“I’ve Got No Choice”

Abstract

Many studies have shown how important it is for low-income mothers to sustain their moral identities as both good mothers and reliable workers during times of little social valuing of mothers’ caring work. Discovering how low-income mothers sustain this duality when caring crises preclude employment requires a mapping of their social worlds as reflected in their moral justifications. We used an institutional ethnographic approach that focused on situations wherein mothers decide to exit the labor market and devote themselves to their children’s caring needs. Interviews with 48 Israeli mothers revealed that they maintain their moral fitness both as good mothers and good citizens by engaging in a specific emotion management: expressing emotional devotion to their paid job, whereas child care is presented as a necessity. We argue that emotion management is particularly revealing of how macro-level institutional practices and discourses come to the fore in individuals’ daily lives.

Keywords

child care education work and family qualitative poverty/welfare family policy

Introduction

For several decades, and more intensively since the implementation of neoliberal welfare reforms in many Western countries, studies have explored how mothers interpret the dual expectations of functioning as a “good mother” as well as a “good worker” (Dodson, 2007; Hennessy, 2009; Weigt, 2006; Woodward, 2008). Research has shown that when “good citizenship” is contingent on labor market participation, it limits low-income mothers’ ability to care for their children and family. However, little research has looked systematically at the work–family conflict in low-income mothers’ lives by investigating caring crises as a macro-level institutional practice and discourse coming to the fore in individuals’ daily lives (Smith, 1999).

We employed the Institutional Ethnography (IE) method, which primarily focuses on institutions themselves to investigate how institutional discourses and practices are reflected in women’s worlds. We focus on situations wherein institutional imperatives lead to caring crises, namely, when the “webs of obligations” of work and home clash, and the woman’s identity as a worker is encroached on by familial obligations (Backett-Milburn, Airey, McKie, & Hogg, 2008). Herein, we define these emergencies as an acute state wherein women must interrupt their employment to engage in maternal work. These situations are especially difficult for low-income mothers, since they are often the sole earners and the sole caregivers for their families (Collins & Mayer, 2010); thus, responding to the crisis often means relying on welfare or other external sources for economic survival.

In an institutional context wherein the individual’s morality is measured by his/her labor market participation, responding to a caring crisis by exiting the labor market might expose him/her to social stigmatization and accusations of being an inferior citizen (Hennessy, 2009). Nevertheless, a mother who does not respond to a caring crisis might be accused of being a bad mother as per the universalized mothering discourse (Griffith & Smith, 2005) that defines a good mother as one who is fully and intensively committed to her children’s needs (Weigt, 2006). For low-income mothers, this threatening accusation increases the typical association between welfare dependency and defective maternal morality (Ajzenstadt, 2009; Fineman 2004).

To analyze the relationships between macro-level institutional imperatives and their day-to-day expression at the individual level, Israel offers an institutional environment of special interest. When it was founded in 1948, Israel’s policy emphasized women’s contribution to the Zionist enterprise through reproduction, and through the 1950s, high Jewish birth rates were encouraged (Helman, 2011; Herbst, 2012). Commensurately, good citizenship for women was defined as their devotion to their reproductive role. During the 1970s, the discourse depicting women primarily as mothers and unpaid caregivers was deemphasized, and women were actively encouraged by the state to join the workforce (Ajzenstadt & Gal, 2001). For the next three decades, Israeli mothers were perceived as mothers and workers, and the state institutions supported their labor market participation either by providing some child care or by offering part-time positions in the labor market (Benjamin, 2001; Lewin-Epstein, Stier, & Brown 2006). However, the cultural expectations of motherhood remained traditional, reinforcing women’s traditional role as caregivers (Berkovitch, 1997).

At the turn of the 21st century, Israel undertook a welfare reform program that was heavily influenced by U.S. welfare trends. Like the rationale underlying U.S. welfare reform in the 1990s, the Israeli welfare reform of 2003 established employment as the best indicator of appropriate citizenship (Ajzenstadt, 2009). Following the accelerated neoliberal ideology, and similar to the United States, the neoliberal discourse in Israel views the good mother as one who does not raise her children on welfare, requiring that she supports her children independently (Ajzenstadt, 2009).

The good mothering discourse in Israel, however, continued to influence mothers’ caring expectations (Rom & Benjamin, 2011), similar to the standard North American middle-class definition of good mothering as an intensive, present mom (Smith, 1993). Herbst (2012) claimed that although the pivotal image of Israeli motherhood was overtaken by images emanating from the American neoliberalism, there is still a profound emphasis on the crucial role of the woman as mother. Moreover, Israeli scholars examining the shift in welfare policy argue that, despite the emergence of the neoliberal ideology which primarily emphasizes self-sufficiency and individual responsibility, both individuals and social organizations in Israel refuse to shoulder the blame for individual dependency and insist on governmental traditional commitment to individuals and social protection (Maron, 2012). As a result of the Israeli welfare reform program, Israeli society is currently drawn in opposite directions by two main forces: U.S.-like neoliberalism, emphasizing work and not mothering (Herbst, 2012), and the preservation of traditional gender roles (Lavee & Katz, 2003).

Thus, the Israeli case may shed light on the ongoing debate over how macro-level demands emphasizing individualism and market citizenship and also social provision and traditional gender roles shape low-income mothers’ perceptions and actions. In the following section, we propose associating IE with research on emotions, explain its usefulness for understanding low-income mother’s embeddedness in social relations, and situate our study in the context of post-welfare feminist research.

