Abstract
The place of mothers and motherhoods in commercial life represents one of the great under-told stories of consumer culture. At once revered and despised as leisure shoppers, women nevertheless have borne the brunt of the labor of consumption for the household and thus have garnered the attention of advertisers and marketers since at least the early decades of the 20th century. During these formative years, the ‘mother’, as conceptual persona, can be found informing the design and staffing of retail spaces of urban department stores in the USA (Benson, 1986; Cook, 2004), completing the ‘family circle’ in depictions of the ‘housewife’ in advertising promotions (Marchand 1985) and occupying center stage in consumer education efforts of the time (Frederick, 1929). A good deal of the story of the mother–consumer – in both historical and contemporary treatments – has until recently remained enfolded into, and perhaps lost in, the general figure of a ‘female’ consumer with all if of its attendant ideologically inflected foibles and presumptions. Indeed, relatively recent key works focusing on women and shopping, such as those by DeVault (1991), Miller (1998) and Zukin (2004), tend to elide the specificities of what women do as mothers and thus of how constructs and understandings of motherhood may inform those of womanhood as well as those regarding consumption.
Motherhood remains caught in the tussle between seemingly disparate forms of value and valuation. Abiding cultural norms continue to set expectations for mothers to defer some measure of personal gratification to their children’s ‘needs’, or at least to their wants, both at home and in the marketplace. Yet, it is in the regular handling of children’s desires that the sorting of priorities and the fabricating of value take place on a fundamental, everyday basis. It also is in the handling of such desires that various motherhoods come to be constituted as social practice (cf. Warde, 2005). As Douglas and Isherwood remind us, consumption, in the broad sense, constitutes the way the materials of culture become organized. It is ‘the very arena in which culture is fought over and licked into shape’ (1979: 57). Consumption here includes the sorting of values – of good from bad, of appropriate from inappropriate. These become manifest in the purchasing of things as well as well as in the calculating of budgets, in the outfitting of children for the school day as well as in the pleasures and anxieties over a mother’s own self-presentation to her peers.
The key epistemological and conceptual insights enabled by attending to the specificity of mothers/motherhoods resides in recognizing that individual and individualistic consumption rarely applies, and that those who are charged with the care of young persons are constrained from acting solely in reference to an individualistic frame. Accounting for, listening to, and engaging with mothers and motherhoods in consumer studies does not simply mean studying families or studying mothers with children (which is not something to be avoided by any means); nor does switching the frame from ‘consumption’ to ‘care’ suffice to exhaust the import of what this perspective offers, although addressing care is quite necessary (see Tronto, 1992; Pugh, 2009). When mothers and motherhoods are placed at the crux of analysis of consumer culture – rather than as special cases or as those who occupy temporary states or subject positions – the world opens up to different possibilities of approach and understanding. Being able to discard assumptions about individualistic economic action serves as a point of departure for grasping the expansive and interconnected forms of exchange in social life, both contemporaneously and between generations. It is not only that mothers, on the whole, spend a good deal of time considering others in their purchases and provisioning – that they ‘co-consume’ and ‘co-shop’ even if they are in the store (or online) alone (Cook, 2008). Rather, when the lives, contexts, and experiences of mothers and their motherhoods stand at the forefront of investigation, one’s attention is called toward the ways in which all consumption resides in relations of give and take, of identity and distinction, of transactions over time.
Recent work in the last decade has sought to demonstrate the expansive and integrative insights that can be grasped when mothers and motherhoods are brought to the fore of conception and analysis in consumer studies. Research on adoption (Dorow, 2002), kinship (Yngvesson, 2004), fetal ultrasound technology (Taylor, 2008), midwifery (Davis-Floyd, 2004) and pregnancy loss (Layne, 2001) stand side by side with and inform studies of advertising and marketing to mothers (Thomsen and Sørensen, 2006; Voice Group, 2010), bringing with them changes in the ways in which motherhood is being re-evaluated by marketers and being practiced and understood by mothers. One of the key changes in public discussion about middle-class motherhoods in Global North contexts revolves around the ways in which many mothers accept, if not embrace, their consumer roles as constitutive of how they make their own motherhoods. Part neoliberal ethos and part active empowerment, many contemporary middle-class mothers find less of a chasm or tension between market and mothering than what Sharon Hays (1996) found in the late 1980s. Now, the traditional ‘mommy brain’ construct (i.e. the supposed stupefying effects of being a mother of young children) fights with an emergent notion of ‘mom-in-chief’ (Woolf, 2009), where women are encouraged to bring their leadership and corporate skills from the workplace to bear upon their parenting and the running of their households. As women continue to make inroads in the workforce, they also are increasingly held morally and socially responsible for virtually every aspect of the lives of their children. As such, many have become actively engaged in influencing the kinds of products available for their children by making use Web 2.0 technologies and social media, which, in turn, is making mothers’ practices, skills and networks part of the marketing resources for many companies (Bailey, 2011).
Mothers make their own motherhoods even if the motherhoods available to them are not of their own making. Such is the insight and operating premise of the articles assembled in this special issue on ‘Producing Motherhoods In/Through Consumption’. The authors approach their subjects from a variety of fields – sociology, anthropology, history, consumer behavior – and in so doing they assert that consumption, in its many varieties, is indispensable to the practice and experience of motherhood for many living in the wealthy nations of the Global North and has been for quite some time.
We see, for instance, in the articles by Theodorou and Spyros and by Cairns, Johnston and Mackendrick the ways in which mothers and children – motherhoods and childhoods – necessarily speak to each other in reciprocal definition. One does not exist without the other. The baby imagined in utero, as Theodorou and Spyros show, prospectively defines boundaries of motherhood in ways that are, in practice, inseparable from dominant ideologies of motherhood in the Cypriot context. Cairns, Johnston and Mackendrick detail how the ‘organic child’ arises in and from the intertwined discourses of ethical food consumption and ethical child care. This idealized figure supports and reproduces gendered notions of care within a specified class context to forward a neoliberal view of a maternal self.
The care for self in relation to others arises as a key pivot in an expectant new mother's life, as Ogle, Tyner and Schofield-Tomschin show. The struggle with and decisions about the kinds of maternity dress new mothers contemplate highlight the ways in which goods both enable and constrain the transition to the ‘role’ of mother, while nonetheless marking her as liminal. The research by Layne in some ways addresses a different kind of liminality – i.e., that of the ways in which lesbian couples understand and construct the ‘absent’ sperm donor father. We see from Layne how the commodity status of the sperm combined with medical practice and desire for intimacy call for various maneuvers by the couples to manage, among other things, the ever-present money relation that frames the creation of life through these means.
The contradictions and locations of motherhood are many and varied. Bradshaw offers a glimpse into the complicated readings of one version of contemporary motherhood in the US cable television show The Big C where the ‘bad’ mother anti-hero is showcased. The result is, for Bradshaw, both a hiding and a playing out of the politics of motherhood and postfeminist inspired anxieties around the ‘perfect’ mother and consumerism. Rose examines some of the key meanings of children’s’ clothing in 19th-century Britain and, in the process, uncovers the mother consumer who is both audience for and participant in the marking and marketing of these garments. In so doing, she offers not only a compelling depiction of status and gender concerns in the 1800s, but also ways in which such research can inform current questions.
Put together these articles constitute a fine ensemble of research that reaches in different directions, opening up the promise and prospects of realizing different ways in which mothers and motherhood speak broadly to the conceptualization and theorization of markets and commercial life.