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Wrote, The Juggling Mother: Coming Undone in the Age of Anxiety (UBC 2020) $27.95 978-0-7748-6462-6
Publisher's blurb:
Who invented the juggling mother, the woman who quietly flicks dried cereal off her blazer while running a corporate empire? The Juggling Mother explores this figure of contemporary mothering in media representations: a typically white, middle-class woman on the verge of coming undone because of her unwieldy slate of labours. This idealized version of motherhood perpetuates established inequities of race, gender, class, and ability. In fact, as Amanda Watson convincingly demonstrates, the juggling mother is a model neoliberal worker who upholds white privilege along with notions of mastery, capacity, and productivity. The Juggling Mother is not about work-life balance. It is about how the expectation to manage competing labour demands impossibly well is pinned to women's desire for political visibility and social inclusion. This controversial study makes the case that unfair labour distributions are publicly celebrated, intentionally performed and intimately felt. Mothers with the most power are thus complicit in the exclusion of less privileged ones -- and in their own undoing.
Amanda Watson is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Simon Fraser University. Her work has been published in the International Feminist Journal of Politics, Studies in Social Justice, and Politique de l'image.
INTERVIEW:
SFU lecturer, Amanda Watson’s The Juggling Mother: Coming Undone in the Age of Anxiety is a deep dive into the mythology of the contemporary “respectable” mother in Western media. BC BookWorld interviewed Watson about the central ideas of her book.
BC BookWorld: In simple terms, what do you mean by ‘the juggling mother’?
Amanda Watson: By the juggling mother, I mean the mother who is busy keeping up with her many responsibilities. She is also busy with good deeds that demonstrate both her service as a productive and efficient paid worker and her respectable devotion to her family. She is striving in both realms: her job as a professional or entrepreneur seeking to climb the ladder and break glass ceilings, and doing everything possible to set her kids up for financial success and happiness.
So, I’m arguing that there’s a performative element to the juggling mother as she keeps herself and her family together. She may be unfairly burdened with work, and she may even be burnt out and depressed as a result, but she is also complicit in how labour is organized. She is willing to be overworked and she is unwilling to disrupt the way work and family life are organized unfairly. The juggling mother is not an activist.
Mothers also have the emotional responsibility to keep their families feeling good in the face of highly uncertain futures. I argue that the responsibility to make things feel all better when things clearly aren’t (with respect to climate change, the economy, global conflict, racism, Covid-19) is the sort of glue that sticks women to all of this work.
BCBW: Do we take it for granted that mothers not only take on responsibility for most of the chores in the household, they can also do paid work on top of everything?
AW: That’s a helpful way to think about it. We take for granted the fact that women will pivot to fill whatever gaps in labour emerge, paid or unpaid. Even though most women work for pay in Western societies, it is still the default expectation of women and girls to provide for the needs of family and community with their unwaged labour. While we now take many of our care needs to market, relying on low-waged workers who are disproportionately women of colour and immigrant women, we still hold gendered expectations of family and household management.
When Covid-19 hit, women made themselves economically vulnerable when they left the paid workforce to care for and educate children. We take for granted that women and girls will comport themselves in such a way that families and communities thrive, even if they themselves are feeling overwhelmed or sad.
BCBW: What does this mean for women who want to have children and have a professional life? And is this related to the second part of your book title: Coming Undone in the Age of Anxiety?
AW: This means that most women will be taking on an enormous load of work. We expect so much of mothers. While women can of course resist their distribution of unpaid work if they are partnered, they have little power to resist pressures like workplace stigma and pay inequity. I think it is sadness that I am describing in the second part of the title. How sad that we have designed family life to be impossible, especially in the midst of widespread popular feminism.
BCBW: Ultimately, is it really possible for women to ‘have it all’? Does having a family come at the sacrifice of a career for women?
AW: We have organized society in such a way that career and family come at the sacrifice of each other, one way or another. As I say in the book, I don’t think we want to have it all anymore. It’s too much! Certainly, a balance of both is more accessible to families with financial privilege, but even affluent professional women, and women of colour in particular, face extra demands on their work and behaviour in order to be valued as competent. Rather than aiming to have it all, we might consider fighting for shorter workweeks, accessible childcare and pay equity.