Institutional Ethnography and the Study of Emotions

Institutional Ethnography is a methodological approach of studying the social world as encountered by individuals. It therefore investigates phenomena as macro-level institutional practice and discourse coming to the fore in individuals’ daily lives. It analyzes interviews, as a first stage, in ways that divert the analytical gaze from interviewees’ inner worlds to the characteristics of the social institutions implicated in interviewees’ talk. As a second stage, discoveries made in the first stage are used to guide analysis of organizational procedures and forms; but herein we focus on women’s reports of these aspects particularly as they relate to their encounters with child care and schooling services. Griffith and Smith (2005) argued that IE is particularly suited to investigating how women deal with child care and schooling, as it allows researchers to identify the extent to which these institutions assume women’s unpaid work and calculate it into their operations. Herein, we focus on caring crises, wherein mothers realize that their child care arrangements are damaging their children’s well-being.

Backett-Milburn et al. (2008) reported that low-income mothers ascribed high importance to sustaining their moral identities both as good mothers and as reliable workers even in times of caring crises. In the current study, beyond simply using these caring crises to characterize women’s moral identities at the local level, we view them as signifiers of trans-local ruling relations, that is, the social relations assumed by the complex field of coordination and control (Smith, 1999) that coordinates women’s activities within institutions and between institutional settings (DeVault & McCoy, 2002). IE explores outward from the experiential world into those ruling relations that constitute our experience, namely social relations wherein we actively participate, and yet are larger than the experiential scope of any one individual (Griffith & Smith, 2005).

DeVault and McCoy (2002) claimed that there is no single way to conduct IE research. Herein, we suggest that in order to identify how institutional power acts and coordinates people’s activities and perceptions, we need to focus on people’s justifications and emotional “devotion” and interpret them as “forms in which power is generated and held in contemporary societies” (Smith, 1999, p. 79). Thus, we introduce the study of emotions into IE.

Previous researchers on the dynamics of work and home in the lives of low-income mothers have found it useful to implement the framework of emotionality. Garey and Hansen (2011) argued that in order to reveal an individual’s positioning in a given social relationship, we need to investigate his/her emotion management. Emotion management was defined as “the act of trying to change in degree or quality an emotion or feeling” (Hochschild, 1979, p. 561) used to enhance its appropriateness to specific “ideological environments.” Hence, dominant discourses set forth feeling rules that govern how we try or try not to feel in ways “appropriate to the situation.” Focusing on the relationships between micro-level feelings and macro-level structure, Garey and Hansen (2011) stated,

To explore meaning is to examine . . . what people feel about the object, action, or situation. More than that, it involves peeling back layers of meaning to explore not only what people feel, but also how they think they should feel, and what they think others think they should feel. (p. 5)

Hochschild’s notion of ideological environment resembles that of ruling relations constituted by the discourses embedded in the institutional level that come into play in our activities (Smith, 2005). Thus, discourses dominating the institutional context encountered by individuals can be traced via the analysis of emotional management patterns.

By linking IE with emotionality thusly, it becomes possible to examine specific moral meanings of the good worker and/or the good mother when women feel that their caring obligations have been negatively affected by their jobs to the extent that they exit the labor market. Below, we discuss two concurrent dominant discourses constituting the ideological environment of the neoliberal era: intensive motherhood, and appropriate citizenship.

The Moral Meaning of Emotions

In a neoliberal ideological environment that measures citizenship by labor market participation, individuals who seek respectability (Skeggs, 1997) and wish to be considered moral are required to express commitment to the job market (Hennessy, 2009). Describing dominant discourses as a set of ruling relations, Weigt (2006) emphasized the work enforcement discourse as part of the neoliberal meta-discourse (Smith, 2005) reflecting the solitary definition of individual worth as embedded in labor market participation as per the “ideal work norm” (Webber & Williams, 2008). Studies have shown that low-income mothers have a strong motivation to be and to be perceived as independent and self-reliant (Nelson, 2000), and express their concern for society as a whole as part of being a “responsible citizen” (Hays, 2003; Smith, 2005). The implication therein is that a woman should be devoted to her work life and the labor market regardless of her care obligations.

Blair-Loy (2001) defined these cultural expectations in the lives of executive mothers as devotion schema, which invokes intense emotional commitments. The devotion to a work schema demands emotional allegiance to one’s job, employer, or career. Hennessy (2009) extended this model to low-income women and used the term work commitment schema to describe the moral and emotional implications of devotion to work. Framing devotion to work by Hochschild’s emotionality, the appropriate feeling rules associated with this labor market–oriented morality might involve expressing love of one’s job, emotional commitment thereto, pride in being employed, and having a strong work ethic and sense of responsibility. In contrast, nonappropriate emotions might include frustration with or resentment of one’s job or the disparities of the labor market in general.

When institutional practices shift and require the constant presence of any given individual as a labor market worker, including women and mothers, it might be assumed that the institutional discursive imperatives regarding good mothering will shift commensurately. However, previous literature has elucidated the difficulty of the neoliberal policy and discourse for low-income mothers, since the strict demand for labor market participation often conflicts with these women’s family obligations (e.g., Collins & Mayer, 2010; Dodson, 2007; Hennessy, 2009; Weigt, 2006).

