Maternal presenteeism: Theorizing the importance for working mothers of “being there” for their children beyond infancy

Alison Edgley

Gender, Work and Organization, 2021, vol. 28, issue 3, 1023-1039

Abstract: This study theorizes why full‐time working women with partners and school‐age children deploy talk of maximal irreplaceable maternal care. The concept of maternal presenteeism frames women's personal beliefs, perceptions, and ambitions as subject to normative pressures associated with intensive mothering and a postfeminist sensibility. The accounts of 20 women who combine motherhood of school‐age children with full‐time professional work are analyzed using thematic analysis. The findings show that even women in demanding careers with partners talk about seeking to be maximally visible to their children and construct forms of workplace flexibility as a matter of luck. By contrast, maternal irreplaceability was viewed as a matter of fate. Examples of resistance to maternal presenteeism served to highlight these normative assumptions and a conflation of ideologies within the accounts of some working mothers. Vestiges of “intensive mothering,” performative notions of “presenteeism” drawn from regimes of work, and a postfeminist sensibility can be identified in the intersubjective experience of some working mothers. A postfeminist sensibility explains why social practices consistent with forms of “intensive mothering” may persist beyond infant years, and yet get recast as choice

Date: 2021
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