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During the Covid-19 pandemic, the postfeminist ideal of “having it all” became more contradictory, as women struggled to juggle work and childcare. This research, using critical discourse analysis, examines how lifestyle and explanatory journalism made sense of this problematic ideal as it became evidently untenable during the pandemic. Here, journalism operates as a discursive structure, obscuring its own complicity in sustaining postfeminist and neoliberal relations around the expectations that surround working mothers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of International Journal of Cultural Studies is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Parent–child interaction therapy (PCIT) is an empirically supported behavioral parenting intervention developed for families with young children who have significant behavior problems. In Japan, PCIT was introduced in 2008 as a parenting intervention method and later introduced to therapists. This case study reports on the detailed use of PCIT, originally developed in Western cultures, for a 5-year-old Japanese boy with behavioral problems and his mother. During the treatment, the mother successfully acquired PCIT skills in the early stages of the coach sessions that led to improvements in the child’s problematic behavior. However, especially in the later stages of the treatment, the mother was too tired/distressed to focus on the treatment, which complicated the implementation of PCIT (e.g., unable to do homework, canceled sessions). This was mainly because she was a full-time working mother who was very busy with work, housework, and child-rearing, and also had no help from her husband. Cases such as this are commonly seen in current Japanese society. In summary, this case study supported the potential effectiveness of Western-originated PCIT for Japanese families with children who have behavioral problems, and also argued that there is a need for PCIT therapists to carefully assess and address the primary caregiver’s distractions outside the session room especially when working with Japanese working mothers.

Stay-at-home and employed mothers have been the subject of a wide range of both academic and popular discourse about roles, satisfaction, and meaning. However, no literature has examined time trends in relative satisfaction with being a stay-at-home versus a working mother. Here, we use pooled, yearly data from the General Social Survey to examine trends in how satisfied stay-at-home mothers are with their work relative to employed mothers. We find that stay-at-home mothers used to report less satisfaction with their work than employed mothers, but this gap became statistically nonsignificant around the same time trends in which societal attitudes toward gender roles began to shift. These changes are widespread across different socioeconomic and ideological groups, and do not appear to be attributable to sociodemographic composition changes.

This article juxtaposes The Good Wife’s ( TGW) representation of Alicia Florrick’s experience as a professional woman and a mother, against interview accounts of middle-class women who left successful careers after having children. I show that TGW furnishes a compelling fantasy based on (1) the valorization of combining motherhood with competitive, long-hours high-powered waged work as the basis for a woman’s value and liberation, and (2) an emphasis on women’s professional performance and satisfaction as depending largely on their individual self-confidence and ability to “lean in,” while marginalizing the impact of structural issues on women’s success and workplace equality. This fantasy fails to correspond to women’s lived experience, but shapes their sense of self in painful ways. The TGW fantasy thus involves a relation of “cruel optimism”: it attracts women to desire it while impeding them from tackling the structural issues that are obstructing realization of their desire.

Research on creative work typically focuses either on precarious work and employment or on creative workers’ dedication to their work and profession. The account of UK broadcaster and writer Charlotte presented in this article bridges these two foci. Charlotte talks about finding work in the cultural industry she loves, moulding a portfolio of jobs into a coherent creative career, and being a woman and working mother in broadcasting and media. Her account gives rich insight into how creative workers exercise individual agency in the face of their industries’ structural constraints and how they pursue careers both because of and in spite of what the cultural and creative industries offer.

This article describes the evolution of labour market participation and fertility patterns in Spain among women born between 1956 and 1970. Trajectories are captured by combining partnership, employment and motherhood over a 20-year span (from the age of 16 to the age of 35). Using Optimal Matching Analysis, four different patterns in female trajectories are identified: (1) early marriage/non-working mother/high fertility; (2) late marriage/working mother/low fertility; (3) early marriage/working mother/high fertility; and (4) late marriage/low participation/low fertility. A multinomial probit model contrasts whether or not the patterns found are compatible with the human capital approach to female labour market participation and fertility and/or Hakim’s preference theory. Results show that both theoretical frameworks partly explain the observed trajectories although neither of them, not even both together, suffices to determine female employment and family careers.

