Unbounded Motherhood

Material Obstacles

Given that the U.S. Family Medical Leave Act of 1993 allows for only 12 weeks of unpaid leave (Wilcox & McGarth, 2000), yet the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP, 2012) recommends infants be breastfed for at least 6 months and preferably 1 year, women who work and breastfeed are likely to be doing both at the same time. Breastfeeding/working women can express and bottle breast milk or nurse infants by traveling to them or having them brought to the workplace. In any case, mothers producing milk need to empty their breasts up to 3 to 4 times a day to maintain supply and prevent complications (Faught, 1994). Organizations are beginning to feel legislative pressure to provide support to employees in the form of designated break time and space for lactation (U.S. Department of Labor, n.d.). However, only 25% of U.S. employers reported providing an on-site lactation room in 2009 (Center for Disease Control, 2009). Thus, women may face obstacles in carrying out breastfeeding practices while at work.

Statistics generated in the United States suggest that combining breastfeeding and paid labor impede success for mothers who initially choose to breastfeed. Women who work full time while pregnant typically cease breastfeeding before returning to work, often at either the 6-week or 3-month mark, while those who work part-time or do not work for pay breastfeed longer (Ross Products Division of Abbott Laboratories, 2003). Although there is no relationship between returning to work and initiation of breastfeeding, there is a strong negative relationship between returning to work and cessation (Kimbro, 2006). Often, work seems to take priority, at least in practice, since the duration of breastfeeding is dependent on the duration of work leave and the intensity of work upon return (Roe, Whittington, Fein, & Teisl, 1999). The relationship between breastfeeding and work is moderated by demographic characteristics. Those who are able to breastfeed while working for significant lengths of time tend to be educated, White, middle to upper class women (Arlotti, Cottrell, Lee, & Curtin, 1998; Li, Darling, Maurice, Barker, & Grummer-Strawn, 2005). In fact, women who occupy nonprofessional positions with hourly wages, more rigid work schedules., and where lactation space rarely exists are more constrained in their breastfeeding choices (Galtry, 1997a, 1997b; Guendelman et al., 2009).

Discursive Obstacles

As if the competing physical demands of work and breastfeeding are not enough to make their combination difficult, working mothers also contend with ideological dilemmas. A substantial body of research has documented the discursive struggles working mothers experience in light of the opposing discourses of good worker and good mother (Buzzanell & Liu, 2005; Johnston & Swanson, 2006, 2007; Payne & Nicholls, 2010; Ridgeway & Correll, 2004). This research has included mostly women who are privileged in terms of education, occupational status, and/or income.

The good worker discourse holds that an ideal worker is not only dedicated to the job, but goes above and beyond expectations for the average employee (Acker, 1990; Deetz, 1992). A good worker puts in extra hours, is always on call, and sacrifices personal life for the good of the organization (Ridgeway & Correll, 2004). Further, good workers discipline their bodies to be fit, young, and professional (Nadesan & Trethewey, 2000). These metrics are based on the lives and bodies of men and on (White, upper-middle class, U.S.) norms of masculinity; therefore women face difficulty existing in the space of good worker (Acker, 1990). A woman who is a mother exists even further outside of this identity, because the good worker is “not someone who chooses pregnancy, who exhibits feminine and sexual qualities, who prioritizes personal needs such as childbearing over corporate needs, and who cannot be in the office 24/7/365 (see Deetz, 1992, 1995; Perlow, 1998)” (Buzzanell & Liu, 2005, p. 11). Furthermore, a woman who breastfeeds brings into the workplace a leaking, undisciplined body (Trethewey, 1999). The breastfeeding, working mother has three strikes against her as a woman, mother, and nursing mother because all breach professional expectations regarding the body at work.

Women may also be implicated by the discourse of good mother. The dominant voice on motherhood in U.S. culture says that mothers should be the primary caregivers of children and should engage in intensive mothering, which requires almost full-time physical presence, self-sacrifice, monetary investments, and attention to expert advice on parenting (Hays, 1996). Breastfeeding has become a key exercise in intensive mothering (Marshall, Godfrey, & Renfrew, 2007), deemed optimal by medical and public health associations (AAP, APHA), encouraged by organizations like La Leche League, supported by alternative medicine professionals, and pushed by U.S. government initiatives (e.g., “Healthy People 2020”; CDC, 2009).

Granted, mothering happens within specific cultural contexts; not all women in the United States may feel pressured by intensive mothering or pro-breastfeeding discourse, nor the competition between these and the good worker discourse (Arendall, 2000). However, because the good worker and good mother discourses serve as the culturally dominant standards in larger U.S. culture, women who do not meet these expectations are often implicated by others as deviant. Hence, as working mothers are accountable to both discourses, they may struggle to construct coherent identities in the face of competing messages.

