La vie d’une autre femme (2012): Returning working mothers to the homeplace, by Julie Rodgers (French, NUI Maynooth)

I have just attended a screening of La vie d’une autre femme (2012) as part of the annual French Film Festival at the Irish Film Institute (IFI) in Dublin and feel that there is much to discuss in this film in connection to the theme of our most recent workshop in October, namely, Motherhood and Work.  La vie d’une autre femme marks the entry of established French actress Sylvie Testud into the domain of directing. Loosely based on the novel by Frédérique Beghelt (2008) similarly entitled La vie d’une autre, Testud’s film deals, inter alia, with the trauma of memory loss and the quest to recuperate the original self.  The film focuses on a forty-year old female protagonist, Marie Speranski (played by Juliette Binoche), who awakes one day to discover that she cannot remember anything of the previous fifteen years of her life. Her last memory relates to her initial encounter with her husband Paul Speranski (played by Matthieu Kassovitz) at a time when she is depicted as being young and carefree. Bit by bit Marie has to piece together her identity and comes to the painful realisation that the woman she has grown into has nothing in common with the self that she remembers. Originally from a modest background, she is now an extremely wealthy and successful business woman: at the beginning of the film we see her talent being recognised by Paul’s father, head of a very important finance firm, who invites her to join their company. She is also a mother to a child she cannot recall having and on the brink of divorce from a marriage that, similarly, she cannot remember breaking down.

While this conflict between a ‘before’ and ‘after’ self brought on by Marie’s amnesia can be interpreted from a number of perspectives, one of the most obvious being the gap between the realities of adulthood and dreams of youth, it was the depiction of the working mother as someone who had betrayed her ‘true’ identity that was, for me, at the heart of this film. As Marie begins to gather information from those around her about the last fifteen years of her life, the spectator is made aware of a kind of moralising experience that is taking place for the protagonist. We learn that she has risen to the top of the company for which we saw her being recruited at the beginning of the film and that her talent as a business woman is in demand internationally. However, in rising to the top of her career, there is a sense that she has abandoned her ‘feminine’ values and that she has neglected the place where society considers her to be most needed, that is, at home with her husband and child. The world of work and power is portrayed as a masculine domain (the only other women in her workplace are secretaries and receptionists) and there is a feeling in the film that by being so successful Marie has become a ‘like a man’, and that this, in turn, has devastating consequences for her marriage and homelife. First of all, it appears that she has usurped her husband, Paul, who, unlike his wife, has been struggling in his career as a comic book artist. While Marie’s work takes her out of the home to a luxurious executive office (situated on a floor full of workers over whom she has complete control), Paul works from home in a little atelier at the top of the house. Marie’s mobility juxtaposed against Paul’s immobility has thus disturbed the ‘natural order’ of the home and can only end badly. Similarly, becoming ‘like a man’ has impacted on her ability to mother - she makes a mess of the cooking, doesn’t know how to play her child’s games properly and can’t get him to school on time. Of course, this could also be explained by her amnesia, but I think that there is more to it than that alone. Moreover, in opposition to the female professional who has forgotten how to mother is the character of the nanny in the film who is presented as being more in harmony with the child’s needs than Marie. A further way in which the film depicts the ‘masculinisation’ of Marie that takes place when she enters the corporate environment lies in the change that occurs in her appearance: she cuts her hair short and adopts the standard business uniform of the power suit. When her amnesia takes hold, Marie, of course, resumes her former, more feminine style, puts on a pretty summer dress and talks of growing her hair again. This is greeted positively by her son (and also her husband, I feel, who begins to notice her again), thus revealing a nostalgia in the film for a more traditional image of the mother, a mother who is gentle and warm, as opposed to the trouser donning female executive who is depicted as cold and distant.