Apparently, despite the policy demanding full labor market participation, neither the practices nor the discourse regarding women’s familial commitments have adapted thereto. On the practical level, although American and Israeli welfare programs established child care subsidy and promised to support women’s employment by providing appropriate child care facilities, research has shown that low-income mothers are compelled to participate in the labor market, and often face intense difficulties in obtaining state support for child care. Strict terms of eligibility, lack of facilities or low-quality facilities (Forry & Hofferth, 2011; Schulman & Blank, 2011; Weinraub, Sorhagen, & Stull, 2012) is what they find. Moreover, regardless of policy changes, the school system continues to assume that mothers are available to supplement the shortcomings of public education (Griffith & Smith, 2005).

On the discursive-moral level, although policies regarding good citizenship are changing, the dominant discourse of moral mothering has remained fairly stable and continues to emphasize the family devotion schema (Blair-Loy, 2001) that constitutes the foundation for the universalized mothering discourse that requires women’s commitment to providing intensive nurturing work: Women are expected to primarily devote themselves physically and emotionally to their children’s developmental needs and their schooling (Douglas & Michaels, 2004; Griffith & Smith, 2005). Devoting oneself to one’s children’s social and cognitive development reflects the middle-class childrearing doctrine of concerted cultivation, a term coined by Lareau (2002, 2003) or child development discourse as Griffith and Smith (2005) define it.

Although the Intensive Mothering (Hays, 1996) SNAF (Smith, 1999) Model refers mainly to White middle-class women and has been frequently challenged (Garey, 1999; Hennessy, 2009; Weigt, 2006), an alternative mothering discourse that considers the mother’s role as worker-citizen has not emerged. Neither the alternative model of the African American working mother proposed by Hill-Collins (1987), nor the Philippine definition of good mothering as an earning mother even when working across the globe far from her children (Parrenas, 2004), have gained traction in public discourse. In the absence of alternative models for the good mother, the prevalent feeling rules require unconditional love for one’s children, pride in having successful children, and being content fulfilling the “natural” female role of mother (Hochschild, 1989). Nonappropriate emotions might include frustration at staying at home and resentment of being economically dependent.

This study elucidates how social institutions shape day-to-day individual maternal practices and links employment disruptions to the imperatives of the dominant discourses regarding moral mothering and moral citizenship. When faced with a caring crisis, upper-class mothers can fulfill their maternal role without compromising their morality as citizens or individuals, since even when they do not participate in the labor market, they have their spouses’ incomes, previous savings, or other sources of economic support and therefore do not have to rely on welfare (Blair-Loy, 2001; Garey, 1999). In contrast, low-income mothers who wish to respond to a caring crisis face a double dilemma of having both hands tied (Collins & Mayer, 2010): If they leave their paying jobs, they often have to rely on welfare to get by and as a consequence are stigmatized and demoralized, the threat of which is particularly heavy when no alternative discourse of mothering for low-income mothers exists.

In summary, in Israel and elsewhere, although the neoliberal ideological environment has changed institutional and policy demands regarding labor market participation,¹ it has not changed practices and discursive imperatives for good mothering. The specific ideological environment contains welfare-to-work programs that require women’s emotional devotion to the labor market. When a caring crisis intensifies the clash between competing devotions (Blair-Loy, 2001) low-income mothers realize the importance of their maternal care, mainly their presence and the emotional work necessary for their children’s schooling (DeVault, 1999). We ask how low-income mothers justify their actions in these situations to understand how they sustain their moral self-images as both good mothers and reliable workers.

Methodology

Participants

Forty-eight semistructured, in-depth interviews were conducted with low-income Israeli mothers aged 24 to 62 years. The three criteria for participation were the following: (a) living in poverty, defined on the basis of the subjective experience of economic distress and repeated welfare dependency rather than income (Lister, 2004); (b) being the sole earner of the household; (c) having at least one child living at home. Many of the mothers participating were single mothers; four were married. The women had between one and nine children, with an average of three children, whose average age was 10 years. We did not limit participation to women with preschool children, and indeed, the interviews showed that even grown children can trigger a caring crisis affecting mothers’ employment. Rather, it is the specific types of crises that differ.

Most women in this study were of Mizrahi descent, that is, those born to families who emigrated from North Africa or Middle Eastern countries. The local Jewish Israeli ethnic hierarchy stigmatizes this category and relegates its members to its lower echelon (Khazzoom, 2003). Immigrants from the former Soviet Union are also stigmatized; our study included eight, only three of whom belong to the hegemonic Ashkenazi ethnic group, that is, those born to families of European descent (Khazzoom, 2003).

Recruitment

Trust relations in this kind of research are critical to probing the interviewees’ deep subjective lives (Warren, 2002). Dodson and Schmalzbauer (2005) stated that researchers often find it difficult to investigate the lives of those living in poverty, since they are reluctant to share their intimate lives with others. Hence, we sought the most effective ways to gain women’s trust. We found that adopting a passive stance, via which a potential interviewee approached us, was the most effective way of assuring that all the interviewees were truly willing to participate in the study and share their stories with us. Thus, we publicized the study through agencies providing services to the poor, such as the welfare, housing, and employment offices, or through social workers and workers at nonprofits providing assistance to the poor (mainly food packages). These representatives were asked to send or hand out letters about our study to potential participants. Those who were willing to participate approached us for more details. We thus ensured that the subjects of our study were interested in participating.