Organizational values demand that working mothers separate the maternal from the professional. Due to the nature of maternity leave in the United States, however, working mothers who are breastfeeding have little choice but to bring motherhood into the workplace. In investigating the ways women navigate this situation, we found that to maintain their reputations as good workers participants practiced bounded motherhood at work, constraining breastfeeding practices to preserve norms of professionalism. However, participants sometimes practiced unbounded motherhood wherein their inter/actions disrupted organizational orders by merging motherhood and work in material ways. This embodiment of a good working mother identity expands the repertoire or action for working mothers and contributes to a re-meaning of the relationship between work and motherhood. This study demonstrates one means for making breastfeeding while working more feasible as well as to how workers’ bodies can be sites of resistance and reinforcement of gendered symbolic orders in organizations.

Women experience workplace penalties when they become mothers, whereas men who become fathers are not penalized. We explored whether a working mother’s self-professed devotion to work over family would undermine the “motherhood penalty.” Male and female business students evaluated an applicant for an industrial engineering job. The applicant was always described as married, with 2 children. Depending on random assignment, the candidate was male or female, and expressed devotion to work or to family. Family-devoted mothers experienced strong hiring discrimination (with lower ratings than all other candidates), but work-devoted mothers escaped the motherhood penalty and were rated as highly as work-devoted fathers. We discuss the advantages and drawback to expressing work devotion to escape the motherhood penalty.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the association of sociodemographic, psychosocial, and behavioral characteristics with screen time among school-age children in Korea. This study employed a nonexperimental, cross-sectional study design. A total of 370 children attending four elementary schools participated in the study. Self-report method was used, and instruments included screen time (time spent on TV/video/computer/video games), sleep duration, eating behavior, pros and cons of exercise, and exercise self-efficacy. According to the results, 45.7% of the children had screen time of 1–2.9 hr/day and 8.9% had 3 or more hr/day. Increased screen time showed an association with gender (boy), higher body mass index, fast food consumption, higher cons of exercise, having a working mother, and attendance at a school in an inner city area ( p < .05). Understanding the factors associated with screen time may provide useful information in the development of health promotion programs aimed at decreasing sedentary behaviors.

This study explored the association between mothers’ work-related factors and breastfeeding practices in Bangkok, Thailand. Data were collected from 84 working mothers with a child aged 6 to 24 months who visited the breastfeeding mobile clinic at a nursery goods exhibition. Thai interviewers collected data using a structured questionnaire. Analysis of the data showed that exclusive breastfeeding for 3 months was 78.6%, and for 6 months it was 38.1%. Mothers who returned to work 3 months or more after giving birth exclusively breastfed more than the mothers who returned to work in less than 3 months (crude odds ratio [OR] = 4.26, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.39-13.05; adjusted OR = 4.15, 95% CI = 1.15-14.95). Moreover, mothers who worked at self-employed or family-owned businesses and some mothers working at private companies showed tendencies of returning to work in less than 3 months. Results suggest that longer maternity leave would help extend the duration of exclusive breastfeeding. In addition, the improvement of a breastfeeding supportive environment in the workplace would be valuable and may be an effective means to improve breastfeeding practices and infant health.

Corporate mission statements are ubiquitous, but their relationship to organizational practices, especially those noted for their high quality, remains a subject of debate. We use the case of work—life practices in publicly traded financial services firms to illustrate an innovative method for studying this issue. Overall, we find variation in the mission statements of firms in the same organizational field. We also find relationships between these statements and high-quality investment in work—life practices, as recognized by Working Mother magazine and Kinder, Lydenberg, and Domini. The mission statements of firms recognized for their work—life initiatives were more likely than those of competitors to emphasize the value of employees and less likely to stress shareholder value. We identified four types of mission statements, a pattern which may reflect the dual influences of distinctive organizational commitments and pressure from institutional actors. We discuss the implications of our findings for the literatures on work—life initiatives, strategic implementation, and organizational theory.