What ensues, then, in La vie d’une autre femme, is a kind of corrective narrative where Marie realises how much she has sacrificed for the sake of her career and subsequently strives to restore the ‘natural order’ in the home by tending to her child and winning back her husband. A domestic lifestyle is presented as much more rewarding than a high-powered executive position. It is also interesting to note that during this period of amnesia when Marie cannot really go to work (because she can’t remember what it is she actually does there) and we see her as being more present in the home, her husband’s career finally starts to take off, thus suggesting that a ‘natural’ balance is being restored. By the end of the film, Marie has decided that she needs to make some changes in her life. In a conversation with her father-in-law and owner of the company (Mr Speranski), Marie is informed that she can have a transfer to another office. In this same conversation, Marie is simultaneously criticised for not valuing her family enough by the very man who recruited her in the first place. This would seem to suggest that it is acceptable for women to work only when it doesn’t interfere with their responsibilities in the home – we should recall that when Mr Speranski initially hired Marie, she was single and childless.  In the end, Marie decides to leave Paris for a fresh start in London. Although she is not giving up her job, her relationship to work and ambition has clearly been altered. She is insistent that her son will come with her, and the film closes with the feeling that Marie has ‘learnt a lesson’ and that a resolution has been reached through the protagonist’s rediscovery of her nurturing side.

To conclude, it would appear that the rather depressing message propagated by Testud’s La vie d’une autre femme’ is, as Ann-Marie Slaughter’s widely-read article published in The Atlantic earlier this year states, that ‘women can’t have it all’ – a career at the top cannot be combined with the demands of caring. In fact, the very title of the film points to this idea, that is, that the lives of a working woman and nurturing mother/wife are simply not compatible – they belong to two very different women. Furthermore, the emphasis that the film places on rediscovering one’s ‘true’ self in the film suggests that the mother who works is a mother who is guilty of ‘bad faith’. Keeping all of this mind, it is fair, I feel, to say that this particular film is punitive to women who wish to combine motherhood, marriage and work as it really only presents two options (the ‘good stay-at-home mother and wife’ vs. the ‘bad working mother and wife’) without considering how a balance might be reached. It could, I suppose, be argued that Marie’s decision at the end of the film to change jobs but take her son with her is, perhaps, an indicator of a third way. However, this is where the narrative stops, hence, there is no way of knowing whether or not a third way is actually viable.

Some links to recent discussions of mothering and work, and mothering as work

In light of the discussions we've been having about mothering and work, and mothering as work, (following on from our 'mothering and employment' workshop), here are some relevant links: 

Nina Power's discussion on her latest radio programme on resonance fm (November 11th 2012):

http://soundcloud.com/resonance-fm/sets/the-hour-of-power-1/


One of the books Nina  discusses is 'The Problem with Work' by Kathi Weeks (2011):

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Problem-Work-Feminism-Antiwork-Imaginaries/dp/0822351129

For a shortcut, I've written a review of Weeks' book in Radical Philosophy (Issue 175 2012): 

http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/reviews/175-reviews


Finally, Stella Sandford's article 'What is Maternal Labour' (Studies in the Maternal, Issue 2, 2011) considers 'the specificity of maternal labour as labour and what is its specificity as maternal?' 

http://www.mamsie.bbk.ac.uk/back_issues/3_2/Sandford_SiM_3_2_2011.html


Please do add any more links or references that you've come across. 

Thanks,
Victoria 

Report on Workshop 2: Mothering and Work: Employment Trends and Work, by Katarina Carlshamre

Notes on the second workshop of the network

Sitting on the airplane home to Sweden after the workshop, I was filled by a buzzling sensation of adventure. This had been the first time I ever met a group of other scholars working on motherhood in a context where literature was in focus, and I was excited.

http://www.igrs.sas.ac.uk/sites/default/files/files/AHRC%20Motherhood%20Network/Workshop%202%20Final%20Programme.pdf

Victoria asked me the other day if I wanted to write a report from the workshop to post here on the blog. It had been more than a week since the workshop, and I realized, after looking at my notes from the day, that I would have little help from them (they are mostly questions and associations) but I gave it a try. The result, I’m afraid, is closer to “blog-notes on the workshop” than to a formal report. Please comment, elaborate and/or protest!

                                                                                         

1. The aim of the workshop was “to identify specific problem areas relating to the relationship between mothering and paid work in Europe, asking what kind of insights literature may offer to the issues raised”. A very optimistic objective, to be sure, but I think that we, to some extent at least, achieved it. Problem areas which I observed, and which reappeared throughout the day, were vulnerability/precarity, isolation, and the (inherent?) contradictions of the maternal experience. I think we also saw several example of how literature, by its capacity to capture life’s fundamental complexity and contradictions, and doing so by intuitive and direct understanding, can help us resist schematic conceptions of maternal experiences.

