Paths Into and Out of Totalizing Motherhood

Abstract

This article examines discourses on motherhood among young middle-class Brazilian women in Rio de Janeiro for whom the challenge of reconciling motherhood and employment constituted a key drama. Interviews revealed women’s multiple strategies, both traditional and modern, including securing a professional position, having two children later in life, and relying on childcare aid of domestic workers and/or grandmothers. Analysis of their stories and commentaries identified three discourses: the first, favoring more direct care than preceding generations; the second, opposing “totalizing” motherhood, i.e., finding stay at home motherhood disagreeable and asserting that women are better mothers with an outside occupation; the third, a discourse of guilt. I suggest the evaluations both justify choices regarding a mother’s employment and attest to the speaker’s emotional and moral absorption in motherhood. Thus, I find a moral/emotional intensification of mothering allows these middle-class Brazilian women to partially escape from and partially accept a totalizing motherhood.