Beyond the Ideology of Motherhood_ Leisure as Resistance

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1990 26: 36Journal of Sociology Betsy WearingBeyond the Ideology of Motherhood: Leisure as Resistance

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36

Beyond the Ideology of Motherhood:

Leisure as Resistance

Betsy WearingDepartment of Social Work

University of New South Wales

ABSTRACT

The structural view ofpower

in feminist

analysisto date has

discouraged women as victims from thinking that anythingthey do at an individual level can be effective in the genderstruggle. This article presents a view of power that incorporatesresistance. Leisure as resistance for mothers of first babies is

explored. The intersection of two contradictory discourses: the

discourse on motherhood and that on human rights allows

these mothers to transform some repressive aspects of mother-

hood. The vehicle isleisure,

a

legitimatearea of

autonomyconcerning time and space. Strategies in this site of struggleinclude, refusal to do housework and cook, co-option of the

father, relatives and other mothers in child-care responsibilityfor periods of time and refusal to adopt a victim mentality byorganising and planning for self-space. Gains in control over

labour and in gender power relationships at a strategic time in

family relationships are potential outcomes.

Recent developments in the theorising of both class and gender have

questioned the explanatory power of broad categories such as these for

understanding the complexities of domination and subordination in

advanced industrial, capitalist societies. They have suggested that these

complexities will not be addressed by continued projection of the con-

flict of the ’objective interests’ of entire categories of subjects such as the

bourgeoisieversus the

proletariat,male versus female on to the actions

of individual agents or actors (Hindess, 1982, 1987; Wickham, 1986;Connell, 1987; Emmison et al, 1988; Alcoff, 1988; Pringle, 1988). Cruder

versions of Marxian analysis as well as radical and socialist feminist

analyses are criticised for their over-simplifying of the complex inter-

relationships and variety of responses extant in contemporary society.Deconstruction of both capitalism and patriarchy has suggested views of

power which are neither essentialist (e.g. entirely determined by the

relations of

production)nor

totalisingin their effect

(e.g. entirely








37

blanketing in terms of consciousness) nor absolutely repressive. These

theorists urge us to look at specific sites of power in specific historical

and cultural contexts. They say that examination of the forces at play in

such sites, and the negotiations and renegotiations which make up a

struggle, will bring us closer to an unravelling of relationships of powerthan broad categorisations. The outcomes of power struggles and of the

process of domination and subordination, they claim, are neither zero

sum nor entirely determined by the macro-structures of society (seeHindess, 1982, 510; Wickham, 1986, 174-7).

Ideas such as these have potential as a way forward in feminist analy-sis which has so thoroughly documented women’s structural oppressionthat little room has been left for ways in which individual women can

and do resist their oppression in their everyday lives. In fact the struc-

tural emphasis has discouraged women as victims from thinking that

anything they do at an individual level can be effective in the genderstruggle. I would go so far as to claim that such victim mentality has

become an ideology in itself with enormously repressive potential. Thefeminist adage ’the personal is political’, as a necessary step towards

liberation, uncovered women’s individual subjection as an integral partof the general oppression of women by men. In this view the power of

the male due to his position in the political, economic and cultural insti-

tutions of industrial capitalism has been seen to enable male values,ideas and definitions of the situation to hold sway. Thus have male

interests been served as against those of female counterparts in all status

and class groups in society. Ideologies which perpetuate and legitimatemale privilege are propagated and women accept their position in the

family and in the workforce as natural and inevitable. It is only womenwho have access to ideas which raise their consciousness or cut throughtheir ’false consciousness’, who also have access to material resources

and who band together with other women in a similar position who can

resist domination. These are they who can gather sufficient power to

challenge male definitions of the situation propagated through ideol-

ogies and construct utopias or relative utopias which go beyond presentsocietal conditions and beliefs. Or so I argued in The Ideology of Mother-hood (Wearing, 1984).

Infact,

in the data collected for that research there is much thatsug-

gests that individual women, even those with very few material

resources do not completely assent to ideologies. Many did make some

space for themselves in their everyday lives by taking time out, for

example, the Mt Druitt mothers who played evening netball, in spite of

grumblings from husbands who were prevented on those evenings from

going to the pub. But such is the power ofone’s theoretical perspective to

control the selection of data in research that I minimised these resist-

ances.








38

In this paper I suggest a view of power that incorporates resistance

and explore leisure as resistance for mothers of first babies. The majorityof these women are in the relatively powerless position of being econo-

mically, physically and emotionally dependent on a male. I will not

look, as I previously did, at how they conform to an ideology of mother-hood, although most do conform to some degree. Rather I will examine

how through leisure they resist aspects of that ideology. More specifi-cally, I will demonstrate how two competing discourses in current

society enable some of them to challenge tenets of the ideology, or in

deconstructionist terms, transform the dominant discourse on mother-

hood.’I

My purpose is to suggest ways in which individual women can resist,

and in so doing how others may. My claim is that even if such resistance

does not change overall power relationships, neither is it totally incor-

porated. The personal is political as much in resistance as it is in

repression. Even if absorbed, like ink on blotting paper, it leaves its

mark.22

LEISURE AS RESISTANCE

I have chosen the sphere of leisure for two reasons. First, feminist

analyses have concentrated on the family and the workplace as sites of

the construction of gender, the sphere of leisure has been largelyignored. Women’s ability to give birth and to suckle were taken in

patriarchal society as the basis of their ’natural’ responsibility for parent-ing, household tasks and husband care. Gender in the family was

constructed along the lines of female nurturing/caring ability and male

instrumentality and rationality. This construction was shown by femi-

nist analysis to result from male/female power relationships both in the

family and in wider society. Thus men could define women’s situation

for them in such a way that males are advantaged (e.g. Firestone, 1970;Mitchell, 1971; Barrett and MacIntosh, 1982). The workplace has also

been shown by feminist researchers (e.g. Dex, 1985; Game and Pringle,1983) to be a sphere where male dominance has enabled women to be

channelled in particular ways which construct their gender identity as

nurturing and caring or confined to tedious tasks which require manual

dexterity. And here again, as in the family, these characteristics and the

jobs which depend upon them have been given subordinate status, evi-

denced by lower wages and inferior conditions.

