“I feel quite organized this morning”: How mothering is achieved through talk

Abstract

This paper examines examples of women's everyday interactions to explore the ways in which the participants of two all-female groups discursively invoke their roles as mothers through accounts of their daily mothering practices and domestic responsibilities. Qualitative analysis of the data shows a very traditional model of motherhood emerged from the women's conversations. While there were some between group differences in the ways the women negotiated constructions of motherhood, the accounts of domestic life examined here reflected a traditional model of intensive mothering (Hays (). The cultural contradictions of motherhood. New Haven: Yale University Press).