The Older Mother in One Born Every Minute

Abstract

Mothering and motherhood is the subject of close scrutiny in postfem-inist media culture, and this scrutiny encourages women to monitor their performance as mothers against a class-inflected, neoliberal ideal. Discussing the ‘powerful resonance’ between post feminism and neoliberalism, Rosalind Gill and Christine Scharff suggest that in this climate mothers are called upon to ‘self-manage and self-discipline’, to ‘work on and transform the self, to regulate every aspect of their conduct, and to represent all their actions as freely chosen.’¹ Mothers are judged by ‘type’, from the aspira tional, middle-class ‘yummy mummy’, to her opposite, the demonised working-class ‘teen Mom’ or ‘pramface’. Current feminist attention, however, continues to focus upon the younger woman, the ‘teen mom’, or those women who aspire to youth. Yet, the number of babies born to mothers over 40 in the UK has more than quadrupled in the last three decades, a fact reflected by the intense debate (and often criticism) surrounding older mothers in a wide range of popular media texts.² While much important work has focussed upon the pregnant body and the vilification of the young, working-class mother, the older mother and her lived experience of labour and childbirth as explored through popular culture remains neglected. Addressing this omission, this chapter examines the experience of the older woman in the popular television programme One Born Every Minute (OBEM) (UK, 2010-).