The sphere of leisure is only now coming into focus (Deem, 1986;Green, et al., 1988; Wimbush, 1988a). In male-stream sociology the

sphere of leisure has generally been subordinated to the importance of

work in capitalist society (e.g. Stedman Jones, 1977), but is now receiv-

ingmore attention as an

increasingly important sphereof

activityecon-








39

omically, socially and culturally (Yeo and Yeo, 1981). Some feminists

suggest that investigating aspects of women’s experience in relation to

the structure of their lives as a whole will throw more light on women’s

position than examining each sphere separately (Green, et al., 1987, 76).

In anycase an examination of the

sphereof leisure for women is needed

to round out our knowledge of women’s lives today.

Second, and more importantly, the concept of leisure carries with it

the idea of freedom (Wearing and Wearing, 1988). In an analysis of the

underlying assumptions concerning the concept of leisure in the leisure

literature of the last decade, Parry and Long (1988) argue for a mini-

malist definition of leisure as ’free time’, that is unobligated time, time to

choose activity for oneself. Most writers assume some basis of freedom

when they write about leisure. The leisure studies literature unequi-vocally assumes individual freedom to choose and the benefits of such

’free time’ for the individual and for society as a whole (e.g. Neulinger,1974; Roberts, 1978; Kelly, 1982). The sociological literature on the

other hand sees such ’freedom’ as an ideology which legitimatesinequalities in other spheres of life such as work. It is deemed to serve

the interests of capital by providing a safety valve for the alienation of

work, by refurbishing the worker for his/her work and by providing an

incentive to the worker to work harder and to earn more so that con-

sumption of commodified leisure can increase (Coalter and Parry, 1982;

Rojek, 1985; Clarke and Critcher, 1985). For example,

Leisure is now central to capitalist economic and cultural domination... The

leisure market is now a major source of profit, its fluctuations an index of the

state of the economy as a whole... The ideological implications are wider

still... Far from being the antithesis of freedom it has been represented as its

realisation. Broader questions of freedom and control have been narrowed

around the right to consumer choice. No one seriously interested in under-

standing how capitalism works can afford to underestimate the economic and

cultural importance of leisure. (Clarke and Critcher, 1985, 232)

At the same time, however, Clarke and Critcher recognise that these

ideas on leisure have gained widespread acceptance because ’leisure can

genuinely be seen as an area of some freedom, where positively eval-

uated experiences are most keenly felt’.

Like all ideologies the ideology of leisure which incorporates legiti-mate freedom has some basis in the lived experience of its subjects. It is

possibly the one area in advanced industrial capitalist societies where

freedom is encouraged, albeit a freedom constrained by the commodifi-

cation of leisure goods and services and by ideas of legitimate leisure and

pleasure. So that it is an area of distinct possiblities for resistance.

This is not a new idea. Efforts to control and restrain the leisure activi-

ties of the working classes by ’magistrates, millowners and Methodists’








40

as documented by E.P. Thompson’s The Making of tlie English WorkingClass (1963) are testimony to the fact the working man’s leisure could be

seen as a distinct threat to developing capitalism in the nineteenth cen-

tury. As Yeo and Yeo (1981) point out, leisure for labourers has consti-

tuted opportunity as well as constraint. For example:For the Derby framework knitters in 1845 the Shrovetide games became a

vehicle of social protest, for the holiday provided the opportunity for knitters

from the region to gather to project a union to resist ’the serious abatements

made in our earnings by the manufacturer where no fault is found nor can be’

(Yeo and Yeo, 1981, 150).

Goldman and Dickens (1984, 318-9) go further and claim that

’hedonism and narcissism as

outgrowthsof the

philosophyof leisure

consumption become as potentially disruptive of capital social relations

as they are necessary to them’. They point out that studies of workingclass youth in Britain show how the meaning of commodified leisure

may be reassembled to form a style of resistance. They conclude:

These practices of mass culture ’bricolage’ (Hebdige, 1979) and other dis-

sonant forms of culture industry reception suggest a politics of opposition in

advanced Capitalism may yet find grounding in, of all places, the social rela-

tions of leisure consumption (Goldman and Dickens, 1984, 318-319).Wilson (1988) also points to the political potential of resistance

through leisure. The home, friends and street gatherings, he claims,have long been spaces in which workers have been able to expressvalues, ideas, projects and demands which do not conform to dominant

social interests. And play, he says, can enable an individual to acquire an

awareness of the self as a cause of activity which invites transgression of

conventional restraints, thus creating time and space out of structure

where new social arrangements can be experimented with. To date,however, feminist analyses of leisure have not looked at women’s lei-

sure as an opportunity for resistance. Rather have they continued the

documentation of gender inequality and women’s oppression and re-

pression in this sphere as in the spheres of the family and paid labour

(Deem, 1986; Green, et al. 1988).

In order to prepare the way for an empirical examination of the waysin which the mothers I studied used leisure as

resistance,some discus-

sion of power and resistance is necessary, as is a discussion of the

concept of leisure as applied to women whose labour is unpaid andcarried out in the domestic sphere. I will do each in turn.

POWER AND RESISTANCE’

Reflexive feminism suggests that structural views of gender power rela-

tionshipswhich present all men as

opposedto and

oppressingall








41

women in a total war of ’them against us’, in which men are always the

winners and women the losers are both politically inadequate and

empirically inaccurate (Connell, 1987; Pringle, 1988; Alcoff, 1988).Recent male-stream theory posits similar objections to a concept of

powerthat is

top-down, blanketing and repressive (Foucault, 1979a,1980); that is based on outcomes of struggles structurally determined

(Hindess, 1982) or that is based purely on the relations of production in

the Marxian sense (Giddens, 1981; Emmison et al., 1988). Drawing on

these theorists, I will argue for a concept of power which incorporatesthe potentiality for struggle and resistance.