Speaking in Melbourne in 1952, mother and wartime childcare activist Marjorie Coppel reflected on the voluntary effort that underlay early childhood services. Voluntarism, she noted, may not be as efficient as government provision, but it was more innovative. 'The enthusiasm, the combining of people in a commonsense empirical sort of way, to achieve a service which no-one else would give them, these are the good worth-while things about voluntary effort.' But, she warned, 'those who do voluntary work undertake it less for the sake of helping others in need than to help themselves' (Coppel, 1952, pp. 8-9). Where the self-interest of the volunteers conflicted with the wider aims of the organisation, 'deep strains' were likely to arise. While not decrying the claims to innovation, this paper focuses on the self-interest inherent in voluntary action and the impact this has had on childcare provision in Australia. Child care is a contested terrain, the site at which the competing demands of the working mother and the preschool child are negotiated and perhaps resolved. Australian debates about the merits of private and public/community provision proceed from an uneasy consensus that child care is an essential service: on the one hand both a right and a social good, but also central to the functioning of the national economy. Jones (1996) has identified a tendency in historical debate to polarise and then construct chronologies which move from the bad past to a better present. Deborah Brennan's (1994) history of child care in Australia, The politics of Australian child care: From philanthropy to feminism, fits this pattern, confining the history of pre-1970s developments to two chapters, before moving on to celebrate second-wave feminism's role in shaping the pattern of provision in which 'community' and government work in partnership. So persuasive is this account that it has been taken up by American writer Sonia Michel (1999) as a model that the US could, but did not, follow. This paper, which is part of a larger project on the history of working mothers in Australia, will contest the teleological narrative implicit in Brennan's account by giving equal weight to three distinct periods in the history of child care: nineteenth-century creches, World War II children's centres, and the 1970s Community Child Care movement. It will argue that, in each of these periods, the services were shaped by three sets of competing interests: those of the mothers who needed or wanted to work; their children; and the volunteer committees or collectives anxious to 'rescue' children from forms of care they considered to be unsuitable. The final resolution, in each case, reflected not simply a response to the needs of working mothers and their children, but rather a more complex process that owed at least as much to the goals and values of the service providers. Nineteenth-century creches Most nineteenth-century creches trace their origins to Paris, where the first such institution was opened in 1844 with the aim of displacing private child-minding establishments conducted by lower-class older women (La Berge, 1991). The threefold goals elaborated in Paris were adopted by the founding committees of similar institutions internationally: creches were charities aimed at combating 'pauperism' and inculcating bourgeois morality, public health services aimed at reducing infant mortality, and educational institutions providing a 'model for working mothers on how to rear children hygienically and morally' (La Berge, 1991, p. 67). However, they failed to engage more than a small minority of their target clientele. The problems that La Berge has identified in the operation of the French creches recur in their international replicas, namely irregular work patterns of mothers leading to an irregular attendance from children, and a continuing preference amongst mothers to leave their children 'with women of similar background who lived in conditions they were used to' rather than submit themselves to the interrogation and indictment of their way of life which was central to the creche ideal (La Berge, 1991, p. …

This article examines the complex and contradictory patterns of representation used by the media in reports of Cherie Booth/Blair, wife of current British Prime Minister, Tony Blair. As a subject of media attention, she is particularly interesting for she acts as a focus for a range of identities that juxtapose stereotypes of women related to their roles in both the domestic and public domains (a celebrity wife, a successful barrister and an icon for `working mothers'). The data sample considered here consists of 130 British press reports which are analysed using lexicogrammatical tools from critical linguistics, specifically concentrating on naming practices and transitivity choices. This is complemented by a corpus-based approach which traces collocational patterns, especially those related to the phrase `working mother'. Both the naming patterns used and the contrast between the personalized profile of Booth and the collectivized stereotype of the `working mother' are understood as examples of `textual heterogeneity' and so evidence of social change. Moreover, these representations are also seen as operating within that social change to both reflect and potentially reinforce the gendered inequality presupposed by the ideological model of separate spheres.

