“Facilitating wife” and “feckless manchild”: Working mothers’ talk about divisions of care on Mumsnet

Abstract

This article considers a culturally marginalised yet consequential gendered discourse that positions women as “wife” alongside their role as mother in working women's talk about divisions of care on Britain's largest parenting site, Mumsnet. Unlike most previous research on Mumsnet that has focused on the construction and partial resistance of normative ideas of motherhood, this paper suggests that the increasingly politicised site is a space where a discourse of wifehood is drawn upon to account to some degree for experiences of domestic inequality. Using a critical discursive psychological approach to data from 14 online discussion threads posted on Mumsnet, the paper identifies two dominant, complementary constructions through which posters frame divisions of care. These are the position of the “facilitating wife”, enabling their male partners’ careers by taking on the bulk of domestic responsibility to the detriment of their own professional achievement and mental wellbeing; and the construction of partners as “feckless manchildren”, as an attempt to manage dissonances with their positioning as “wife” and related overburdening. I conclude that the relationships women form in the Mumsnet space allow them to articulate dissonant views and feelings about their co-existing domestic roles of wife and mother and associated divisions of care.