I will begin with Foucault whose critique of Marxian structuralist

ideas on power acted as a catalyst for an alternative conceptualisation of

this vital sociological concept. First, in Foucault (1979a) power analysisshould begin with relations between individuals, not with the ’sovereignstate’, industrial society or patriarchal institutions. Foucault argues

against the totalising effect of the power of the state, ideologicalmechanisms and class interests. For him, there is a ’complexity’ in the

mechanisms of power, which includes both diversity and specificity(1979a, 71). For Foucault, everyone however lowly and relativelypowerless has power and this power varies in specific individual and

group relationships. In individual families, between individual hus-bands and wives, the relationships of power are neither static nor

one-way. By inference, there is some room to move for women, some

relative autonomy in each situation.

Second, Foucault puts more emphasis on the positive influence of

power than do structuralists:

Power would be a feeble thing if its only function were to repress, if it worked

only through the mode of censorship, blockage and repression, in the manner

of the great Superego, exercising itself only in a negative way (1980, 59).

Power in his view is productive, inducing pleasure, forming knowlegeand producing discourse.

Third, Foucault sees power as a ’mode of action upon the action of

others’ which includes an important element of freedom’ (1983, 221).Power is exercised

onlyover free subjects, and

onlyinsofar as

theyare

free. He sees freedom as the condition for the exercise of power, since

freedom must exist for power to be exerted and also for its permanent

support. Without the possibility of recalcitrance, power would be

equivalent to a physical determination, as in slavery when man is in

chains. The essence of the power relationship is not to discover what we

are, but to refuse what we are and to reach toward what we could be,claims Foucault. So that, in his view, power and resistance go hand in

hand, ’where there is power there is resistance’ (1979b, 94).








42

By resistance Foucault means the struggle against the form of powerwhich pervades everyday life and constitutes individuals as subjects in

the sense of being subject to somebody by control and dependence and

subject to their own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge (Fou-

cault, 1983).

’

In his work Foucault maintains therefore that most will be learned

about the way power operates through the examination of struggle or

revolt. He, however does not do this. In both Disciplille and Punish

(1977), and The History of Stmunlity (1979b), the dominant themes are

the repressive and control aspects of power through discourses which

call out subjects who are constituted and constrained by those dis-

courses.

His work,in

fact, suggeststhat discourses are

justas

overlydeterministic of individual perception and interests as are the class struc-

tures of those he criticises. Nevertheless there is also the suggestion in

his writings of the possibility of transformations achieved throughrecombining certain aspects of the differing discourses to which we are

all subject.

In my opinion these three aspects of power together with the possi-

bilityof transformations in

specificsites of

powerhave

potentialfor

understanding the everyday struggles of women in the home with small

children. But a closer look at the agency of the actor in situations of

power and resistance is first necessary, and for this I turn to

Giddens.

Giddens modifies what he sees as Foucault’s over-radicalised view of

power by focusing on the ’transformative capacity of human action’ and

the

’knowledgeabilityof the actor’. However wide

rangingthe control

which the powerful have, the weak always have some capabilities of

turning resources back against the strong. ’An agent who has no optionswhatsoever is no longer an agent’, he argues (1981, 63). Even someone

in solitary confinement who may appear utterly powerless has optionsof hunger strike or suicide. Thus he sees a dialectic of control in which

those in positions of domination may be able to achieve considerable

effective control over the contexts of their activity.

Power then, is not to be defined in terms of a capacity to secure out-

comes3 such as whose will is realised in a conflict situation, or chose

bias is mobilised, or whose interests are met, or even whose knowledgeproduces a discourse. Rather is it a relationship between agents in which

there is the possibility of struggle, resistance, recalcitrance, negotiation,and renegotiation. Outcomes such as absorption, concession, transfor-

mation depend on the action of agents with varying access to and

mobilisation of resources both material and

metaphysical.








43

Weedon invokes the usefulness for feminist analysis of a similar view

of power. For feminists, she says:

the attempt to understand power in all its forms is of central importance. Thefailure to understand the multiplicity of power relations focused in sexualitywill render an analysis blind to the range of points of resistance inherent inthe network of power relations, a blindness which impedes political resist-

ance...’

Although the subject in poststructuralism is socially constructed in discursive

practices, she more or less exists as a thinking, feeling subject and social agent,capable of resistance and innovations produced out of a clash between con-

tradictory subject positions and practices (1987, 124-5).

I would argue that if it can be shown that relatively powerless womensuch as mothers at home with first babies resist in a way that benefitstheir general well-being and control over their labour, that a significantinroad into the blanket power of males both in the home and in wider

society is being made. The strategies they use may be a prototype for the

effective resistance of many women who do not have a collective con-

sciousness of their conflict of interests with dominant males, but who

negotiate power struggles at an everyday level with potential for poli-tical leverage.