Second, we made a few pre-interview phone calls to each interviewee. These phone calls had two goals: First, we clarified that the potential participant met our three criteria for participation, and specified that we were interested in learning about the daily experiences of motherhood in poverty. Moreover, these calls were an important stage for building trust, such that by the time of the actual interview, we had basic knowledge about each other.

Finally, given that the interview location is not just a technical matter but also plays a role in constructing reality (Herzog, 2005), we asked the interviewees to select the interview location. In most cases, the women chose to conduct the interview in their homes. Although this decision may advance the balance of the power relations, since the interviewee is on her own territory, it can also contribute to our grasp of the immediate context within which her stories are embedded.

Procedure

The interviews lasted between 1½ and 4 hours, most lasting 2 hours. Following a short explanation about the goals of the study, we asked for the interviewee’s consent to use a tape recorder. With the exception of three interviewees who asked not to be recorded, all the interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim to ensure the findings’ credibility. All the participants’ names were replaced by pseudonyms and other personal details were disguised. We used an interview guide and prompted interviewees to describe their routines as employed mothers.

We found that our status of complete outsiders reduced women’s “habits of hiding” (Dodson & Schmalzbauer, 2005) and enabled them to share the most intimate details of their lives with us. The interviewees’ frequently stated (usually by the end of the interview) that the interview gave them a chance to talk about their lives and share their feelings without having to worry about being judged or accused. Similar to Solari’s (2006) experiences with immigrants from the former Soviet Union, we found that our positive responses to the women’s frequent question “Are you a mother?” and the short discussion that followed concerning our own struggle to juggle family and work made the interviewees feel more comfortable telling their stories.

Analysis

The data analysis was designed to characterize “how things work” (Smith, 2005). In the thematic analysis of the texts, the salience of mothers’ encounters with their children’s scholastic difficulties emerged. At first, we did not consider using the framework of emotion management in our analysis. However, later in the analysis it became clear that the use of emotion is salient to women’s justifications for their decisions.

When interpreting the interviewees’ stories, we were constantly aware that the interview process itself, that is, the meaning of this social interaction, cannot be omitted from the analysis process (Warren, 2002). In particular, we realized that the ruling relations were part of the interviews, and placed them within class and ethnic power hierarchies. Thus, we interpreted the data as indications of discursive threads that respondents weave together to justify their actions and construct their selves. We followed Silverman (2011) in assuming that in talking to us, women were defining themselves as moral members of the social category of “good mother,” as well as “good citizen.”

Findings

Our analysis of the interviews indicated that low-income, sole earner women feel compelled to exit the labor market in three main situations, listed below. In this context, emotions were used to justify decisions and present a moral self. In general, we found a form of emotional management that clearly responds to the neoliberal ideological environment that stresses the individual’s devotion to work: Mothers expressed an emotionality that could sustain their moral selves as devoted to work even if in practice they could not maintain their labor market participation.

A Caring Crisis Conveyed by the Institutional Context

The institutional context, which in low-income mothers’ talk is represented by child care professionals, does not accommodate mothers’ employed status. The caring crisis is conveyed when problems with children arise and mothers’ time at work appears to interfere with children’s school performance. Facing these problems, the mother comes to realize her inability to maintain her commitment to her job (Backett-Milburn et al., 2008; Dodson, 2007), and she eventually exits the labor market. The mothers were particularly responsive to information hinting that their children might display any kind of inferiority:

I always worked. All my life is about management: I was a shop manager, in charge of other employees. Over the last year I left the work track, because I had some problems with my child. He is 2 years old and has a hearing deficiency, and they didn’t want to allow him to stay at the regular preschool . . . but I didn’t want him to be in a special-needs school. . . . It involved an extremely long procedure and you would need to get a document here and a document there, all kinds of confirmations. So now I take him to an afterschool place called “child development” and he’ll undergo an operation to remove the fluid from his ears. Well, I must put aside my job for a while. But it isn’t for too long and of course I’ll get back on the work track, as there isn’t anything like work . . . at the moment I’ve got no choice; I have no other choice! I always have to keep my finger on the pulse. But, me, as a woman, I’ve got to promote myself; I’ve got to rescue myself too, you see? I’ve got my own life as well, behind all these mommy issues. I’ve got me. (Hadara, 36, mother of one)

The interviewee described her most recent job in extremely positive terms: “There’s nothing like work.” If the caring crisis had not arisen, she would have preferred to continue working. However, the preschool’s threat that her son would be sent to a special-needs school compelled her to leave the labor market. She was reluctant to accept the possibility that her son would be stigmatized as a special-needs child, and realized that she had to give up her job to keep him in the regular school. “Shifting work aside,” she explained, enabled her to overcome the caring crisis.

The attempt to decipher how our interviewees are embedded in ruling relations led us to identify a specific type of emotionality that links local activities and institutional spaces. By tracing the speaker’s emotional expressions, it became clear that her emotional responses were dominated by the neoliberal, class-blind expectation of being an employed woman rather than by being a mother. She has to be with her child because of his future scholastic performance, a rational realization that does not disrupt her emotional devotion to work. Apparently, the paradox generated by the “different webs of obligations” (Backett-Milburn et al., 2008) requires a form of emotional management (Hochschild, 1983) that has not yet received analytical attention: Women are required to express their emotional attachment to their workplace and work life. Hadara uses this emotional management as a justification for exiting the labor market. Although for the time being, she has “no choice,” as soon as she can, she will go back to her job. Rather than encouraging women to move from welfare to employment, the institutional context itself, by not providing adequate child care arrangements, is effectively imposing exit from the labor force and generating welfare dependency.

