"If a woman voluntarily remains childless, some will say she
is cold, heartless and unfulfilled as a woman. If she is a mother
who works too hard at her job or career, some will accuse her of
neglecting the kids. If she does not work hard enough, some will
surely place her on the 'mommy track,' and her career advancement
will be permanently slowed by the claim that her commitment to her
children interferes with her workplace efficiency. If she stays at
home with her children, some will call her unproductive and useless.
A women, in other words, can never fully do it right," author Sharon
Hays asserts.


BOOK EXPLORES THE "GOOD MOTHER" DILEMMA

	CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va., Sept. 11--Rachel is a successful
professional with a demanding, well-paying job. She is also the
mother of a two-year-old daughter who needs to be hospitalized
briefly. Rachel feels compelled to stay with her daughter in the
hospital, yet her boss is angry and resentful that she is not
completing an important assignment. 
	Rachel faces the "good mother" dilemma, being torn between
two worlds as she confronts the opposing pulls on her time and
energy. 
	Rachel's dilemma, and those faced by all mothers who work
outside the home, are explored in "The Cultural Contradictions of
Motherhood," to be published Sept. 18 by Yale University Press.
Author Sharon Hays, an assistant professor of sociology and women's
studies at the University of Virginia, examines mothering today,
offering insights about our culture's troubled relationship with
mothering and why a mother's job may be the most difficult one in
American society.
	Rachel's nurturing qualities and her commitment to placing
her child's needs above work and her boss's profit motivation and
demands for efficiency represent the contradictory ideologies that
coexist in contemporary society, Hays asserts.
	Half of all mothers of young children work outside the home
in an environment where self interest and profit motivate behavior.
"Yet we expect mothers to devote themselves to their children," Hays
notes. 
	Somehow mothers are expected to be competitive and ambitious
in the workplace, yet nurturing and unselfish while child-rearing.
"They face not only conflicting demands on their time and energy,
but also conflicting ideas about how they must behave," the
sociologist observes.
	"Given those conflicting demands, wouldn't it make more
sense to simplify child-rearing and reduce the double load women
carry?" she asks. 
	Instead, mothers of different backgrounds and financial
circumstances, mothers who work outside the home and mothers who
stay at home with their children -- all share an amazingly similar
vision of what makes a good mother, Hays discovered through
extensive interviews with 38 mothers of young children.
	"They believe good mothers should have a willingness to
expend a great deal of physical, emotional, cognitive and financial
resources on their children. Intensive mothering is the American
ideal," Hays said. 
	And mothers feel this burden heavily. When asked if parents
could share the parenting burden equally, many mothers indicated
that they did not feel fathers were competent to be primary
caregivers. They did not believe the fathers had been trained in
taking care of children the way mothers are.
	The mothers' views match the author's historical research
and review of contemporary child-care manuals. Hays traces the
evolution of intensive mothering -- an ideal that holds the mother
primarily responsible for child-rearing and dictates that the
process be child-centered-- to ideology as far back as the Middle
Ages. 
	She also discovered that widely respected child-care experts
such as T. Berry Brazelton and Benjamin M. Spock advocate unselfish
values for mothers and issue detailed instructions. Such cultural
expectations increase the tensions both working and at-home mothers
face, placing them in a "no-win" situation, the sociologist
believes. 
	In a country where 58 percent of mothers with children under
six are in the workforce, why has our culture maintained such a
tenacious hold on the concept of intensive mothering? Hays believes
attitudes toward mothering reflect a fundamental ambivalence about a
market system that is based on the competitive pursuit of individual
interests. 
	"Our society has a deep uneasiness about self-interest.
Peculiar to our society is an ambivalence about individual rights
and the work ethic. A working mother who places her child's needs
ahead of her own challenges our notion of what to do to succeed. We
have imposed unrealistic obligations and commitments on mothering,
making it into an opposing force, a primary field on which this
cultural ambivalence is played out," Hays said.
	Cultural contradictions about motherhood have deepened,
rather than lessened, as women have increasingly entered the
workforce, notes Hays, who studies gender, culture, family and
social theory. "The ideal of intensive mothering is protected and
promoted because it holds a
fragile, but nonetheless powerful, cultural position as the last
best defense against what many people see as the impoverishment of
social ties, communal obligations and unremunerated commitments,"
she said. 
###
September 10, 1996
	Note:  To obtain a review copy of "The Cultural
Contradictions of Motherhood," call the U.Va. News Office at (804)
924-7116.  Sharon Hays can be reached at (804) 924-6517, office, or
(804) 978-2816, home.