GENDER AND THE CONCEPT OF LEISURE

The male-stream conceptualisation of leisure as ’time-out’ or ’free-time’

from paid labour and as a sphere of ’non-work’ activity while suggestingfreedom, autonomy and difference in action and experience from the

time-frame at work is unsatisfactory for understanding women’s lei-

sure.4

First, most studies which had defined leisure as ’non-work’ or ’free-

time’ or the activities pursued in this time had concentrated both empiri-cally and theoretically on the class position, occupational cultures and

associated leisure activities of white male workers (e.g. Thompson,1967; Parker, 1971; Dunning, 1971; Salaman, 1974). Women, if theywere present at all, were marginalised or seen as facilitating male leisure

or

becoming partof it. Second, feminist

analysesof housework

(Oakley,1974), care of children (Wearing, 1984) and adult dependents (Finch andGroves, 1983), as well as studies of women’s leisure (Anderson, 1975;Deem, 1986; Green et al, 1988; Wimbush, 1988a) have demonstrated

that the idea of time set aside solely for leisure for those who work at

home is difficult to achieve. In addition to redefining work to include

unpaid labour in the home, feminist leisure sociology has called into

question the complete compartmentalisation of work and leisure. The

conceptof leisure has been widened to denote ’non-

obligatedtime’ and








44

’time to myself’ (Wimbush, 1986; Green et al., 1987a). And this idea ofleisure is vital in any examination of mothers’ leisure.

Nevertheless for the mothers of my empirical study such a concep-tualisation still leaves out a vital component of leisure experience.

Rosemary Deem’s work with women implies an idea of space. Shedemonstrates the need to create an environment for women’s leisure

that includes physical space which is safe at night as well as in the daytime and metaphysical space where leisure for women is less bounded

by sexist traditions (Deem, 1986, 413). Wimbush (1988a) uses the idea of

leisure as personal time/space in her study of mothers at home. The idea

of leisure as a struggle over time and space is also fundamental in Wil-

son’s recent analysis of Politics and Leisure. But neither these authors nor

those who are currently wrestling with the concept of leisure (Parry andLong, 1988) include a discussion of space as a vital component of the

concept.

For women in the home whose work space is their leisure space the

idea of leisure as ’my space’, both literally and metaphorically appears to

me to be important, especially if leisure is to be conceived as a form of

resistance. By ’my space’, I mean space over which the individual

woman has control, both in

respectof what to do and where to

go,as

well as who should be included or excluded from such space.

This element of the concept of leisure can be elucidated, I think, byFoucault’s discussion of space in the twentiety century. He suggests(Foucault, 1984, 252) ’the need in contemporary urban society for

space’. ’Space’ he says, is ’fundamental in any form of communal life;

space is fundamental in any exercise of power’ (where he means resist-

ance). In particular he suggests the need for ’heterotopias’, that is ’those

singular spaces to be found in some given social spaces whose functionsare different or even the opposite of others’. Leisure space is a ’hetero-

topia’ in this sense, its function for the individual is different from thatwhich in a person’s life is compulsory, dutiful, or necessary. It is a spaceover which the person has some control to be used for the person’s ownsatisfaction.

Exactly how one chooses to use such a space may be governed by the

socialised ’me’ and the discourse of leisure in a particular historical

period. It will also be constrained by material and metaphysical re-

sources. Nevertheless the spontaneity of the ’I’ (Mead, 1932, part 3)which has been overlooked in post-structuralist thought has some room

to move in leisure space.

LEISURE AS RESISTANCE FOR MOTHERS OF FIRST BABIES

Between February and October, 1988, I interviewed

sixtymothers of








45

first babies who attended baby health centres in the northern and west-

ern regions of the Sydney metropolitan area. Thirty mothers were

contacted through baby health centres in the northern middle class

suburbs of Pennant Hills, Baulkham Hills, Carlingford and St Ives and

thirty through the centre in the western working class area ofBlacktown.5 Interviews were conducted in the women’s homes and theylasted from one to one and a half hours. They included quantitative and

qualitative data. The quantitative data concerned demographic and

background information, satisfaction with leisure, time and space for

leisure during the past week, attitudinal statements, definitions of lei-

sure, an index of general health and one of mental health. The qualita-tive data expanded on the leisure questions.

The mothers interviewed live the lifestyles of middle and workingclass suburbia in Australia in the 1980s. Eighty per cent were bom in

Australia. Forty-four per cent had post-secondary education, including20 per cent with bachelor or higher degree. They went on to be

employed in occupations such as secretarial, personnel or finance man-

agement, nursing, teaching, physiotherapy and law for the middle class

mothers and clerk, sales, hairdressing, factory work for the working

class mothers. They marriedmen

of similar educational background -53 per cent post-secondary, including 22 per cent with bachelor or

higher degree. Husbands are employed in occupations such as in-

surance, real estate, personnel or finance management, medicine, den-

tistry and law for the middle class and bank clerk, electrician, sheet

metal worker, factory hand, labourer for the working class. Husbands

incomes range from below $100 per week to $1500 per week with 53 percent earning $400- 600 before tax.

Four mothers are unmarried, four are living in a de facto relationshipand two are separated. Most had married in their early to mid twenties

and had their first baby soon after marriage. Some had waited until their

careers and/or finances were well established and had their babies in

their thirties. Their ages ranged from 18 to 40, eighteen were agedbetween 18 and 24 years, thirty-nine between 25 and 34 years and three

were over 35. The majority had purchased their own homes and were

paying off mortgages, quite a few of the working class were renting;single mothers and younger working class mothers tended to live with

their own parents. Forty-one had left work 2-3 months prior to the

baby’s birth and are at present housewives with no employment. Thir-

teen are employed part-time, three are on supporting parent’s benefit,two are on paid maternity leave and one is on sick leave. Thirty-sixintend to return to work at least part-time when the baby is older, eleven

do not and six are undecided.

The leisure experiences of these mothers varied according to their








46

class and age; availability of support from husbands, relatives, friends;their paid work status; their material resources such as a car; their beliefs

about marriage and motherhood and most importantly, their own abili-

ty to carve out time and space for their own needs. Middle-class mothers

had more ideas about possible and desirable leisure, andmore

often theuse of a car during the day. But they often had less available cash due to

high mortgages and were less often in the workforce. Younger mothers

had more energy to organise ’time out’ for leisure, but fewer material

resources due to less time in the workforce. Mothers in the workforce

were more easily able to demarcate work and leisure, felt they were

justified in taking time for leisure, but had less available time for it.

