This study takes the position that mothering performed by women is not revelation of women's essential motherhood but is experienced as labor based upon socially constructed motherhood. However, it is hard to understand special characteristics of wome...
This study takes the position that mothering performed by women is not revelation of women's essential motherhood but is experienced as labor based upon socially constructed motherhood. However, it is hard to understand special characteristics of women's labor through existing concepts of labor. Accordingly, this study accepted theoretical discussion, which reconstructs women's labor with care work and emotional labor. This study introduced the concept of motherhood labor in analyzing women's experience of labor revolving around motherhood and mothering. This research collected data from in-depth interviews with 10 domestic service labor(mainly childcare) and 4 mothers who employed them in order to analyze experiences of women who performed motherhood and mothering as labor.
This study addressed the following research questions: how is the process that motherhood become a commodity and what are its characteristics?; what factors make motherhood transacted?; and how are women identifying themselves as mothers and reconstructing their motherhood through their experience of motherhood as labor?
The major findings of the research were as the following:
First, since employment relationship regarding motherhood is stable when motherhood(reproduction of maternal love) regarded as women's disposition is maintained, emotions were managed and controled properly within limited motherhood demanded by employers and expressed by workers. This paper viewed this phenomenon as feeling rules and display ones in accordance with motherhood ones. As for women who are entitled to identify themselves through their children, intimate relationship between their children and other women is thought of as a threat to their identification. Accordingly, domestic service labor, on one hand, has to maximize their emotional expression to show their motherhood; on the other hand, they have to be careful not to go beyond the limit.
Second, under a premise that 'all women are mothers', motherhood could be safely traded within women's social age or experience as mothers and expectation of desexualization. In a private space of home domestic service worker may sometimes encounter a husband of their employer. In the uneasy situation what makes the employers trust their employee is the employee's de-sexualized image. Moreover, the result indicated that trade of motherhood was based on difference between women, that is, difference in ability to pay for motherhood.
Third, the participants in this study showed changes in awareness of motherhood values which they had before they experienced domestic service as labor. Through the experience of motherhood as labor, they found out domestic labor and parenting are 'not necessarily performed by mothers'. They understood that mothering they conducted under employment relationship could be what they are good at or labor resources. Furthermore, the labor resource of mothering became their ‘knowhow’ through long-term experience.
The experience that mothering can be labor resources means that caring is not necessary conducted by biological relation, and it suggests that caring labor can be socialized. Moreover, breaking up the identification that all women are mothers reveals contradiction of the motherhood ideology itself.
The concept of 'motherhood labor' presented in this study is very useful in that it can be beyond the existing viewpoint that motherhood is the nature of women. That is, this study shows that mothering is labor which should be rewarded and paid, and that there are various ways of breaking the gender division of labor through the experience of mothering as labor.
Therefore, this study would be meaningful in that it tries to expand viewpoints on the reconstruction of motherhood and mothering through a concrete empirical research on commodification of care work. For further study, it is necessary to conduct studies on different types of employment relationship depending on employers' situation(employed women/housewives) and more diverse types of care work.