Navigating Tension, Constructing Identities

Johnston and Swanson (2007) found that full-time working mothers in the United States had difficulty meeting the demands of mothering and work; “Their most common response was neutralization—a state of perpetual disequilibrium in which they are ricocheted back and forth between dialectic poles” (p. 456). However, a few participants kept these roles separate in space and time, and by refusing to buy into the ideology of intensive mothering they maintained a strong worker identity without experiencing a great deal of tension. Another few reframed intensive mothering to intensive nurturing, constructing child-care as a shared responsibility. Similarly, Buzzanell et al. (2005) found that women in managerial roles reframed the good mother construction to a good working mother construction, described as one who “makes quality child care arrangements by herself; who takes on the job of allocating tasks . . . and who feels pleasure in both working and mothering—the best of both worlds—despite initial ambivalence and feelings of separation from infants upon returns to paid work” (p. 276).

These studies provide a framework for understanding the ways working mothers discursively construct identities in the face of divergent discourses. However, they do not provide a sense of how the competing worlds of work and motherhood are materially negotiated. Combining breastfeeding and work presents a situation in which the separation or integration of motherhood and work is more materially problematic. For full-time working mothers, breastfeeding practices cannot feasibly be relegated to nonwork time and space, and yet are “not amenable to assimilation to a male norm of embodiment” (Hausman, 2004, p. 276). Therefore, breastfeeding workers must find ways to discursively and materially manage two opposing spheres at once.

Payne and Nicholls attended to both discourse and embodiment in examining how, through bodily practices, women worked to negotiate discourses of motherhood and work. Their participants constructed their choice to breastfeed despite being physically separated from their babies as fulfillment of the good mother identity and constructed their efforts to minimize breastfeeding practices at work as maintaining the good worker identity. In effect, they “negotiated the tensions created by the subjectivities of good worker and good mother, through disciplining of self . . . ” (Payne & Nicholls, 2010, p. 1814). The authors concluded that this self-disciplining of the maternal body keeps breastfeeding marginalized in organizations.

This study does well to join materiality and discourse and to illustrate how organizational norms and values exact control over women’s bodies and identities. However, research that focuses exclusively on control instead of simultaneously exploring resistance “fails to adequately theorize the possibilities for human agency at the level of everyday organizing” (Mumby, 2005, p. 27). Therefore, it is important to investigate how breastfeeding workers’ bodies both uphold and challenge the systems of power that undergird organizations. Work that attends to both discourse and embodiment as well as both control and resistance may produce a clearer picture of the complexities of organizational life and communicative practice.

Data Collection

Eligible participants were women over the age of 18 who had returned to full-time work within 3 months of giving birth and while still breastfeeding. Participants were recruited using informational flyers posted at relevant locations such as breastfeeding support venues, retail and resale stores catering to new mothers, and birthing classes. Snowball sampling was also used. Recruitment resulted in a sample of 15 women from across the United States who occupied various employment statuses including semiprofessional and professional as well as hourly and salaried. Their occupational categories included healthcare provider, academic, consultant, corporate trainer, corporate manager, nonprofit manager, and administrative support staff. Although the diversity of employment was good for a small sample, most participants were educated, all were Caucasian, and all had at least some flexibility and/or autonomy in their jobs that led them to see combining breastfeeding and work as a feasible option, at least at first.

The first author drew upon her experience of having breastfed and worked in order to design and conduct semistructured interviews with participants. This insider identity allowed her to attend to specific embodied elements of this experience. Interviews were designed to capture specific instances where participants felt they experienced a significant interaction or moment of decision around breastfeeding that defined them as mothers/employees. The interviews were first guided by general questions such as, “How did you manage breastfeeding and working simultaneously? What situations did you feel positive and not so positive about while breastfeeding and working? Did you tell others you were going to breastfeed and work? If so, what were their reactions?” then quickly became unique conversations. In fact, during one interview that took place at a conference, another woman who was nearby asked if she could join and share her experiences. Throughout discussions, experiences that had emerged in previous interviews were inserted, when appropriate, to see if they rang true to others. Interviews were audiotaped and transcribed for analysis.