2. The structure of the workshop

The workshop was organized into three blocks. Two of them (1 & 3) were interdisciplinary plenary panels, with one sociologist and one literary scholar in each one, the first panel also including the paper of a historian. The remaining block (2) was constituted by three breakout sessions, where literary extracts were discussed in smaller groups, which then reported back to the whole workshop. The literary texts were from a diverse range of countries: Italy, France, Greece, Czechoslovakia and Sweden. The social science presentations were from Italy (one paper) and the UK (three papers).

A note I wrote on the airplane home: In what ways can research which produces knowledge in one national context be of use for researchers working both in other national contexts and in different disciplines? (i.e. how is British literature of interest for German sociologists etc)

3. The Social science presentations

In her response to the first interdisciplinary panel, Janneke van Mens-Verhulst stated that “the similarities between our West-European nations appear to be more impressive than the differences. F.e. the motherhood penalty in earnings, the role of grand-parents, and society’s half-heartedness and ambivalence in providing parental leave and day-care for children.”

Indeed, all of the presentations during the workshop told of social-political contexts in which the opportunity of mothers to combine parenthood and work is not facilitated enough. In her historical overview of the UK, Pat Thane underlined the significance both of economic impetus, psychological experts’ discourses on motherhood and the (lack of) political will, for the shaping of the conditions for mothers’ work. The sociological presentations showed that the conflict between caring responsibilities and job constraints is still a women’s issue (not something which concerns parents of both sexes), both in the UK and in Italy. Bertoloni’s research demonstrates for example that couples do not respond to the conflict childcare/work by questioning the institutional arrangements (or the father’s role), but by reducing the mothers commitment to work. Miller stated that deeply entrenched assumptions about gender roles still govern the way parents organize the work-life balance. Despite a positive attitude towards the idea of gender equal parenting, in practice little has changed during the last decades.

It is important, I think, to keep in mind that the only national contexts discussed from the non-literary disciplines during the day was the UK and Italy, two of the countries where provisions of parental leave are the lowest in Europe. Variations within Europe, differences between countries, were only very slightly part of the discussion during the day, but would be interesting to pursue.

4. The literary presentations

A rich array of questions were discussed in relation to the literary texts. Here are some of the aspects I recall (please feel free to correct and/or complement my list):

a) The transition to motherhood, and the discrepancy between expectations and reality. The interesting fact that knowledge of the more difficult sides of motherhood, still seem to be very difficult to transfer to the next generation. Why is this so? (Susan Maushart’s idea of the mask of motherhood comes to my mind.)

http://www.amazon.com/Mask-Motherhood-Becoming-Mother-Changes/dp/0140291784

b) The insecurity, the precarity, of the mother’s work situation. In Carmen Covito’s “Tempo parziale”, working conditions forces a work-oriented mother to become a full-time mother. This is an Italian text, but the conflict is applicable to the reality of several European countries where working life includes long hours and scarce opportunities for part-time work, where day-care is either difficult to get or very expensive and where the idea of the father is that of a breadwinner, not a care-taker.

c) Monica Jansen talked about the use of irony as a form of resistance, and irony as a literary technique. The idea that collective precarity can be transformative.

This raises the more general question of maternal revolt against socio-political structures. It is interesting that the revolt of the Italian mother (if there is one in the text) is never turned against the father. In the Swedish mother narrative novels that I study this is the primary focus. But even if a mother sees the inequalities inside the couple, revolt is difficult. How do you show resistance in your daily life without putting your children’s well-being at risk? It is easy to fight against gender inequality in the home by refusing to do the dishes, for example, or even pretend that you don’t know how to. Dirty dishes won’t get harmed by neglect. It is not as easy not to pick up your children after school because you think it’s your husband’s turn to do it, if you know he won’t.

d) Mothers putting her children first vs. Mothers putting herself first. Helena Forsås-Scott’s presentation involved a mother who, even as she is being attacked in her own home, thinks about her children before the protection of her own body. Margarita Lymperaki, on the other hand, gives us a mother who puts her artistic work before the care of her daughter, a mother who is not a bodily presence for her child, but has given the child her name. (The traditional male position.) What is a mother, and what is she supposed to be?

e) In the French text, work is described as the mother’s only safe haven, in the Czecz text work is described as something that motherhood can liberate the woman from. Work means very different things. And how do we define work? Is the structuring “mothering and work” a good way to conceptualize the problem if we seek to challenge the dichotomy “mother/work”?