Mothers at home found it difficult to separate their work from their lei-

sure and for many, aspects of child-care such as playing with the baby,were considered to be leisure. Support from husbands was crucial for the

majority of mothers, if they were to have some time apart from the baby,and this varied greatly and was to a large extent dependent upon beliefs

about the division of labour in marriage and the ’selflessness’ of mother-

hood. Yet, the mothers who were single or whose husbands’ jobs took

them away from home, had more control over their time and space. The

availability of the mother’s own mother, or mother-in-lanv and/or recip-

rocal child-care arrangements with other mothers also affected time andspace for leisure. All of these factors constrain or make easier the leisure

of mothers at home with young children. Lack of material and ideolog-ical resources such as those mentioned above contribute to inequalitiesin the leisure expectations and experiences of men and women (Deem,1986; Wimbush, in press; Wearing, in press). Nevertheless they are not

absolute, and, as the following discussion demonstrates they are nego-tiable. It is the struggle over time and space for oneself and the right to

such time and space that constitutes the potentiality of leisure as a site ofresistance to the confines of traditional ideologies of motherhood. Those

mothers who engaged in this struggle benefitted both in terms of their

general well-being and in terms of their power relationships with their

husbands.

For most mothers (65 per cent), leisure was defined as ’free choice to

do something or nothing for your own enjoyment’ and included time

spentwith husband and the baby. It was not

alwaysa ’n~n-wurk’ con-

cept as it tends to be for men. For example, in Claire Williams study of

Opeu Ciit the majority of men saw leisure as a compensation for the

stringencies of work, or as a release into freedom to enjoy family life or

pursue hobbies and sports. For the mothers in my study leisure and

work are very much intertwined, and the lack of a separate space forleisure meant that activities such as ironing and watching television or

taking the baby for a walk or to the shopping centre or to visit friendscombined some of each. Leisure under these circumstances becomes








47

more diffuse, and less controllable. For many, mothering itself, or at

least certain aspects of it are seen as leisure. For example;

It depends on what sort of mothering. If it’s looking after the baby or playingwith the

baby,that’s leisure, but if it’s doing chores like

nappies...(Carling-ford mother).

In her study of Edinburgh mothers, Erica Wimbush found a similar pat-tern :

The expectations of others, and themselves, about what they could and could

not do as mothers...constrained their leisure options. These material and

ideological limitations meant that the women’s experience of leisure in

motherhood had become complexlv interwoven with their working lives and

the everyday texture of family life (Wimbush, 1989, 153).

In the week prior to the interview, 92 per cent of the others in my

study spent their leisure with family members at home or away from

home. This family centring is demonstrated by the leisure activities theypursued. These included resting, visiting friends and relatives, shop-ping, cooking, crafts, walking, gardening, aerobics, tennis, playing a

musical instrument, mothers’ group, playing with the baby, and holi-

days. For example:I had the car for the day so I went to my mother-in-law’s place of work and

then I went down to the shops and wandered around there and picked up myhusband and then we went for a swim to the beach, had a picnic. thoroughlyenjoyed myself. I felt human again. During the week I think mainlv my lei-

sure time is- I like to get out in the garden, but I find it hard to keep up. And

doing up the house (Baulkham Hills mother).

I did some shopping and did some hand-craft things. Made some clothers for

my daughter, which I enjoy. And went on a barbeque on the weekend and

went to a movie with my husband. I went for a walk, played with my

daughter, did a little bit of reading (Baulkham I-fills mother).

Visiting and shopping were most often mentioned by working class

mothers:

We do a lot of visiting. When we were saving to buy our house we didn’t goout a real lot, but we used to go and visit. It’s got to be a habit now that we still

go and visit and we might take a cake or something for supper occasionally tothe people that we see constantly. And we just visit and they visit us. And it’s

being out but it doesn’t cost you anything (Blacktown mother).

I go shopping for leisure, I don’t mind that. I think it’s a good way to forgetabout home. You’re walking around talking to people and looking in the

shops (Blacktown mother).

These activities are low cost. The mothers are not economically inde-

pendent and the mortgage and food engulf most of the husband’s salary.








48

Twenty mothers spent no money on leisure, 28 less than $40, 9 between

$61 and $100 and 3 more than $100. Nor is there money for baby-sitting.Most of their leisure activities could be carried out with a baby in tow.

Only one mother had a paid baby sitter in the last week and that was so

that she could be

employedfor a few hours a

day. Fifty-five percent of

the mothers had no assistance with child-care at all in the last week, so

that any leisure they achieved had to include the baby.

Nevertheless, when asked, the mothers distinguished between this

diffuse leisure time and time for their own space, over which they had

control to include or exclude others, to do something or nothing as theychose. For example:

A time

you

can

spend doingwhatever

you

like to do,sport

or

just resting(Blacktown mother).

I guess that’s what you define leisure as, it’s sort of baby-free time, that sort of

spelling free time when you can forget about them for a time. I guess that’s the

problem with defining motherhood as leisure. If it is leisure all the time then

why do you need a break? (Baulkham Hills mother).

Not surprisingly the latter time was considerably less accessible, and one

third of the mothers said they had no such time in the week prior to the

interview. In Wimbush’s study (1989, 154) ’two-fifths of the mothers

had not experienced any time to themselves over the few weeks prior to

the interview’. It was this time which was crucial for good mental health,as another aspect of my study revealed (Wearing, in press). It was time of

this quality which so markedly differed from their husband’s leisure

time and from their own leisure time experiences prior to motherhood.

For example:

I have less leisure now than before the baby. It’s virtually nonexistent now. Idon’t get much chance to relax now (Blacktown mother).

By the time you care for the baby and do the housework, there’s not muchtime for leisure. And then when my husband comes home, he can relax in the

evening. I’ve still got to cook tea. He might go out and do his little gardening,or something, but that’s his leisure, he loves doing that. But I’ve got to cook

tea and wash up and make his lunch and all that sort of thing, so that’s not

exactly leisure time (Blacktown mother).