Data Analysis

After several readings and individual open coding (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) of the interview transcripts, we met to discuss possible themes. We had both noted material ways participants negotiated breastfeeding at work that reinforced, resisted, and also blended the good worker and good mother discourses. We discussed our notes and agreed upon initial thematic categories. Next, the second author engaged in focused coding (Charmaz, 2000) using these initial themes (e.g., taking as little time as possible, combining work and pumping) as a guide. She coded discussions of embodied inter/actions in which participants managed the combination of breastfeeding and work and referenced identity issues in the process. For example, two participants said they used a manual rather than an electric breast pump at work because the noise made by the electric one embarrassed them. This was coded as an act of concealment that constructs breastfeeding practices as inappropriate in the workplace. The second author conducted this individual coding process as an “outsider”—a woman who has never breastfed or done so while working. We believed this perspective would be beneficial to the first phases of analysis because the first author might take for granted some of the inter/actions participants discussed (e.g., eating while pumping), seeing them as consistent with her experiences and therefore not necessarily significant.

In the next phase, the second author engaged in axial coding (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) where data are reassembled to produce

an understanding of the central phenomenon in the data in terms of the conditions which give rise to it, the context in which it is embedded, the action/interaction strategies by which it is handled . . . and the consequences of those strategies. (Punch, 2005, p. 210)

She analyzed each significant datum against Strauss’s concepts of routine versus problematic action and organizational orders. Specifically, an inter/action was interpreted as upholding the good mother discourse when the participant described enduring hardship in order to breastfeed for the sake of her baby. Second, a datum was regarded as routine or a reinforcement of the good worker discourse when the participant conducted breastfeeding in a way that upheld an organizational order. For example, participants pumped while eating lunch to preserve work time. This was coded as maintenance of the time order. Third, participants’ practices were interpreted as resistant when they defied organizational orders and were constructed as acceptable. For instance, the act of breastfeeding during a meeting was coded as a problematic action that challenged the separation of work and motherhood.

In the final phase, the first author used her “insider” perspective to confirm/question the second author’s analysis and to provide additional insights based on her embodied familiarity with participants’ experiences (e.g., that having to pour out breast milk is a significant sacrifice). For more information about this insider/outsider approach see Turner and Norwood (forthcoming). Finally, we reconvened and reconciled through discussion the few divergences in our interpretations. Together, we generated the concepts of bounded and unbounded motherhood to capture the most significant contributions of our analysis.

Breastfeeding, Good Mothers

Overwhelmingly, participants constructed breastfeeding as a practice that allows them to be good mothers despite their absence from infants while working outside the home. They cited breastfeeding as “what’s best” or “right” for babies and mothers. When asked why she chose to breastfeed, Nina, an administrative project manager at a university, said:

Gosh! All the information that’s out there about how healthy it is and . . . it makes your kid smarter. You know, you want your kids to be smarter. The immunity that, you know, it gives them, the defense. And just that bonding that it allows you.

And when asked what advice she would give to other women who choose to combine breastfeeding and work, Nina offered:

I would just say to be prepared for the work . . . the dedication . . . you have to understand that it’s going to be a lot of lugging . . . this extra bag back and forth . . . so I think you have to be able to just stay strong mentally and stay confident in your ability to breastfeed. You just have to stay confident because if you lose confidence, you just won’t do it.

Participants engaged in significant mental, physical, and emotional effort to maintain an adequate supply of milk. This “labor of love,” as one woman called it, fits with the discourse of good mothering in terms of selflessness, intensive care, and compliance with expert advice, allowing participants to embody at least part of the good mother identity. Participants also discussed breastfeeding as an extension of their bodies, or a way that they could be materially connected to their babies when physically absent. Kathy, a single mother and business service support specialist at an insurance company discussed the difficulties she faced:

And there would be times I would be at work and just . . . I just miss him . . . I think the nursing helped me through that because I felt like I kind of was substituting, like maybe because I’m working and I can’t be there all the time, but I’m giving you this. And maybe that’s why I was toting around milk in airports and pumping out of town or whatever it may be . . . to always feel that connection . . . because it does get hard when you return back [to work].

Unfortunately, bringing the breastfeeding body into the workplace is an infringement on the symbolic orders therein. In response to this, participants reported separating mothering and work practices and hiding breastfeeding activities in order to limit the maternal body’s intrusion.

Bounded Motherhood, Good Workers

Consistent with previous research, participants described tucking breastfeeding practices into slivers of time and space to minimize the impact of motherhood, thereby maintaining work, spatial, aesthetic, and temporal norms. They shared these stories as if offering secrets or best practices. Participants rarely attributed their suppression of breastfeeding to a lack of support from coworkers or supervisors, but rather to their desire to maintain a good worker identity. This presence and practice of maternity that is restricted to fit professional norms and values constitutes the performance of bounded motherhood ¹ . In performing bounded motherhood, women emulate the bodies of those who have power (Strauss, 1993)—namely, men.