BCBW: Certain high-earning women with families (e.g., Facebook CEO, Sheryl Sandberg) put the onus on individuals to “lean in” to be successful. Is this a reasonable approach?
AW: This approach is to be expected in a society that puts ultimate value on individuals pulling themselves up by working hard and making good, responsible choices. In that sense, it is reasonable, but it is unhelpful. I encourage my students to understand that this is what it looks like when individualism has its claws in feminism. We have made gender equality about individual choices and individual striving. This approach only causes harm. It creates the conditions for women’s work and family decisions to be scrutinized, no matter what they do.
BCBW: What about the divide between high-earning mothers and blue-collar mothers? Being able to pay for childcare makes it easier to focus on a career but not everyone has that luxury.
AW: The fact that childcare is a luxury good is what is holding us back. It is that simple. Childcare needs to be high-quality, accessible, affordable, and inclusive of the needs of diverse communities, children, and families. Not only does accessible childcare narrow the class gap between mothers, it narrows all kinds of social hierarchies between children and families. It is so simple, and so poorly understood in our society. I think we are getting there by making the economic case that childcare is a good investment. I really hope feminist social scientists can turn our attention to making another case at some point in the near future!
BCBW: Where do you look for answers and what gives you hope?
AW: Even though I’m critical of the systemic barriers that mothers face, I’m optimistic when I am talking to other mothers and parents. Instead of the competitiveness between mothers and families that we see satirized in media, I see solidarity and empathy. Witnessing that sense of allyship gives me hope. I really feel that women are thirsty for a collective break from shouldering so much work and worry, and I am hopeful that with enough solidarity and allyship across genders and races, this will translate to changes in how we organize work. I am also heartened when I see what an impact small policy changes can make on redistributing work and resources. The task of shifting labour across genders and classes seems infinite, but there is a lot we can do. 978-0-7748-6462-6
[BCBW 2021]
Publisher's blurb:
Who invented the juggling mother, the woman who quietly flicks dried cereal off her blazer while running a corporate empire? The Juggling Mother explores this figure of contemporary mothering in media representations: a typically white, middle-class woman on the verge of coming undone because of her unwieldy slate of labours. This idealized version of motherhood perpetuates established inequities of race, gender, class, and ability. In fact, as Amanda Watson convincingly demonstrates, the juggling mother is a model neoliberal worker who upholds white privilege along with notions of mastery, capacity, and productivity. The Juggling Mother is not about work-life balance. It is about how the expectation to manage competing labour demands impossibly well is pinned to women's desire for political visibility and social inclusion. This controversial study makes the case that unfair labour distributions are publicly celebrated, intentionally performed and intimately felt. Mothers with the most power are thus complicit in the exclusion of less privileged ones -- and in their own undoing.
Amanda Watson is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Simon Fraser University. Her work has been published in the International Feminist Journal of Politics, Studies in Social Justice, and Politique de l'image.
INTERVIEW:
SFU lecturer, Amanda Watson’s The Juggling Mother: Coming Undone in the Age of Anxiety is a deep dive into the mythology of the contemporary “respectable” mother in Western media. BC BookWorld interviewed Watson about the central ideas of her book.
BC BookWorld: In simple terms, what do you mean by ‘the juggling mother’?
Amanda Watson: By the juggling mother, I mean the mother who is busy keeping up with her many responsibilities. She is also busy with good deeds that demonstrate both her service as a productive and efficient paid worker and her respectable devotion to her family. She is striving in both realms: her job as a professional or entrepreneur seeking to climb the ladder and break glass ceilings, and doing everything possible to set her kids up for financial success and happiness.
So, I’m arguing that there’s a performative element to the juggling mother as she keeps herself and her family together. She may be unfairly burdened with work, and she may even be burnt out and depressed as a result, but she is also complicit in how labour is organized. She is willing to be overworked and she is unwilling to disrupt the way work and family life are organized unfairly. The juggling mother is not an activist.