Customer brands like Coke, Intel, Pepsi and General Mills provide differential advantage to great companies. Workplace brands can create a unique place to work that attracts and keeps the people you want. Branding the workplace is not new—lists of “best places to work” have been used for some time. But now we need to emphasize the business as we brand our workplace. This means creating a brand that works in good times and bad. This article argues that companies must go beyond providing liberal benefits and perquisites to be a best place to work. Companies need to emphasize workforce results, performance metrics, expectations communications, active career tracks and a win-win reward solution so both the company and workforce benefit. The article advocates a business approach to workforce branding that goes far beyond the standards outlined by Fortune’s and Working Mother’s best places to work lists.

Transition to the market economy in post-socialist Ukraine, followed by the destruction of the ‘working mother’ gender contract, has led to the emergence of new forms of women’s identities. But the formation of new identities in the transformational period appeared to be mediated by free market ideology, linked to the development of consumer capitalism and dissemination of western consumer standards and lifestyles. The seeming diversity of the new identities promised by the ‘free market’ turned out to be reduced to two models: housewife and businesswoman. Imported along with western mass culture, they can easily be inscribed onto the Ukrainian cultural context. At the same time, the everyday practice of economic survival through informal business and the difficulties of adaptation to the market economy have a profound impact on women’s identity formation.

In recent years, the "woman-friendly" or "family-friendly" appellation has been given to companies that score high on criteria that support a woman's career development and help employees manage family responsibilities. Magazines such as Working Mother and Business Week periodically rate companies on criteria such as percent of top salaried positions held by women; number of female managers who report directly to the CEO; existence of goals and programs to improve women's standing; and benefits such as flextime, job sharing, parental leave, and child care or elder care (Schwartz, 1992; Moskowitz, 1996, 1997; "Welcome," 1990). These ratings are based on surveys of employees as well as analysis of company policies. Recognizing the competitive edge that such ratings can give an employer in a tight labor market, companies compete to get on such lists (Fierman, 1994; Shellenbarger, 1996a; Lublin, 1996; Korry, 1997). An ATT Shellenbarger, 1996b). In some companies, family-friendly policies are applied at the discretion of the employee's immediate supervisor. However, many supervisors are not fully aware of their companies' work/family policies, and few companies base managerial performance ratings on work/family issues ("Corporate America," 1991). Among the companies achieving a place on the 1997 Working Mother list of 100 best companies, only 39 measure managers on women's advancement (Moskowitz, 1997) Milton Moskowitz, who creates the list for Working Mother (and who coauthored the list with Carol Townsend for several years prior to her death in 1995), acknowledges that companies send him elaborate public relations materials to woo him, but he insists he is not swayed by company propaganda. Instead, he demands access to employees. He also "wants to see the company's newsletter, which reveals much about the way a company treats its people" (Korry, 1997, p. 5). An employee newsletter or magazine has been characterized as "a tangible interpretation of abstract policy" (Waltman & Golen, 1989, p. 100) and "a means of defining or expressing [a company's] 'culture'" ("Read all about it," 1994, p. 4). James (1990) contends that corporate communications (in which he includes employee newsletters or magazines) should ideally reflect "what is in truth a positive corporate culture" (p. 29). Therefore, one might reasonably expect a company that actively promotes policies of equity and family support to use its employee publications to demonstrate that commitment. One could argue that the pictures as well as the words used in employee publications should be expected to portray the company's culture. Goffman (1979) made the case that photographs are powerful, condensed representations of social relationships. He argued that what is seen in a posed picture is not a photographic record of an actual scene; instead, it is staged in response to a conception of what represents the particular person or event - a perception of what the social reality is or should be. …

1. The number of women who returned to work after childbirth increased steadily through the 1980s, with many mothers returning to work earlier than ever before. This trend has caused new mothers, their employers, and legislators to examine the issue of infant day care. 2. Infant day care availability, arrangements, and cost influence maternal work force participation. These concerns may also impact on the physical and mental health of the working mother. 3. Further research is needed to determine if and how infant day care concerns affect worker productivity, and to determine how to obtain quality day care at a reasonable cost.