While bounded motherhood stretches the limits of what it means to be a good worker in the strictest sense, it allows women to maintain a foothold in this sphere because maternity is done in ways that maintain the organizational orders. Specifically, the work order is maintained by keeping breastfeeding practices physically separated from work activities and by conceptualizing them as a personal responsibility that should not interfere with professional responsibilities. Spatial order is maintained through the ways women use and do not use space. Often, participants reported making do with inadequate spaces for pumping, like storage closets, bathrooms, or even phone booths and were reluctant to ask for appropriate spaces. These stories were often shared with a sense of pride regarding having successfully breastfed despite significant sacrifice. Further, participants concealed breast milk or pumping equipment. Asked if they stored breast milk in shared refrigerators, Mallory, who worked in an administrative support role in a university, and Faye, an organizational consultant, commiserated over embarrassment:

Even the sounds associated with pumping were perceived by some participants to be a violation of the sentimental order, as these noises were thought to broadcast the performance of maternal activities and therefore to disrupt the professional feel of their organizations.

Although some participants who had private offices were able to use them for pumping, others had to make do with lesser venues. However, even if a woman had a private office where she could pump the fact that this was a work space sometimes brought about a sense of discomfort. Eleanor, a recruiter at a university, said:

It’s a little bit—it’s probably a little bit uncomfortable, you know, to be doing that in your workplace . . . in your office where you meet other people and just talk about work.

And, even if there was a designated lactation space, it was not always adequate. Donna, manager of a training development team at a corporate firm, described such a space:

Once we didn’t have light in there . . . the lights didn’t work.

This exemplar illustrates the obstacles women work around and the privacy risks they bear simply to keep their breastfeeding practices from disturbing organizational orders. The label on the door Donna describes is a testament to her experience as a breastfeeding mother in the workplace—the choice to label the space “Mothers’ Room” sidesteps a reference to a leaking body and at the same time emphasizes the separation of maternal practices from work practices.

In addition to the spatial order, participants’ accounts suggested that they worked hard to maintain the aesthetic order of the workplace by containing their bodies. They experienced embarrassment when their bodies violated the boundaries of professionalism. When asked if there was a time when breastfeeding made her uncomfortable at work, Patty, a manager at a software company, recounted a story about leaking breasts:

Well, yeah. When I would let down in the middle of a meeting . . . I was wearing something that I didn’t feel comfortable in, anyway . . . I’m very conscious of the size of my breasts since I’ve been breastfeeding because they’re bigger than they ever were . . . So I’m talking, and I look down and I don’t even know what happened . . . It was shortly after that that I got these . . . little silicon thin strips . . . they make enough suction that you don’t leak . . . . I don’t know if anybody noticed . . . I sat there like this (indicating arms folded across chest) for the rest of the meeting, and I was just mortified . . . as soon as I got back to my office, I put my jacket on . . . There’s always a second layer . . . not just for leaks, actually, just because I—I’m self-conscious about my body . . . And I feel like . . . everybody can tell that I’m breastfeeding . . . And so at work I don’t want to be overt about that. I don’t know why, but it’s like I don’t want to bring attention to that fact more than I have to because I’m already sitting in the conference room twice a day [pumping] . . . since I cart my pump in and out of the office, I feel like I’m trying not to do it overtly, which is actually an interesting comment on the maleness of my office because it was a very male office . . . I don’t want to show any sign of weakness, you know . . . and because I’m nursing, that introduces an element of something that would be considered weakness.

Patty recognizes that organizational orders are founded on masculine norms, values, and bodies and that this entails a devaluing of femininity. She acknowledges that when she does not uphold masculine norms she risks negative professional consequences.

In addition to work, spatial, and aesthetic orders, temporal orders were important for participants to maintain in performing bounded motherhood. Participants put work responsibilities first and kept breastfeeding activities efficient to ensure work productivity. They often delayed pumping to the point of near-leaking so as not to interrupt or reschedule meetings or other work events. Participants described pumping while eating lunch or when work was slow enough to warrant a quick “break” and stayed late to make up for time spent pumping. Jan, a hospital clerk aide, painted a hectic scene of finding time to pump at work:

It’s kind of stressful at work cause . . . you get slammed and I like to try to pump every three to four hours . . . where I can build up my milk supply, but at work sometimes you just can’t do it . . . One time I couldn’t pump for five hours . . . being the secretary, I got to run around and get all the paperwork ready, take all the paperwork from the lab, order all the labs for the patients, and then I have to clean the rooms after they deliver or after they have a C-Section, and just kind of help with everything . . . And a lot of times you don’t take a meal break . . . if I eat, it either has to be when I’m pumping or I’m at the desk taking phone calls and doing other stuff and just kind of biting as I go.