Some of the qualities of the emerging neoliberal emotion management surface when schools refuse to adjust their practices to the reality of employed mothers and continue to assume the existence of a stay-at-home mom who can be asked to deal with her child’s behavior at any given time. Gila, a single mother of two, told us the following:

Two years ago I was still a manager at the supermarket in charge of employees and all that, but I had problems with my youngest at school . . . I would take him at 7 O’clock and my supervisor at the time was fair with me and allowed me to start at 8 O’clock. But then she [the school principal] began calling me: “Your son did such and such.” She wouldn’t let me breathe. She ruined my life. This went on for a while until my supervisor said: “Listen, I can’t go on. Really, you’re good at what you do but I don’t know what’s going on.” I would tell him: “I have to go; they called me again.” For a while he empathized with me, but in the end, once when he complained, I said to him, “Well go to hell . . .” I couldn’t go on like that, and I had to quit. They really loved me there. I could go back even today; but the children take priority for me and that’s what’s really important to me. (Gila, 48, mother of two)

The interviewee’s claim of “putting the children first” is a statement of devotion that is accompanied here with a range of positive expressions describing her work life rather than time spent with her children. To understand the process Gila underwent, we followed how she explained her calculations and justified leaving the labor market:

Certainly I must enter the employment cycle again. But to enter the labor market I need to get my head organized. Now my problem is with my youngest, who should be going into the fifth grade but they can’t treat his ADHD. He has emotional issues as well, so he sees a therapist. He has all kinds of issues and I can’t do anything at the moment. I take him every morning to his therapist. And he suffers from a range of things that have to do with the drugs he is on. It’s an extremely long process. So I take him to occupational therapy, to the dentist, to his therapist; and on days when I have no appointments for him, the school calls me: “We’ve got a problem with him; he fought with this kid and hurt that kid.” I realized that it was no wonder I haven’t been able to function at work for the last year and a half. So now I’m considering putting him in another school where they have a smaller class. The minute I get that one sorted out, I have no problem and I can work.

By presenting herself as rational subject, Gila embraces both the superiority of the “I need to enter the employment cycle” imperative and her sole responsibility for all outcomes in her children’s lives. This merging of the maternal and the neoliberal discourses renders the ruling relations in the speaker’s world invisible yet clear: Without her personal presence, her children cannot benefit from all the treatment they need, and their (violent) behavior gets out of hand. Gila’s actions reflect an intensive mothering ideology, whereas the emotions she expresses reflect the neoliberal feeling rules of work devotion (Blair-Loy, 2001). An analysis of Gila’s emotions revealed the gap between the discursive ruling relation under which women act and perceive their action as free will, and the difficulties of their actual class position: The women present the middle-class mothering commitment, according to which the good mother has to devote her entire self to her children (Hennessy, 2009). However, unlike middle-class women, low-income mothers are often demoralized and stigmatized if they quit their jobs (Dodson, 2007). Furthermore, often they hold low-wage positions characterized by strict, nonflexible conditions that do not allow them to fulfill their care obligations while holding onto their jobs (Collins & Mayer, 2010). Thus, to sustain a moral self, low-income mothers have to manage their emotions in a way “appropriate” to the situation (Hochschild, 1979), that is, as dictated by neoliberal doctrine. The situation here may refer to the specific institutional context and to the interview situation as well, wherein mothers strive to present a moral self to a middle-class, academic interviewer. In other words, although they frame their actions as a rational, pragmatic response to the caring crisis, they must not demonstrate any kind of relief at leaving the labor market.

Similar to the interviewees in Griffith and Smith’s (2005) study, difficulties in finding appropriate child care prompted the mothers interviewed here to contribute their own labor to the provision of schooling:

They threw him out of school and I said “Over my dead body! This kid is going to complete his schooling, no matter what!” I’ve worked all my life; other than this last year, perhaps, and that’s far more important because you may lose your job but you get your child back. There’s nothing you can do about it. Once you have an ADHD child, you have to stay at home with him; you must make sure that he leaves home properly prepared for school. You can’t go to work and leave him to manage on his own, because he might forget his bag, his lunch, his pencil case, anything. Then he forgets to take his pill. He needs a coach, and the coach is his mom; there’s no other way. With all the pain, that’s how it is. . . . So in that meeting in the city council when they insisted he must leave school, I said to them: “Please! Let me have one trial trimester. I promise I’ll work with him . . . I’m willing to leave my job . . .” (Irit, 48, mother of four)

The narrator was employed for many years as a preschool assistant, but was forced to exit the labor market when the school threatened to expel her son. This threat was perceived as a caring crisis and thus put an immediate halt to her employment. The message conveyed by the school was interpreted as a crisis; namely the idea that her son might not complete his secondary education was so unacceptable to her that she gathered all her resources to combat the impending danger. The primary resources available to her are her presence and the emotional work required to advocate for her son (DeVault, 1999).

The mother’s devoted presence enables her to “work on him” medically and therapeutically. The emotionality of responsibility and obligation echo her familiarity with the middle-class mothering discourse regarding the need for maternal involvement in children’s schooling (Lareau, 2002), especially regarding children with ADHD (Firmin & Phillips, 2009). She thus shouldered exclusion and welfare dependency to ensure the future inclusion of her child. By stressing her devotion to the labor market, she depicts herself as moral neoliberal citizen, even while outside the job market (Backett-Milburn et al., 2008).

