Expecting labor? Pregnant women in the corporate workplace [microform]
- Bib ID:
- 3284411
- Format:
- Book and Microform
- Author:
- Fursman, Lindy Joan
- Description:
- 184 p.
- ISBN:
- 0493822313
- Summary:
-
This dissertation explores how work experiences during pregnancy influence women's identities as workers and as mothers. I argue that despite the influx of mothers into the workplace, the normative view of motherhood in the U.S. still requires women who have children to place their identities as mothers before all else, and certainly before their identities as workers. However, the "ideal worker" required by the workplace is one which is unencumbered from family responsibilities and makes work the number one priority. Pregnant women employed in corporate and management positions must thus contend with contradictory ideologies as they start families. Using in-depth interviews with twenty-eight women, I examine how experiences at work during pregnancy affect how women go about adding "mother" to their sense of self.
Women who worked in environments which supported their multiple identities within an emotionally positive atmosphere found it easier to keep "worker" as a primary part of their self, and easier to resist exaggerated norms of intensive mothering. In contrast, women who experienced negative events in the workplace related to their pregnancy were more likely to subscribe to the normative view of the primacy of motherhood as an identity. This dissertation argues that workplace support during pregnancy contributes significantly to whether a woman is able to maintain her sense of self as a worker while starting a family.
- Notes:
-
- (UnM)AAI3063371
- Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 63-09, Section: A, page: 3151.
- Chair: Arlie R. Hochschild.
- Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, Berkeley, 2002.
- Reproduction:
- Microfiche. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms International.
- Subject:
- Other authors/contributors:
- University of California, Berkeley
- Copyright:
-
In Copyright
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Copyright status was determined using the following information:
- Material type:
- Literary Dramatic Musical
- Published status:
- Unpublished
- Creation date:
- 2002
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