Maintenance of the temporal order is important to Jan. Pumping and even eating is often delayed or forsaken in order to complete work tasks. Similarly, Esther, a technician at a university research laboratory, talked about how she compartmentalizes her mother and worker identities and keeps pumping to a minimum, maintaining the work as well as the temporal order:

I almost never pumped twice a day, even though in theory if I was nursing her four times a day when I was home, I should have been pumping more often, but—

Likewise, Liz, a research project manager at a university, shifted pumping around work responsibilities to maintain the temporal order and avoid the perception that being a mother made her a lesser employee. Liz said she felt bad skipping a pumping to attend meetings, as if she were somehow failing to care for her child. When asked why she chose to be on time to meetings rather than to pump and be late, she responded:

Just because of what other people would say. You know, if I were meeting with my staff, the people under me—no question, I would always say, “Give me ten minutes . . . But if I were meeting with . . . the director of the department . . . I would absolutely make sure not to be, not to cause a wave, you know, to be my same old self.

Liz perceived breastfeeding to be something that would “cause a wave” at work and motherhood as threatening to her “old self,” her professional identity.

In the same way that women may employ their bodies to breastfeed as a way to be good mothers, they may employ their bodies to perform bounded motherhood at work as a way to be good workers. We argue that both of these performances of motherhood constitute what Strauss (1993) calls routine actions. That is not to say that these actions are in any way easy or even common. They are routine in that by performing them, women’s bodies conform as well as they can to established orders and, therefore, uphold both good mother and good worker discourses.

Most participants characterized bounded motherhood as a balance; they made do with what space they could find between competing and seemingly closed realms. They detailed the difficulties, labors, leakages (literal and metaphorical), and stresses they endured in combining breastfeeding and working this way, but often characterized it as “worth it.” In trying to fulfill some requirements of good mother and some of good worker participants were silently burdened by the stress of keeping them separate, of squeezing each in around the other, of stretching their bodies across two domains without sitting comfortably in either. Donna captures the difficulty of meeting the demands of medical experts and the demands of her organization:

I’ve said it over and over, after I returned to work, I’m like, “You know, anybody, any of those people on the American Academy of Pediatrics who set that twelve-month timeframe probably didn’t return to work and try to do this because it’s really hard.”

Donna implicates the top-down influence of macro-level discourse when she refers to the burden of the AAP’s recommendations for optimal breastfeeding. While performances of bounded motherhood minimize the impact of motherhood on work, participants also described ways their everyday actions could minimize the impact of work on motherhood.

Unbounded Motherhood, Good Working Mothers

Amidst the accounts of bounded motherhood, there were descriptions of a different way of negotiating breastfeeding and working. At times, participants were unwilling to hide breastfeeding practices, did not hesitate to ask for accommodations, and did not report feeling embarrassment or guilt. By not keeping their practices as workers and mothers separated, they refused to comply with the notion that these domains are exclusive. This mode of combining breastfeeding and work constitutes a performance of unbounded motherhood. The practice of unbounded motherhood disturbs the orders that bounded motherhood upholds.

The following exemplars show how some participants inserted motherhood into the workplace in ways that problematized spatial and temporal orders. While some performed unbounded motherhood by refusing to fit pumping into space and time that would not interfere with work, others comfortably combined pumping or breastfeeding with work. Participants described pumping while answering phone calls, returning emails, reading documents, or even engaging in small meetings. Kellie, who worked as a pharmacy technician and a server in a restaurant, even performed her duties at the pharmacy while nursing:

. . . the director of the facility called me at home . . . and said, “Is there any way—I know you’re not supposed to come back for like seven more weeks. We are in the biggest jam . . . And I was like, “Well, I got my son and I’m nursing.” . . . And he’s like, “Whatever he needs is fine. Just bring him with you. You can keep him in there. I’ve talked to the girl in Medical Records. They can watch him in between. If you’re not comfortable with that, just leave him next to you. We don’t care.” And so I literally remember at one point, not an exaggeration, our pharmacy had like a cut-out window, you know, so like you sat at a desk and people walked up to you . . . and I remember at one point I was just nursing my son. I had a blanket over my shoulder and I was standing there talking with a doctor, taking an order for a chemotherapy treatment and nobody bats an eyelash.

Victoria, a development director for a religious organization, offered another particularly striking example of combining breastfeeding and work. She once nursed her son during a board meeting at the suggestion of her supervisor.