In summary, in this section we traced the role of the education system in shaping mothers’ labor market exits. Moreover, the school, with its threatening power of depriving children of their chances for future appropriate citizenship, imposes a pattern of emotional management wherein maternal emotionality is replaced by emotional expressions of labor market devotion. In the following section, we discuss the disparity between these mothers’ perceptions of their families’ needs and how these needs are viewed in their social surroundings.

Contrasting Definitions of Family Needs

The clash between working hours and family needs creates a caring crisis; at these moments, women responded to the caring requirements. By exposing the nature of institutional demands on their time as indifferent to their children and family matters, mothers discover the conflicting definitions of family needs in their world. Shirli, a mother of five adolescents, described what she perceived as a caring crisis:

I did try a proper job too, I tried to get a better job; I left cleaning 2 years ago. I worked in a daycare, one that operates 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. I tried working there and leaving my informal jobs. And it drained me of all of my energy . . . if I’m doing something, then I really want to do it properly, especially at work. I felt I was giving a lot of myself, and then I really didn’t have any energy left for home, and the hours . . . I’d get home at 5 p.m. and the kids were just waiting for me, even though I prepared their lunch and set the table and this and that . . . they were just waiting . . . they were used to my being there. (Shirli, 44, mother of five)

This mother’s account reflects the neoliberal “work first” welfare policy that mothers should be in the job market familial obligations notwithstanding (Collins & Mayer, 2010). However, Shirli’s children do not comply with these expectations, having refused to warm up the food she prepared and instead just waiting for her, hungry, which Shirli interprets as her fault. Therefore, her return to what she called “a proper job” or to her previous balancing act between several cleaning jobs is perceived as justified. It is intriguing that in describing her job loss, Shirli expresses emotions toward the job rather than toward her children (“If I’m doing anything, then I really want to do it properly, especially at work”), revealing her embeddedness in the neoliberal discourse that demands holding onto a “formal” respectable job). Concurrently rejecting any possible negative emotionality, Shirli states how much she wanted to devote all her energy to her job, yet makes no remarks concerning her longing to spend time with her children. Meanwhile, she embraces the belief that she herself is the best provider of care for her children, clearly reflecting the influence of the neoliberal mothering discourse (Douglas & Michaels, 2004). The duality operating in the two merged discourses leads mothers to leave their jobs:

The new cafeteria management demanded more hours, including afternoons, which I couldn’t give. So I enrolled in a temp agency that provides exam supervision services, but I couldn’t get more hours because I was only willing to work mornings. If my mother had agreed to babysit, I could have worked three or four afternoons, but she insists that because I had the baby I should raise her properly, that is, stay with her in the afternoon. (Ofra, 24, mother of one)

Occasionally, a grandmother can join forces with the institutional imperative to home in on single mothers’ “inability” to manage both child care and employment, when there is no child care after 4 p.m. The refusal of her mother to provide unpaid care means that Ofra cannot take on a full-time job. However, the ruling relations in which the interviewee is embedded are even more complex: She stated in the interview that even if the state were to provide her with affordable and appropriate child care at the right hours, she would not be able to use them, implying that the maternal imperative requires that she spend afternoons with her daughter (Hays, 2003). Ofra does not portray the time spent with her daughter as deriving from a positive maternal emotion, but rather as an inevitable consequence of the need to rear her child. Moreover, Ofra justifies herself as moral citizen by demonstrating her commitment to the job market: Although she endorses the neoliberal imperative of economic independence, the situation is out of her control.

Caring Needs After Leaving the Job Market

Previous research (Dodson, 2007; Oliker, 2000; Weigt, 2006) has noted the trap sole earner mothers experience once they feel that their children are paying too high a price for their absence. This trap is generated by two mutually exclusive institutional demands on women: On the one hand, their occupational commitments require such devotion that they are out of sync with their children’s routines. On the other hand, they want their children to extract maximum benefit from their schooling. The latter becomes particularly important when mothers believe that scholastic achievement is crucial to avoiding a future repetition of their own “failure.” Griffith and Smith’s (2005) findings exemplify the importance of mothers’ presence at school “for their children’s benefit.” In our study, mothers referred to their presence at home as key to their children’s scholastic performance, thus reflecting dominant social expectations regarding appropriate maternal performance (Garey, 1999, 2011).

After, unexpectedly, spending time with children at home, the risks involved in returning to work emerged. On a practical level, the care/schooling provided by nursery schools and the educational system as a whole was too partial and fragmented to sustain the “good student” or “good future citizen,” hence the “necessity” of mothers’ presence. Lareau (2003) argued that lower-class parents tend to undertake childrearing strategies that she termed accomplishment of natural growth, wherein parents are far less involved in their children’s schooling and do not promote developmental activities. However, more recent research has shown that these differences in childrearing stem from parents’ differential material constraints and access to resources, and not just from differing cultural values (Cheadle & Amato, 2011; Chin & Phillips, 2004).

