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Gender attitude
The mothers who work and prefer to work full-time have the most egalitarian
gender attitudes, with corresponding divisions of tasks at home with their
spouses, if a partner is present. The mothers often emphasise that they would
never be able to work that many hours without their partner. In some cases, their
husbands perform the majority of the unpaid tasks. However, just like the other
groups, full-time working mothers accept differences
between men and women
and rearing practices along recognisable gender lines.
“Women interact differently with children to men. I do think that women care
slightly better. I mean really taking care of them, making sure they get enough
vitamins, have had their bath and things like that. Asking, how school was
[…] I can see that my husband can challenge them more, at times when I’d
say, ‘don’t do that’“ (Annelies).
And they all pull the strings in the household organisation:
“I have more
responsibility for the organisation of the household. It would be nice if he would
take on more responsibility. But it is just more man-like to take it easy in the
household” (Marlieke).
And they also pursue some gender-compensating strategies, like Sheila and
Alisha who have divided the tasks almost equally with their partners. However,
on Sundays Alisha is in the kitchen for hours to cook all the meals for the week.
And Sheila does exactly the same, and also describes how in the beginning, when
her partner stayed at home with their young children, she had prearranged
everything for him: “
I planned ahead, cooked dinner and put everything in order
[…] I called him in the afternoon, however I do trust him now.” She still cooks
before she leaves home, and he just needs to warm the food up.
Early adult attitude towards motherhood
Attitudes of full-time working mothers towards mothering are similar to those of
balancing mothers. Their early adult attitudes towards motherhood were
ambivalent.
Before their thirties, motherhood was not self-evident for them.
“Kurt really wanted to be a father. My desire for a child was not as strong as
Kurt’s” (Claire).
These mothers generally have fewer children than the mothers without jobs or
with small jobs, and gave birth to their children at a comparatively older age.
Their overall narrative is that they find work easier than motherhood. Some
mothers had children at a young age – occasionally by accident, sometimes
planned – but motherhood was more of a burden than they had expected. They
find work easier.
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As mentioned, mothers in this group appear somewhat
less sensitive to the
Dutch norm of self-care and of not taking their children to professional day-care
too often, or not having an au pair.
“It needs to be organised: professional day care is the best thing that has
happened to me” (Alisha).
However, ambitious mothers generally also consider three days enough. They
are reluctant to admit they make use of an au pair. And although they do give up
shared time with their children in favour of work, they sacrifice their own leisure,
social and hobby time, to spend as much time as possible with their children. This
finding corresponds with the conclusion drawn by Garcia-Mainar et al. (2011)
who demonstrates that more hours spent on paid work is associated with more
hours spent on childcare by the mother herself (the opposite relationship is found
with fathers).
3.7 Conclusions
and
discussion
The present study aims to shed light on how behaviour is explained by mothers in
their narratives of choice, work preference and their attitudes towards work,
gender and motherhood, in order to understand the diverse employment pattern of
Dutch mothers. For this purpose, 39 mothers living in Amsterdam, the
Netherlands, with diverse
employment behaviours, were interviewed. They were
grouped as: stay-at-home mothers, mothers with small part-time jobs (12-24
hours), mothers with large part-time jobs (25-25 hours) and full-time working
mothers. The analysis revealed that the alternative courses of employment action
among the interviewees coincides with different mixes of choice, constraints,
preferences and attitudes, which form the basis of a typology,
as is displayed in
table 2.
Table 2. Typology of mothers based on their employment narratives.
Work hours
0
Drifters
12-24
Privilegeds
25-35
Balancers
35>
Ambitious
Narrative of choice ‘Self agency’
_
++
+
++
Preferred work hours
16-24 hours
16-24 hours
25-35 hours
35> hours
Work attitude
+
+
++
++
Economic independence
_
_
++
++
Gender attitude
Traditional/
adaptive
Rather
traditional
Adaptive/
Egalitarian
Egalitarian
Satisfaction gender division of
labour
+/- ++ +/- +
Motherhood ++
++
+/-
+/-
-=absent, +/-=ambivalent or variable, +=positive, ++= very positive
The typology of mothers in table 2 shows how mothers differ in their rationalities
of choice, which are much more concerned with weighing the
financial costs and
benefits, while explaining their work aspirations and choosing their career paths.