. . . I actually believe it was probably all men that day . . . And it was on my maternity leave, but my boss wanted me to come in. And I was like, “I’ll come in, but I have to bring my son.” . . . He’s like, “No problem.” And so this meeting’s long. In the middle I have to leave. So I go in the other room and bring Alex . . . I’m breastfeeding him and my boss is like, “Victoria, just come on in here. It’s no problem.” And, you know, it’s all guys, and I have—I don’t have much modesty . . . It doesn’t bother me because I think it’s just a real natural thing that we should be allowed to do in most places . . . .And so I went in there and he’s like, “Does anybody have a problem with Victoria breastfeeding?” And he was sincerely trying to make me feel comfortable and say, “Hey, don’t miss out” . . . which was really nice. And so I’m like, “All right.” So I’m sitting there looking around like, “These are all men like over 60 . . . they cannot be comfortable with this.”

Kellie’s and Victoria’s experiences are paradigmatic examples of unbounded motherhood. With the requests, invitations, and support from their supervisors, they combined work and breastfeeding in a very literal way. This semipublic nursing disturbs all manner of organizational orders. It brings breastfeeding and work together in space and time, challenging both of these orders, as well as the work order wherein personal and professional activities are distinct. Further, by breastfeeding in the company of others these participants’ actions disrupted the aesthetic and sentimental orders. Victoria acknowledges the latter in saying the men in the room could not be comfortable with what was happening.

It is interesting that in both cases the participants were asked by their employers to work during their maternity leaves, and seemingly in exchange, the supervisors offered profuse support of breastfeeding at work. Perhaps in asking women to disrupt the routine actions of motherhood, which should be undisturbed during maternity leave, the supervisors felt the need to mitigate this breach by bending organizational orders to accommodate mothering. Also of note is that Kellie said no one reacted to her nursing while working. This hints at a possibility of transformation. When organizational members refrain from policing behaviors that threaten the status quo, problematic actions have the potential to become routine.

Although they described the boldest cases, Kellie and Victoria were not alone in pumping or nursing in the presence of others or in being open about the fact that they were breastfeeding. Carla, a professor, also chose not to be contrite about breastfeeding or motherhood:

I think motherhood—I don’t make any apologies for, for the role that I have as mother when I’m at work . . . to me, part of being successful in this whole enterprise of working mom is that you’re not apologetic about the things that you choose to do. And so I don’t think I would have said something [on her door sign] as coy as “Privacy, please.”

Carla’s description of bringing breastfeeding practices into the workplace exemplifies the significance of unbounded motherhood for working mothers and for organizations—it is not simply a matter of falling short of good worker standards coupled with a justification for failure. Instead, it is a conscious effort to embody a good working mother identity, which denies the currency of discourses that position working mothers as lesser. Accordingly, Mallory thought it important for college students to see unboundedness so that it might establish a new precedent:

. . . my office is in the middle of the career services area on campus, you know, and so at first I was like, “Well, is someone going to be offended?” and then I sort of decided that that was a risk I was willing to take . . . in an environment where college students are coming in and thinking about their job opportunities and job options, I felt like I want the women walking down that hallway to know that this is something they can do at work.

Liz shared a similar construction of herself as an example for others:

I really felt like at work that was a great chance for me to role model, you know, to other women that were getting pregnant or having babies or even the men . . . I worked next door to a man and his wife was pregnant at the time and I thought, “Well, this is a good way for me to role model.”

Although these examples show that unbounded motherhood has a presence in organizations, participants who practiced unbounded motherhood also practiced bounded motherhood. Mallory, for example, expressed embarrassment that coworkers might see her breast pump and worried that her breastfeeding might offend them. She ultimately constructed her challenge to workplace norms as risky, but worth it as she felt a sense of responsibility to other women to create space for motherhood at work. Liz felt comfortable performing unbounded motherhood with certain coworkers and clients, but felt she must bind motherhood in the presence of her supervisors. She described a situation where she felt torn between binding and unbinding motherhood:

I never told them [her supervisors]. I was so afraid. I mean, I was a great employee. I went above and beyond. I never did anything wrong. For some reason that was just one thing I never could reconcile—I just didn’t feel comfortable not taking her [her baby], but I didn’t feel like I could ask permission to take her, but I knew nobody would care there [at the meeting], but . . . how do you tell your boss, “I’m going to a business meeting and I’m taking my baby,” . . . because in most people’s minds that would not be appropriate, but . . . we were meeting in a restaurant. It was like a three-hour meeting . . . I gave my presentation holding her. I breastfed her sitting at a table talking to people, you know.

Liz not only believed that her performance of unbounded motherhood did not detract from her work, but she believed it bolstered her work in the eyes of colleagues/clients. This is a significant claim as it undercuts the assumption that mothering detracts from work and vice versa.