It’s different now because you have to rely on her. I’ve got to think about her

and I’ve got to put my leisure second. I’ve got to time my leisure around her.You’ve got half an hour while she’s asleep. Lots of things I can’t do now, like

gardening. My life’s changed now that we’ve bought this house and it’s also

changed having her. Sometimes I’d prefer not to have her (Pennant Hills

mother).

Definitely less leisure now. Because I can’t take time outnow to do the things I

would have done before. I mean like going to play a game of squash or going








49

to the theatre, or just the pictures or anything. Because I have to hassle to get a

baby sitter and organise things. So I tend not to bother (St Ives mother).

I worked, but I think leisure then was - you could do what you like, youdidn’t have to pick anything up, you didn’t have to worry about someone else

in the house to grab and put in the car (Baulkham Hills mother).

Its a different type of leisure. When you’re working you’ve got that sort of

cut-off time, if you’ve got a job that cuts off and when you leave your place of

work you’re free to do as you please- you can go and play sport or whatever.- Whereas when you’re at home it’s harder to define what’s leisure and ~~hat’s

not leisure, because you don’t just cut off and say - ’Well I’ve finished work

and now I’m going to do something’. You’ve got to think about the child

(Pennant Hills mother).

All but three of the mothers believed that they had a right to time and

space for themselves which gave them a quality of leisure different from

that which included the baby. For example:

I think they do. I think you should think about yourselfsometimes, otherwise

your whole life’s centred around other people (Baulkham Hills mother).

Yes definitely, I think you need that time just to yourself. I don’t think you

should spend all your time with the child. The child needs to be away fromyou too or you become too dependent (St. Ives mother).

I think they do. Everyone needs space. Everyone needs time. A lot of parentssay, ’I just need time for myself with no one around’ (Blacktown mother).

Yes, mothers are people and all people have that right (Blacktownmother).

The three middle-class mothers who did not agree with this questionqualified their answers. One felt she didn’t really need space; she was

happy to function as a family unit. One didn’t feel she could take such

time although logically she knew she was entitled and one said she

wouldn’t state it as strongly as a right, but motherhood was a full-time

commitment.

Mothers who strongly believed in this right for themselves negotiatedwith husbands over ’time out’ for themselves. This does not mean that

they achieved equality with their husbands concerning leisure, nor thatthey relinquished motherhood as the priority in their lives at this pointin time. In no case did husbands assume complete responsibility for the

baby for periods longer than an evening or a morning or afternoon, and

many husbands retained their individual sporting participation, while

few mothers did. The mothers in this study were just as concerned about

being ’good’ mothers for their babies, as the mothers I interviewed in

1977- 1978. They attended the baby health centre to make sure the babywas

gaining weightand

receivingthe

rightcare and

nourishment, they








50

felt that the baby was primarily their responsibility and was dependenton them for survival and well-being. Now that they were at home after

working until about two months before the baby was born, care of the

baby and the home and husband was their main job. They gave assent in

very many ways to the following aspects of a dominant discourse on

motherhood which I termed in my 1977/78 study ’the ideology of

motherhood’;

2(a) A ’good’ mother is always available to her children, she spends time

with them, guides, supports, encourages and corrects as well as loving and

caring for them physically. She is also responsible for the cleanliness of their

home environment.

(b) A ’good’ mother is unselfish, she puts her children’s needs before her

own.

3. Children need their mothers in constant attendance at least for the first 3-5

years of their lives.

4. The individual mother should have total responsibility for her own chil-

dren at all times (Wearing, 1984, 72).

However, intersecting with this discourse is one which says that

mothers are people and people have a right to time and space for them-

selves. And it is this intersection which makes resistance possible. As

Weedon (1987, lOb) comments:

Knowledge of more than one discourse and the recognition that meaning is

plural allows for a measure of choice on the part of the individual and even

where choice is not available, resistance is possible.

Mothers who saw mothering as work, were more able to articulate this

right to ’time-out’ for themselves. For example:

I

think our society is sophisticated in the first place to recognise that it’ssomething that’s important, that mothers are performing an important role -

doing an important job. And we see it as important that workers have some

leisure time (Baulkham Hills mother).

People who are at home have their own sort of work to do. Like I consider

housework as working, so I have a right to time and space for myself (PennantHills mother).

But even those mothers who consider that

’motheringis leisure’

(47per cent of the middle class and 60 per cent of the working class mothers)have an idea of their right as a human being to space for themselves. For

many this is linked in their thinking to their sanity and well-being. Theysaid, ’Leisure is very important, it keeps you sane’; ’You need leisure

otherwise you’re just going to go around the bend if you don’t’. The

aspect of the ideology being challenged and resisted by mothers who

attempted to claim this right was that which emphasised the everlasting

availabilityof mothers to their children and their

completeunselfish-








51

ness. The subjectivity of these mothers is no longer entirely constituted

by the traditional discourse on motherhood which emphasises giving of

time and self to the child as the ideal. Weedon (1987, 112) points out

that:

Subjectivity works most effectively for the established hierarchy of powerrelations when the subject position, which the individual assumes within a

particular discourse, is fully identified by the individual with her interests.. Where there is a space between the position of subject offered by a discourse

and individual interest, a resistance to that subject position is produced...Thediscursive constitution of subjects, both compliant and resistant, is part of a

wider social play for power.

The questions then arise, ’How do these mothers make time and spacefor themselves? What strategies do they use to resist aspects of a domi-

nant discourse on motherhood which would claim all of their time and

energy for child-care and household tasks?’