Our findings suggest that in an institutional context wherein parental involvement in children’s schooling is deemed essential to their success (DeVault, 1999), low-income mothers perceive insufficient schooling arrangements to be (their) caring crisis. Realizing how children can benefit from their presence, mothers are reluctant to consider going back to work. Coral assumed for several years that a combination of formal schooling and a babysitter would be a good enough care arrangement to enable her participation in the labor market. However, when her workplace responded to a policy call to reduce expenditures on public services, in her case the court typing service, she realized that her income did not cover the cost of her child care. At that point she decided to quit her job and focus on her child’s learning disabilities:

I had a very good income there but I paid a very high price for it. I didn’t spend any time at all with my son and it came at a very high price. And, I worked very, very hard. And my son, I think that his fate was determined there, you know, that he’s on Ritalin. What can I do? It’s a serious problem. I remember, I was so damn, such a fucked-up mom, you see, it’s all written, predestined from above, that if you’re going to work hard, that’s what’s going to happen. (Coral, 30, mother of one)

The interruption in the interviewee’s employment generated an opportunity to encounter her caring crisis. Staying at home, she realized the causal relationship between her employment and her child’s learning disabilities and she presents this as fact. Her “sin” of working hard was punished: Her child is on Ritalin. The child suffers because Coral’s emotions have not been directed correctly. The ruling relations dictating this straightforward causality are invisible in Coral’s world, so she attributes it to fate: If a mother works hard, fate will see to it that her child will have to take Ritalin. Coral does not articulate her motivation in terms of her love for her son, nor does she mention regret for not spending time with him. This runs counter the conservative mothering discourse explanation often provided in previous research (Hays, 1996; Hennessy, 2009; Weigt, 2006). Her justification appears to reflect devotion and attachment to her job, and her actions are depicted as a rational response to the situation.

The IE perspective revealed that ruling relations shape a two-stage process. In the first stage, mothers realize that they are expected to work and independently provide for their children, which casts them as appropriate citizens (Collins & Mayer, 2010; Nelson, 2005). They rely on the institutional context, in this case, the school or daycare, to fill this role. In the second stage, although mothers assume they can rely on the education system, it fails to live up to its stated commitment to their children’s success, and at times can sideline children’s scholastic achievement, for example, Ritalin as a default fix for behavior problems. When mothers become aware of the shortcomings of the education system, they choose to take on some of what should be the responsibilities thereof. Consequently, they exit the labor market and significantly postpone their reentry into it. For other mothers, children’s health triggers the crisis, but the result is the same: Mothers are compelled to leave the workplace.

The majority of the mothers in our study presented “appropriate” emotion management and toed the neoliberal ideology by emphasizing their devotion and emotional allegiance to their jobs. Nevertheless, a few combined labor market morality with accounts of the unique emotional experience of mothering. Using the neoliberal discourse regarding commitment to one’s job enabled their reliance on past moral worth to justify present maternal devotion:

I used to work 40 hours a week—evenings, mornings—there were days when I didn’t see them at all. . . . But after my third was born . . . I sent her to daycare right after the 3-month maternity leave; and after 2 months she got very sick and I decided I must quit. After 15 years in which I was completely devoted to work, I could see nothing but my baby . . . it was stronger than me, an instinct telling me, “Don’t work. Stay at home.” She lost four kilos, and it killed me. I cried for days. Are you a mom? If so, you must know what parents’ feelings are. Anyone who’s not a mother can’t understand what I’m saying. (Sima, 39, mother of three)

The speaker appeals to the interviewer’s maternal feelings and suggests that they form an invisible bond between all mothers. In terms of the ruling relations governing her attitudes, a significant health threat to her baby “legitimizes” maternal feelings:

Before, even if I would come home early, I had no patience to listen to anyone. I couldn’t do their homework with them; I had no energy; I would drag myself, exhausted and tired. Since I left work, I sit with them, we do homework together; their grades have improved; my daughter, who was already in deep despair about her English proficiency, has become the best in her class. My son is now a champion in math, whereas before he would repeatedly fail. It’s a whole new world! (Sima, 39, mother of three)

Welfare-to-work programs are quick to dismiss the value of women’s unpaid caring, conditioning state support and allowances on employment (Collins & Mayer, 2010; Fineman, 2004). However, women’s own life experiences allow them to dismiss the value of their unpaid caring work only temporarily, usually until a caring crisis arises. After leaving her job because of her newborn’s illness, Sima described the enormous positive effect of her presence at home on her children’s scholastic performance. Like Lareau’s (2002, 2003) and Garey’s (1999) middle-class interviewees, Sima reported that her continuous assistance and involvement in her children’s schoolwork was crucial to their ability to benefit from the education provided by the institutional context, and that relying solely on the “accomplishment of natural growth” strategy would lead to her children’s future inferiority. For this reason, she is reluctant to go back to a full-time job that will “condemn” her children to scholastic failure.²

Discussion and Conclusion

Setting low-income mothers’ experiences as our point of departure allowed us to trace how their daily lives are both anchored by and woven into trans-local social relations (Smith, 2005). Experiences and feedback related to schooling were key factors in shaping women’s sense of obligation and feelings of unsatisfactory maternal performance that led to interruptions in employment. Such interruptions suggest that problems with child care lead not only to missing workdays (Usdansky & Wolf, 2008) but to out-and-out job loss as well as to a reluctance to return to paid employment. The weakness of welfare-to-work reforms is herein exposed: As mothers use emotional expressions to accompany their justifications for exiting the labor market, they manifest the lack of recognition of their caring obligations and reveal how the reforms result in harsh poverty for them and their children. Moreover, the mothers provided us with the opportunity to discover the contribution of emotionality to IE.