Patty, the same woman who described concealing leaks and the size of her breasts, also described one of the most conspicuous and extended performances of unbounded motherhood:

. . . my daughter came to see me every day at lunch and we nursed. And that was significant for lots of different reasons, but for the workplace, that was significant because they had to give us a place to nurse . . . I talked to a couple of other girls that had pumped and a lot of them had pumped in the bathroom, including my boss, and, you know, she had done that for two kids, and I just was like, “This bathroom’s gross anyway. I don’t want to.” . . . I went to the H.R. person and I said, “Is there any other spot . . . can I reserve a conference room, for example, twice a day?” And they told me that, yes, I could. So I reserved a conference room in the morning at 10:15 and in the afternoon at 2:15 [for pumping] . . . for almost fourteen months . . . They let me use an old office at lunch . . . we’d sit in there with just a lamp on . . . and nurse . . . that meant that I was bringing my daughter into the office where other people’s offices were, going into this one every day, which, you know, to me at the time it just seemed like, “Well, that’s what I’m doing. That’s normal,” but in retrospect, that was a little weird, I guess, to other people, that here’s this baby just coming in and she’s getting—you know, I mean, it . . . had never been done before.

Patty recognizes that asking for accommodations of space and time and bringing her daughter to work to nurse goes against organizational norms. She even says that her requests and actions were “significant” for her workplace because the organization was asked to make changes to accommodate breastfeeding. Interestingly, even as she acknowledges that she challenged the routine orders of time and space, she constructs her actions as normal. By not framing these actions as troublesome, she not only challenges the orders of time, space, work, and aesthetics in her organization, she refuses to answer to traditional notions of work and motherhood.

Most of the participants who performed unbounded motherhood still tried to uphold the temporal order. This may indicate that they believe some rules, like those pertaining to time, are more strictly policed or more important to uphold and others are less risky to violate. Regardless, even the intermittent performance of unbounded motherhood opens an arena for discussion and opportunity for new practice (Strauss, 1993) and, therefore, creates space for the embodiment of a good working mother identity.

Embodiment Matters

Organizations, and the norms and values therein, have significant effects on our bodies; the demands of the good worker discourse might motivate us to work to the point of exhaustion, convince us not to get the tattoo we want, compel us to suppress our sexual orientation, or cause us not to breastfeed. However, bodies impact organizations and discourse as well. The presence in the workplace of various bodies that do not fit the narrowly defined ideal worker—female, non-White, disabled, or transgender bodies, for example—has brought about both formal and informal change in discourses surrounding work, although there is a long way to go before such bodies cease to be considered deviant and potentially problematic.

An embodied perspective on the construction of a good working mother identity is essential for considering how communication can change working mothers’ circumstances, “For it is in the expression of bodily presence, movement, gesture, adornment, and so on that we find not only material instantiations of meanings of professionalism but also (re)combinations and new assertions of identity” (Cheney & Ashcraft, 2007, p. 158). The body communicates in sensual ways that may be more impactful and harder to dismiss than other modes of communication. For instance, it is one thing to be told that a coworker is a breastfeeding mother, but it is another to sit beside her while she nurses a child during a meeting. The latter experience may conjure stronger feelings of discomfort than the former, but also may provide a symbolic rupture that speeds the process of transforming norms and values. Bodies are particularly powerful resources for organizational change.

Nevertheless, it is important to consider what kinds of bodies can create change or even enact performances with potential to bring about change. It may be that unbounded motherhood is performed largely by White, educated, middle to upper class, able-bodied, heterosexual women in the United States and/or only tolerated when performed by such women. Unbounded motherhood may be outside of the realm of possible action for women who work certain jobs, experience layers of discrimination, or have bodies that are physically limited. Alternatively, there may be some working mothers who, due to their particular subject positions, routinely and unconsciously integrate the identities and practices of good worker and good mother. For example, Arendall (2000) argues that African American mothers may experience “less stress in combining parenting and paid work than do Anglo women,” because their “employment rates have been higher for a longer period of time and are recognized within the community as being essential to family survival” (p. 1199). In order to better understand unbounded motherhood and the intersections of embodiment, gender, and work it is important to pursue such possibilities.

Facilitating the Combination of Breastfeeding and Work

The performance of unbounded motherhood can help to facilitate the successful combination of breastfeeding and paid labor, which to this point has proven problematic (Kimbro, 2006). While bounded motherhood keeps breastfeeding marginalized in organizations (Gatrell, 2007; Payne & Nicholls, 2010), unbounded motherhood brings it closer to the center. Gatrell (2007) concluded that we are far from a feminist politics of motherhood in which breastfeeding would be considered normal in the workplace (Hausman, 2004), but our findings warrant a more optimistic outlook.

