Page 115 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

108 In search of a ‘good mix’
where housing was expensive and which was largely white and middle class.
However, this area lay in close proximity to areas that were more socially
and racially mixed. None of these women was born in the area, and it is
likely that many of them will move on, further out of London, in the search
for bigger houses or gardens and a different choice of schools. Several of the
women mentioned the same towns, for example Twickenham in Surrey, as
desirable locations. Therefore, these women did not have deep roots in the
local community in terms of residency over generations or even their own
lives. Social mobility was linked to this geographic mobility. With the chang-
ing of geographic place since childhood, their social space had also often
shifted. As a result of social mobility and changing social structures, these
women did not necessarily have models of parenting that could be adopted
2
unaltered from their parents. Thus, their mothering involved new negotia-
tions of place and social space.
At the time when the interviews were being conducted (September 1997
to April 1998), several different high-profile political and cultural events
and discourses impacted on the ways in which motherhood was perceived.
These, along with the social and economic context, form part of the social
space in which the interviews were conducted and the accounts produced.
The new Labour government was putting into legislation its position on the
long-running political debate on single mothers. The idea of single mothers
as an unnecessary burden on the state was underlined through the removal
of single-parent benefit. Single mothers were also defined as a particular
social ‘problem’ because they did not work and thus failed to set a suffi-
ciently industrious example to their children. The government claimed that
it was enabling single parents to do what they wished – that is work. But this
was not a discourse of increasing choice, rather one of delegitimising one
choice, that of staying at home and caring full time for children. High-profile
women such as Cherie Blair and Hillary Clinton could be said to represent
an ideal of successful working motherhood. At the same time as the validity
of poorer single women staying at home was called into question, several
high-profile, high-earning women left work in order to be full-time mothers.
In addition, the Louise Woodward case in the United States, in which a Brit-
ish nanny was accused of killing a child, provoked anxious debates around
issues of childcare, leading to criticism of ambitious working women who
could not care for their children (the mother of the child, a working doctor,
was given fairly unfavourable press). Several ‘celebrities’ (Madonna, Pamela
Anderson) became mothers in this period, giving rise to discussions of babies
as ‘fashion accessories’. The role of fathers did not receive the same level of
debate or attention as that of mothers, and there was no serious challenge to
the idea that children are the primary responsibility of women. For instance,
the Labour government made no suggestion that it wished to overturn Brit-
ain’s exemption from European legislation on paternity leave obtained by
the previous government.
All the interviewees agreed that motherhood was a major transformation,