narratives of three generations of urban middle-class - eTheses ...

Dalia is highly disdainful of putting too much focus on children’s performance. She
narrates,
“Mothers go crazy preparing their children to be best in everything –studies,
dance, music, swimming, sports and what not! Running behind kids all the time is
not necessarily proper mothering. We working mothers know how to give space
to children and this space is important for the child’s sense of independence.”
A reading of these narratives is interesting in many dimensions. The invocation of the
‘material’, market competition and the preparation of the next geneartion ‘professional’,
within and through Mala’s domestic space, problematize the patriarchal nationalistic
binary of the spiritual-inner-private-female domain and the material-outer-public-male
domain. Mala’s narrative which expresses a desire and dream for the public material
world of professionalism that she wishes to relive and fulfil through her daughters, can
be read as overturning this nationalistic dichotomy because it nurtures the material
within the very domestic. However, Mala’s and Mita’s narratives can also be read as
conforming to the hetero-normative discourse of ‘working mothers’ as ‘failing’ to be
‘good mothers’ whose work out of home can intervene into the cultural construction of
ideal motherhood and ‘committed’ domesticity. This idea of ‘ideal motherhood’ also has
its material and social consequences on women’s lives. For instance, in upholding the
view that a negotiated balance between ‘work’ and home will ultimately affect her role
as a wife and mother, Mala decided to leave her job. This reinstates the point that
cultural and discursive constructions of gendered identities do have social, structural
and material effects on women’s lives and thereby on their bargaining power within
home and outside.
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