There is no doubt at all in the minds of these mothers that if they don’t

make the effort themselves to so organise their child-care and household

chores no-one else will do it for them. The foremost way of resistinghaving their lives completely dominated by their mother/housewife/wife obligations was to organise effectively. For example, in answer to

the question, ’How do you make time and space for yourself in your

busy week?’ the following reply is typical:

I think it’s something mothers have to do for themselves although I realise

there are things available. It’s just a matter of me organising myself to do

those things and also it’s an attitude of the person...I see it as nothing twat the

government’s going to say, ’Right, here you are, leisure for mothers, come and

getit’. I think it comes down to mothers

beingmore

organisedthemselves and

if you want to do something you can do it (St Ives mother).

Emphasis on such individual effort was interpreted in my previouswork as part of the ideology obfuscating the structurally subordinate

and relatively powerless position of mothers. It is, nevertheless, a real-

istic evaluation of their day to day situation and, I think, a form of

conscious resistance by women to complete domination of their unpaidlabour and their ’at home’ lifestyles. It is a refusal to adopt a victim

mentality and a belief in their ability to have some control of their own

situation.

For some mothers, resistance took the form of not doing housework.

For example,

I just don’t do housework, things stay a mess...I imagine some people take

their housework too seriously. I think you’ve got to make time for yourself.’

Leisure’s what you make of it. I make time for myself (Pennant Hills

mother). ’ ..

-’








52

I just don’t do the housework. You can’t spend all your time with the baby. It’s

important to have something that you call your own thing (Baulkham Hills

mother).

One recalcitrant Blacktown mother went further than this; she chal-

lenged much more than the housework aspect of her job. She said:

When I was at work ! I used to come home and cook. I don’t really care to cook

anymore. If he comes home hungry - which he doesn’t normally because he

really stuffs himself at lunch - I just defrost something. And the dishes, I

really don’t care if they pile up, because I’ve got all day to do them.

This mother has also resisted by using disposable nappies and by put-ting the baby on a bottle. Her sister-in-law fed the baby during the

interview and her mother-in-law is close by for baby-sitting. She alsothinks married mothers should be paid the equivalent of the supportingparent’s benefit for the work they do.

The majority of the mothers lived in two-parent families and enlistingthe husband’s co-operation, handing the baby over to him or even strug-gling to get him to take some responsibility so that the mother could

have breathing space was a dominant theme throughout the interviews.

The actual

help given byhusbands so that mothers could have some

time and space for themselves varied greatly. At one extreme was a St

Ives mother with a very low mental health score whose husband had

high expectations of the woman’s servicing role for him and who gavealmost no support. At the other was a Blacktown mother with a highmental health score whose husband took over care of the baby when he

came home from work in the evening. For most there was a struggle of

some sort with varying outcomes such as the following:

When my husband comes home from work sometimes I just vanish (Car-lingford mother).

The thing is, when Jack comes home I say, ’I’ve had Martie all day, it’s yourturn’. He’ll say, ’Oh well I’m busy’, We argue about, but he doesn’t do much.

He has a very demanding job (St Ives mother).

One Blacktown mother whose large labourer husband kept teasing her

about her life of leisure during the interview, told me when he had gone

off to do his shift:

Ifmen today say they don’t know how to change a nappy, they get laughed at

by their work-mates. Things are changing; men have to help more with child-

care today.

This mother was very involved with netball and has struggled with her

husband until he took care of the baby during practice on two nights a

week and during playing time on Saturday. Other mothers were not so








53

successful, but continued to struggle and negotiate with husbands over

the issue. For example:

Last Sunday was the grand final of the footy and we were over at friends’ to

watch it. He and his mate were sitting on the

lounge watchingand he

keptsaying to me, ’Can’t you keep him (the baby) quiet? I’m watching this’. I said,’I’m trying to watch too. He’s your responsibility as well as mine’. But in the

end I had to take him outside...-

You know it takes two to make a baby. Why is it only one who’s supposed to

look after it?

Although this mother gave in, the latter remark and her discussion with

me after the interview of her struggles with her husband to gain some of

herown

space, constituted resistance at the discursive level. At this stagethe choice to do otherwise was not available, but as already mentioned,the recognition that there is an alternative discourse identified by ’I’m

trying to watch too. He’s your responsibility as well as mine’, challengesthe traditional discourse and makes resistance possible. Most mothers

saw leisure as a legitimate area for struggle over some rights for them-

selves, even if their ultimate appeal was because it would benefit the

family, as one of Wimbush’s mothers stated concerning involvement in

independent recreation (Wimbush, 1988, 69):I feel strongly that if it’s valuable to you then the rest of the family will benefit

from your involvement. You have more energy and can do more for them

because you are involved.

Enlisting the help of others such as mother or mother-in-law to look

after the baby was also popular, and often more successful than with

husbands. ’My mother loves her and loves to look after her for me’.

Single mothers who lived with their own mothers did not find as muchdifficulty making space as did those in two parent relationships. For one

mother with very high mental and general health scores, living in a row

of naval houses where each family had small children and the husbands

were away for weeks at a time enabled reciprocal baby sitting to be

available at the ’drop of a hat’, day or night.

For many, getting together with other mothers was seen as a form of

enjoyable, productiveleisure where child-care was shared and mothers

could swap ideas and enjoy each other’s company. In my previousresearch I interpreted this, especially in the more formal mothers’ groupssuch as play groups, as a means of passing on the ideology. I also com-

mented on the similarity of some informal mothers’ groups to Youngand Wilmott’s women’s trade union where solidarity was used to resist

domination by the men in their lives (Young and Wilmott, 1957; Wear-

ing, 1984). In this research as in Wimbush’s study (1988), mothers

themselves see

visitingfriends and other mothers as an

enjoyable,low








54

cost form of leisure, which provides some solidarity for their pursuit of

’time-out’. Wimbush says (1988b, 73):

the shared recreational interest was often coupled with a sense of solidaritywith other female

participantswho understood the

problemsand benefits for

mothers in seeking involvements independent of the domestic.