We do not mean to suggest that breastfeeding has been fully accepted in organizations, or that combining breastfeeding and work is becoming standard or easy. Our findings do indicate, though, that some women may perceive that the risk of violating organizational orders is decreasing or that violating them is necessary to accomplish their goals, or both. In any case, these participants did not report any punishment for their breaches and they depicted those who were aware of their unboundedness as supportive. Through repetition of unrepentant action coupled with the explicit and tacit support of coworkers and supervisors, unbounded motherhood may become routine, thereby reconstituting the symbolic orders of organizations. Broadfoot, Deetz, and Anderson (2004) explain, “ . . . changes, wrought by individuals or institutions, draw on their awareness of, accessibility to, and appropriation of alternative repertoires of conduct . . . ” (p. 197). Because unbounded motherhood expands the repertoire of action for negotiating work and breastfeeding, it is a step toward a feminist politics of motherhood wherein breastfeeding will not be considered a potentially discrediting practice at work.

Unbounded Motherhood as Resistance-Control

Even as unbounded motherhood constitutes embodied opposition to organizational norms, we must reflect on the complex relationship between power and resistance. While Victoria and Kellie performed unbounded motherhood in ways that hold transformative potential, they did so at their supervisors’ requests that they interrupt their maternity leaves to benefit the organizations. This suggests that certain performances of unbounded motherhood may be another form of corporate colonization of the life-world in which the organization expands its reach into the nonwork lives of employees (Deetz, 1992). Organizational resistance and control may operate as a dialectic, “a process of ongoing, multiple, and unpredictable calls (power) and responses (resistance) in which power and resistance are often indistinguishable” (Fleming & Spicer, 2008, p. 305). Innovations in the conduct of work can at once give employees more freedom and organizations more control (e.g., Martin, 1990). Edley (2001), for example, argues that technology creates a gendered paradox for women who work and mother: “Technology’s ability to extend the body, space, and time can be empowering. Simultaneously it can be a form of control” (p. 30). Unbounded motherhood may function similarly, concurrently making the combination of work and breastfeeding more viable for women and expanding the organization’s influence in their lives.

Future Research

Future research should investigate when, where, and by whom unbounded motherhood is being performed. We know that there are lower rates of breastfeeding while working among minority and low-income women, partly due to a lack of flexibility and autonomy in jobs (Arlotti et al., 1998; Li et al., 2005). For some women, breastfeeding while working and particularly in an unbounded way may not be feasible. Future research that undertakes a broader-based analysis should attend to how work conditions are connected to bounded and unbounded motherhood in organizations. Additionally, researchers should investigate whether unbounded motherhood, or bounded, for that matter, translates across cultures. It would be worthwhile to know whether more progressive maternity policies in other countries create an atmosphere where being a good (breastfeeding) mother and a good worker is not a struggle or whether other work-life issues arise from extended leaves (e.g., fewer parents in leadership positions).

In addition, future research should investigate the effects of unbounded motherhood on work environments. While we can infer some things about organizational climate from participants’ stories, we cannot know how their performances were perceived by others, nor if and how problematic action impacted their organizations. Conversations with managers and human resource staff would provide a better picture of how organizations formally respond to such performances. Additionally, coworkers’ responses to unbounded motherhood should be explored given that informal, peer influence is important to the utilization of work-family policies (Kirby & Krone, 2002). Ultimately, research should examine whether the flickers of transformation we found actualize in changes to implicit norms and official policies regarding breastfeeding. Along with this research, scholars might examine whether men perform fatherhood at work in ways that both reflect and expand gendered ideals of professionalism as well as how other aspects of identity besides parenting, like sexual orientation or disability, are suppressed by and impact organizational orders.

Finally, organizational communication researchers can make use of Strauss’s framework to investigate broader changes to the way work is done. Our finding regarding the maintenance of the temporal order may bear out in other circumstances. In the case of unbounded motherhood, the body’s maternal presence tests the spatial order (and others) of traditional work environment, yet the temporal order is largely unopposed. Similarly, in the case of telecommuting the spatial order is transformed or even erased due to an absence of workers’ bodies in a traditional work environment. This may be another instance in which the temporal order emerges as a key symbolic order. Employees might be free to work on couches or while wearing pajamas, but they are likely not as free with respect to time, as interconnectedness among employees and clients probably necessitates coordination of schedules. As some symbolic orders change, one or more orders may remain sturdy or gain prominence as a means for organizations to maintain some standard of control. Examining which orders are more and less flexible, which constrain workers in problematic ways, and the specifics of the reciprocal impact between embodied inter/actions and organizational orders would allow theorists and practitioners to better target efforts to understand and affect change.