
196
8.4
A mother’s general gender values and personal gender and
work attitudes are influenced by parental socialization during
childhood
The second important theoretical starting point of this
study is socialization
theory, of which main components will be recalled here briefly. Socialization
theory focuses on the social relational context in which specific normative
standards and expectations are socially transmitted. People make societal norms
and values their own, internalizing them, by learning from others what is to be
expected of them in the social system (Wallace and Wolf, 2006, p.28; also Berger
and Luckmann, 1967). When full internalization has occurred, the
presented
norms and values exist, and are easily accessible within the person herself, so that
they no longer need to be presented by the socializing agents. According to
Bandura (1977), most modelled behaviour is learned through the medium of
imaginable (visual imagery or mental associations with, for example, the person
who was modelling the behaviour) and verbal coding, referred to as mental and
verbal symbols (Bandura, 1977, p.33). If the association with specific symbols to
behaviour is firmly built
and stored in memory, observing the association will be
strong enough to recall the ‘learned’ behaviour, which will happen automatically
and outside of their awareness. Subsequently, one exhibits imitative behaviour
without considering the underlying processes (Bandura, 1977).
Childhood is viewed as the most important formative period in life, in which
the basic structure of the individual’s social world (base-world) is built, with
which it will compare all later situations (Berger and Luckmann, 1967;
Everingham et al., 2007). Socialization is only possible when the parents or
others who take care of the new-born, have an interest - whether automatically or
enthusiastically - in developing the child. This interest can be expressed through
various kinds of
emotional appraisals, like ‘good child’ or ‘good behaviour’ and
‘bad child’. These initial appraisals construct the beginning of the self: the ideas
a person has of himself are, at first, ideas an individual gains from others about
himself (Handel, 2006, p.15). Primary socialization is a particularly influential
process, because a child experiences no problem of emotional identification,
necessary for internalization, since the parents are the only significant others in
the world of a child and the parental daily practices are taken-for-granted and feel
‘natural’ (Berger and Luckmann, 1967, p.154)
.
The concern of the study was to disclose which, if any,
parental norms,
values, attitudes and modelling behaviour have shaped mothers’ present personal
gender and work attitudes and general values. Firstly, the quantitative findings
demonstrated a significant relationship between parental transmission of work life
attitudes, like “work is a means to earn money” and “caring for others is
important” and Dutch mothers’ current traditional/adaptive gender values and
ideal family life, respectively. Interestingly, the qualitative findings revealed that
mothers with traditional/adaptive gender values and attitudes actually did not
clearly remember their parents transmitting any of these values. What is