And it can be a form of resistance as this Blacktown mother demon-

strates :

We’ve got a reservoir up here at Prospect. We went about 3 or 4 weeks ago, we

loved it. Actually we were saying ’Gosh look at us here - our husbands are’

working away and we’re enjoying it’. We probably felt a bit guilty, but I mean

women are the ones that have to bring up their children, I suppose, more than

the husband does. That just crossed our minds, but then we got on and

enjoyed it.

We just ended up taking Kentucky Fried, We couldn’t be bothered makinganything and just staved there on our blankets and enjoyed it.

Of course, the difference in outcome for the mothers concerning time

and space for themselves depended on access to and ability to mobilise

resources. Resources such as their own car, mother or mother-in-law

livingclose,

co-operative neighboursand friends, a

helpfulor

co-optedhusband, availability of money and a co-operative baby were importantand some of these cut across class groups. There is no doubt in my mind,as in the minds of the respondents, that those mothers who made a

concerted and recalcitrant effort to carve out leisure for themselves,

gained in terms of time and space just for themselves and also in terms of

their self-esteem, general sense of well-being, ability to control their

situation of unpaid labour in the home and the stresses involved in

child-care. Leisure for these mothers, as for the workers in

Lynch’s studyof gamblers (in press), is more than either an escape attempt from bore-

dom and routine, or an expression of individual freedom, or an assent to

a legitimating ideology. It is a site of resistance and transformation as

well as one of domination.

The gains are considerable when women, even those in relativelypowerless positions, resist dominant definitions of what they are and

move towards what they could be.

CONCLUSIONS

In this paper I have shown that a specific site of power relationships, that

is, the leisure space of mothers of first babies, is a site of struggle with

possibilities for resistance. None of the mothers interviewed expressedany raised awareness associated with the women’s movement or the

human rights movement. However the discursive statement ’mothers








55

are people and all people have a right to time and space for themselves’

is an articulation of ideas and knowledge associated with these move-

ments. Through the media and the culture, the rights of individuals of

whatever colour, creed, race, age, gender or sexual preference to dignity,

justice and some autonomy forms a discourse which is in contradictionto a dominant discourse on motherhood. The intersection of the two

contradictory discourses, the discourse on motherhood which postu-lates mothers as those who selflessly care for others at all times and the

human rights discourse in which all people, even mothers, have a rightto time and space for themselves, provides a potential for transformation

of what I consider two of the most repressive aspects of a dominant

discourse on motherhood: (1) the availability of the mother at all times to

her child and (2) the priority given to the child’s needs over her own atall times.

So competing discourses have created some room for mothers to

transform or shift a dominant discourse in a way which is significant fortheir daily lives, even if it has not overthrown male dominated structures

and institutions in Australian society. In so doing a transformed dis-

course on motherhood is being constructed which includes many of the

traditional values, but emphasises the individual right of women to time

and space for their own enjoyment and development. Leisure forwomen is then a sphere of ’Relative Freedoms’ (Wimbush and Talbot,

1988), a space for pushing back the overwhelming power of individual

men in their lives and the collective power of dominant discourses:

Resistance to the dominant at the level of the individual subject is the first

stage in the production of alternative forms of knowledge or where such

alternatives exist, of winning individuals over to these discourses and gradu-

ally increasingtheir social

power (Weedon,1987,

111).In the process of transformation, strategies of resistance to aspects of the

dominant discourse on motherhood emerge. These strategies include

refusal to do housework and cook, recruitment of others including the

father for child-care responsibility for periods of time, co-operative care

of children with other mothers and refusal to adopt a victim mentality byorganising and planning for self-space. Individual women who do this

gain in well-being, in control over their situation and in power relation-

ships with husband and baby at a strategic time in family relationships. And the more women who make these gains the greater the political andsocietal impact of these day-to-day resistances.

NOTES

1 I face here the dilemma of retaining the term ideology with its structuralist assumptionsconcerning power, in a paper that purports to adopt a different theoretical framework I

use the term to refer to a body of beliefs which calls out subjects who are subjected to its

demands while

’freely’ choosingto

putits

preceptsinto action, but would now

rejectthe








56

notions that it incorporates the interests of an entire category of people such as ’males’

and that it is completely blanketing in terms of consciousness.

2 For an excellent discussion of this process with regard to the Rastafarian Movement and

the outcomes for a people whose oppression and resistance have their origins in slavery,see Horace Campbell’s Rasta and Resistance(1985).

3 Hindess

(1982) argues

thatpower

defined either in terms of outcomes, or in terms of the

determination of struggles bv exclusion of certain interests, is a gross oversimplificationof the conditions under which struggles take place. Serious analysis of social conditions

and how they may be changed requires, he says, a closer look at the particular conditionsin which struggles take place and outcomes are produced, the constitution of agents and

other forces, the formulation of objectives and of the mobilisation of agents around them

and the means of action and possible strategies.4 For a more detailed discussion of gender and the concept of leisure, see Wearing and

Wearing, 1988.

5 I have retained the conventional class categories of working class and middle class to

denote differences in material resources such as money and education which are import-ant in the power struggle at individual and wider levels. The majority (67 per cent) ofnorthern suburbs mothers had post-secondary education, including 33 per cent with

bachelor or higher degree. The minority of western suburbs mothers (24 per cent) had

post-secondary education, including 7 per cent, with a bachelor degrees. Their partnershad similar educational background. Seventy per cent of middle-class partners had post-secondary education, including 40 per cent with bachlor or higher degree. Thirty-sevenper cent of working class partners had post-secondary education, including 3 per cent

with bachlor or higher degree. Middle-class incomes ranged from $300-400 to $1,500 perweek with 57 per cent earning $400-700 before tax. Working-class incomes ranged from

below $100 to $1,000 per week with 57 per cent earning $300-600 before tax. One

middle-class motherwas

single, five working-class mothers were single.

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