Mothers also have the emotional responsibility to keep their families feeling good in the face of highly uncertain futures. I argue that the responsibility to make things feel all better when things clearly aren’t (with respect to climate change, the economy, global conflict, racism, Covid-19) is the sort of glue that sticks women to all of this work.
BCBW: Do we take it for granted that mothers not only take on responsibility for most of the chores in the household, they can also do paid work on top of everything?
AW: That’s a helpful way to think about it. We take for granted the fact that women will pivot to fill whatever gaps in labour emerge, paid or unpaid. Even though most women work for pay in Western societies, it is still the default expectation of women and girls to provide for the needs of family and community with their unwaged labour. While we now take many of our care needs to market, relying on low-waged workers who are disproportionately women of colour and immigrant women, we still hold gendered expectations of family and household management.
When Covid-19 hit, women made themselves economically vulnerable when they left the paid workforce to care for and educate children. We take for granted that women and girls will comport themselves in such a way that families and communities thrive, even if they themselves are feeling overwhelmed or sad.
BCBW: What does this mean for women who want to have children and have a professional life? And is this related to the second part of your book title: Coming Undone in the Age of Anxiety?
AW: This means that most women will be taking on an enormous load of work. We expect so much of mothers. While women can of course resist their distribution of unpaid work if they are partnered, they have little power to resist pressures like workplace stigma and pay inequity. I think it is sadness that I am describing in the second part of the title. How sad that we have designed family life to be impossible, especially in the midst of widespread popular feminism.
BCBW: Ultimately, is it really possible for women to ‘have it all’? Does having a family come at the sacrifice of a career for women?
AW: We have organized society in such a way that career and family come at the sacrifice of each other, one way or another. As I say in the book, I don’t think we want to have it all anymore. It’s too much! Certainly, a balance of both is more accessible to families with financial privilege, but even affluent professional women, and women of colour in particular, face extra demands on their work and behaviour in order to be valued as competent. Rather than aiming to have it all, we might consider fighting for shorter workweeks, accessible childcare and pay equity.
BCBW: Certain high-earning women with families (e.g., Facebook CEO, Sheryl Sandberg) put the onus on individuals to “lean in” to be successful. Is this a reasonable approach?
AW: This approach is to be expected in a society that puts ultimate value on individuals pulling themselves up by working hard and making good, responsible choices. In that sense, it is reasonable, but it is unhelpful. I encourage my students to understand that this is what it looks like when individualism has its claws in feminism. We have made gender equality about individual choices and individual striving. This approach only causes harm. It creates the conditions for women’s work and family decisions to be scrutinized, no matter what they do.
BCBW: What about the divide between high-earning mothers and blue-collar mothers? Being able to pay for childcare makes it easier to focus on a career but not everyone has that luxury.
AW: The fact that childcare is a luxury good is what is holding us back. It is that simple. Childcare needs to be high-quality, accessible, affordable, and inclusive of the needs of diverse communities, children, and families. Not only does accessible childcare narrow the class gap between mothers, it narrows all kinds of social hierarchies between children and families. It is so simple, and so poorly understood in our society. I think we are getting there by making the economic case that childcare is a good investment. I really hope feminist social scientists can turn our attention to making another case at some point in the near future!
BCBW: Where do you look for answers and what gives you hope?
AW: Even though I’m critical of the systemic barriers that mothers face, I’m optimistic when I am talking to other mothers and parents. Instead of the competitiveness between mothers and families that we see satirized in media, I see solidarity and empathy. Witnessing that sense of allyship gives me hope. I really feel that women are thirsty for a collective break from shouldering so much work and worry, and I am hopeful that with enough solidarity and allyship across genders and races, this will translate to changes in how we organize work. I am also heartened when I see what an impact small policy changes can make on redistributing work and resources. The task of shifting labour across genders and classes seems infinite, but there is a lot we can do. 978-0-7748-6462-6
[BCBW 2021]
