“My Child Has Two Parents”: Swedish Women Entrepreneurs Doing and Undoing Their Motherhood

Magdalena Markowska, Helene Ahl and Lucia Naldi

Gender, Work and Organization, 2025, vol. 32, issue 6, 2133-2148

Abstract: In this study, we explore how women who are both mothers and entrepreneurs construct their subject position as mothers in the presence of dominant discourses. Based on multiple interviews with 15 participants, our findings indicate that women engage in doing and undoing motherhood. Although undoing one's motherhood is related to negotiating one's position vis‐à‐vis social norms and expectations, doing motherhood is related to the construction of new discourses. We illustrate how a norm‐breaking motherhood discourse emerges through processes of gender abating and coalescing. In this discourse, child‐rearing is not a woman's primary responsibility but is shared between the parents, and the public and private spheres—work and family—coalesce. A good mother is constructed as an individual who can pursue her passions and realize her dreams and who focuses on her relationship with her child through her work as an entrepreneur while mastering desirable attitudes and values in life. We also find that entrepreneurship can be a vehicle for escaping normative assumptions about motherhood and crafting one's “project of the self.”

Date: 2025
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