Balancing Acts: Maternal Pragmatism

Abstract

The third major strategy evident in women’s reflections on motherhood can be described as pragmatist. Women who inhabit the role in this way are guided less by a commitment to rational planning or alternatively the expression of inner selfhood, and more by the demands of the particular situations they find themselves in as they go about mothering. This is more than an adaptive attitude of ‘muddling through’ in an incoherent fashion, but instead can be understood as a combination of habit and creativity in finding solutions to the problems and situations that routinely arise, in ways which can offer new definitions of those situations (Joas 1993: 4; 1996: 126–7). This form of action is less linear than that of instrumental rationalism, and although also often goal-oriented, it includes not only a future-directed effort to anticipate all possible contingencies, but also a retrospective re-evaluation of goals.

I think you can work and have a kid and everything works out fine. It’s just if you try to have rules about that, it’s like that would just be harder. (Michelle, US)