Data on 1990 rural children in an impact/evaluation project in the Chandrapur District of Maharashtra India were analyzed to determine the effect of mothers work status on their childrens nutrition and health. Socioeconomic status sanitary and drinking water conditions average family size of 7 of working and nonworking mothers were comparable. Average per capita monthly income was lower among working mothers. 50% of the literate and 70% of the illiterate worked outside the home. Height weight and health status (anemia Vitamin A deficiency conjunctival xerosis with Bitots spots corneal xerosis) were determined by interns and diarrheal and pneumonia episodes were reported by the mother. Heights and weights were converted to z scores and categorized by Indian standards of malnutrition. Childrens ages by month were squared and a natural logarithm was derived from income. A prevalence odds ratio with a 95% confidence interval was used to determine relative risk of becoming moribund or malnourished. Analysis of covariance was used to examine the effect of maternal employment on nutrition and health status. The results showed that the risk of a low weight for age for children

We aimed to evaluate sociodemographic, epidemiological, and clinical risk factors for pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB) in children presenting with severe acute malnutrition (SAM) and pneumonia. Children aged 0 to 59 months with SAM and radiologic pneumonia from April 2011 to July 2012 were studied in Bangladesh. Children with confirmed PTB (by culture and/or X-pert MTB/RIF) (cases = 27) and without PTB (controls = 81; randomly selected from 378 children) were compared. The cases more often had the history of contact with active PTB patient ( P < .01) and exposure to cigarette smoke ( P = .04) compared with the controls. In logistic regression analysis, after adjusting for potential confounders, the cases were independently associated with working mother ( P = .05) and positive tuberculin skin test (TST; P = .02). Thus, pneumonia in SAM children is a common presentation of PTB and further highlights the importance of the use of simple TST and/or history of contact with active TB patients in diagnosing PTB in such children, especially in resource-limited settings.

One of the changes brought about by the increasing employment of women outside the home is the demand for both custodial and developmental care for their pre-school age children 1. The demand situation for extra-maternal child care in Nigeria seems to be aggravated by the gradual erosion of the traditional resources for extramaternal childcare such as the community of friends and relations, hired nursemaids and servants, and the inadequate provision of extrafamilial institutions such as nurseries and daycare centres. Rather than quantify the demand for extramaternal care for children, this study assesses the childcare arrangements of working mothers and inquires into the existing resources for meeting this demand both within and outside the household. It is concluded that demand for extramaternal childcare of both custodial and developmental nature is not fulfilled by existing resources. Therefore, it is being suggested that an inventory of existing pre-school institutions such as nurseries and daycare centres, programmes for the improvement and expansion of these facilities would facilitate the participation of women in the labour force and their effective contribution to social and economic development.

Maternal employment, perceived maternal satisfaction and goodness of mothering, and sex role conceptions were studied as they relate to future life plans of college senior women. Twenty-five women in a working mother group and 26 in a nonworking mother group were administered the Strong Vocational Interest Blank for Women, the Sex-Role Stereotype Questionnaire, the Inventory of Feminine Values, the Maternal Satisfaction and Maternal Goodness scales, and the Life Plan Questionnaire. Daughters of working mothers scored higher on career orientation ( p < .01, Life Plan Questionnaire) than did daughters of nonworking mothers. High perceived maternal satisfaction and maternal goodness correlated with low career orientation for the nonworking sample (the averaged r across variable pairs = .48). For the working sample, perceived maternal dissatisfaction with feminine role values correlated significantly with higher career orientation ( r = .42), while the other satisfaction measure showed no relation to career orientation. Daughters of working mothers displayed broader sex role conceptualizations ( p < .01).

The issue of the possible contribution of single-sex schools to girls' academic achievements is part of an historical debate about relations between the sexes within the education system and of immediate topical importance to policy makers in the educational sphere. The present paper examines the relationships between the social origins of girls, their views of their own abilities, their high school curricula, their teachers' encouragement and their actual academic achievements within both single-sex and mixed high schools. This examination is based upon a sample of 1286 Queensland Grade 12 students attending different types of schools. Complex patterns of relationships among these variables are found which appear to operate differently in each school type. Of par ticular interest is the impact of a working mother upon her daughter's achievements within different types of schools.