The feeling rule in women’s speech was that maternal devotion must be enacted out of obligation and necessity rather than love and care. Mothers felt they had “no choice” but to exit the labor market, revealing how a positive emotional attachment to work and the respectability it implies “must” substitute for maternal care and thus correct any related emotionality. As Hochschild (1983) suggested, their specific ideological environment shaped low-income mothers’ expressions of emotionality.

Consistent with Skeggs’s (1997) focus on working-class women’s longing for respectability, the emotional management we found enabled our interviewees to position themselves as respectable. Their emotional attachment to their workplaces manifested their devotion to the “work first” policy that stigmatizes welfare dependents (Fineman, 2004). The emerging pattern of emotional management is one of adhering to the “appropriate citizen” discourse, thus protecting mothers from any possible negative judgment. By expressing their devotion and attributing positive feelings to their work, their emotional management enabled them to manifest pride in an empowering self-definition (Backett-Milburn et al., 2008). However, mirroring the intensive middle-class mothering discourse, in moments of caring crisis, our respondents mobilized all their resources toward their children. Given that time, presence, and energy are often the only resources low-income mothers can provide (Cheadle & Amato, 2011; Chin & Phillips, 2004), opting out of the labor market was the common response to a caring crisis. Thus, caring crises constitute moments wherein mothers who realize that they have to quit their jobs reveal their embeddedness in the class hierarchy.

Noting emotions within Hochschild’s framework of emotion management can aid in mapping the social and institutional context wherein women strive to provide for their children (Thorne, 2011). Our analysis revealed this institutional context by focusing on the emotional devotion that the women described. Their modes of managing their emotions showed that to enable combining the “good mother” who provides her children with her presence and makes an effort to ensure the best education for them with the “earning mom” who is able to protect her children from poverty and be a good role model of the appropriate citizen, welfare policies need to be far better coordinated. This could be done in particular by enhancing the quality of schooling and child care services along with adjustments in the nature of jobs and their hours.

These mothers’ struggle to be involved in their children’s schooling contributes to the ongoing debate regarding class and child-rearing strategies. Lareau’s (2002, 2003) notion of concerted cultivation as well Griffith and Smith’s (2005) definition of middle-class child development discourse both point to the cultural differences between upper and lower classes. Consistent with previous research that has addressed parents’ involvement in their children’s education (Cheadle & Amato, 2011; Chin & Phillips, 2004), the interviewees’ responses to the caring crisis suggest that mothers’ engagement in their children’s scholastic futures might stem from differential access to resources and especially to the feasibility of parental presence.

Mothers’ decisions to opt out of work as a response to a caring crisis depends on local social policy: As the state reduces its public safety nets and refuses welfare reliance even for sole caregivers, mothers will be compelled to employ natural growth childrearing strategies (Lareau, 2003). Although this might be the case in economies like the United States, where state support is minimized and social benefits are linked to labor market participation (Weinraub et al., 2012), in Israel, despite the accelerating spread of neoliberal social policy, the eligibility requirements for welfare are less rigid (Herbst, 2012). Thus, Israeli mothers may feel more confident that they can survive economically outside the labor market for the time needed to handle the caring crisis, in a way that American mothers might not.

Moreover, we need to carefully consider our interpretation of the data, given the vulnerable population’s “habits of hiding” (Dodson & Schmalzbauer, 2005). We believe that the use of the IE method while focusing on women’s emotionality allows us to link local experiences and institutional imperatives. An interpretation that locates the individual in a specific ideological environment might help mitigate some of the difficulties in studying a stigmatized population (Garey, 2011). In the current research, the notion of “good mothering” may appear elusive or conflated. For example, the absence of warm maternal emotions in mothers’ talk about their children might be interpreted as their desire to present an appropriate moral self as part of the interview context (Silverman, 2011) or as a strategy of pragmatic survival, as suggested by Scheper-Hughes (1992) in her ethnographic research on impoverished Brazilian mothers. However, we believe that pulling the threads from the “coin-like skein” of social relations (Smith 1993), wherein our interviewees are embedded, enabled us to map the institutional discourses and practices therein and thus to interpret these mothers’ stories (Weigt, 2006).

Wharton and Blair-Loy (2006) argued that the meaning of familial obligations varies by national context. However, Garey (2011) maintained that although expectations of motherhood may vary over time and across cultures, members of a shared dominant culture recognize and understand these expectations, even if their own beliefs, traditions, or community culture diverge therefrom. Thus, mothers from differing social locales with varying access to resources might respond to social expectations regarding the good mother and the good citizen by stressing their emotional devotion thereto. Mothers’ dual engagement, as articulated via the emotional management we elicited herein, ensures their moral selves even if welfare dependency is imposed on them and exposes them to social stigmatization and derogation.

An alternative policy approach might begin with the recognition that the masculine ideal of a worker unencumbered by caregiving obligations negatively affects the recognition and value conferred up women, who are primarily responsible for this care (Thorne, 2011). Daly and Rake (2003) and Orloff (2001) suggested that the state’s response to needs associated with care can alter the division of labor between the state, the market, and the family. Our findings suggest that broader child care services suitable for all children with diverse material, cognitive, and emotional needs, as well as higher caring standards, could be a policy remedy. A combination of good jobs and quality, accessible child care services would allow women to experience themselves as fully integrated within a society that is willing to value care.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Shira Offer, Galit Ailon, Ephraim Tabory and to the anonymous reviewers of Journal of Family Issues for their helpful comments and suggestions. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Bar-Ilan Department of Sociology annual conference. We thank the conference’s participants for their constructive feedback which helped improve this paper.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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