To illustrate that the issue of motherhood and work in Europe is not all dark, and that there is hope, I will end with a quote from the Swedish novel Bitter bitch (2007) in which the narrator shares the parental leave with her husband.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bitter-Bitch-Maria-Sveland/dp/1849019681

“When it was Johan’s turn to stay at home everything changed, slowly but surely. Suddenly Johan was the one who knew everything, from when something was missing from the fridge or that Sigge needed a new winter coat, to which story Sigge liked the best. Suddenly I was the one who came home to a tired Johan in need of relief. I came home happy and filled with stories from the outside world”.  

Who wants to have it all? Why mothering remains an important space for feminist resistance and contestation, by Roberta Guerrina.

Ann-Marie Slaughter's recent piece 'Why Women Still Can't Have it All' published in The Atlantic earlier this year has gone viral. It has generated wide reaching debate in policy and academic circles. This is clearly a heartfelt piece. Slaughter provides a candid overview of the struggles and internal conflict she felt as a working mother.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/why-women-still-cant-have-it-all/309020/

The response she has received to the article in the form of comments, blogs and response pieces highlights something that I have been trying to grapple with the whole of my career: mothering. The values associated with this function, remain as contested today as they were at the height of the equality-difference debate in the 1960s and 1970s. Whereas Liberal feminists have long advocated equality of access (i.e. formal or legal equality), difference and Radical feminists have focused on revaluating women’s caring role as a key value of society. Feminist scholars have thus been trying to navigate a difficult social and political territory between promoting women's right to participate in the employment market on an equal footing to men whilst recognising the importance of care as a social function. The main aim of most feminist work in this field is and has been to challenge a socio-economic model that is based on the division between public and private, and which supports inequitable gender hierarchies in the family.

The starting point for a meaningful engagement with Slaughter's argument must be to recognise these tensions. Equally, we should acknowledge that there is nothing fixed or essential about the current gender order or the socio-economic structures within which we all operate. These values are neither neutral nor natural; they reflect a set of dominant social, political and economic interests that shape and restrict individual choices.

Slaughter’s main argument revolves around the impossibility of reconciling the demands of a high level executive or political career with the responsibilities of mothering. It should be noted at this point that Slaughter’s standpoint is based on her personal experience of trying to reconcile a career at the top of the American political pyramid with the demands of caring. As she points out in the second half of her article, she has been able, and continues to be able, to reconcile a highly successful career as an academic and public intellectual with the demands of mothering. What she perceives as the key to unlock the “holy grail” that is work-life balance was flexibility. Something she clearly felt was not reconcilable with the ambitions of US foreign policy and the demands of the State Department, despite working for a boss as understanding as Hilary Clinton.

The conflict of interests and emotions she experiences is something that many working mothers would recognise. These complex emotions, however, come as something of a revelation to Slaughter, leading her to a revaluation of core values. In particular she considers whether women with care responsibilities (i.e. mothers) can, or should try, to compete for high level jobs. She provides other examples of women who made the difficult choice to scale down professional activities/aspirations to concentrate on the needs of their families. Slaughter is sensitive to the complex set of variables that influence these women’s choices, but ultimately she concludes that focusing on equality in the public sphere (i.e. politics, employment and the boardroom) has been at the expense of women’s caring role. In so doing, Slaughter provides a detailed critique of liberal feminism, particularly the expectations placed upon women and the limitations of this approach to equality.

Men and socio-economic structures are not forgotten in this open and personal assessment of the shortcomings of the work-life balance narrative. Fathers have a particularly important role to play in changing expectations. She recognizes that men also cannot “have it all”. Many highly successful men may have to “sacrifice” the kind of personal fulfillment that is enjoyed by playing an active role in the upbringing of a child, for a “greater” (public) purpose. Yet, she also notes that wider society seemingly remains supportive of these choices. Such sacrifice is often seen as duty towards the family or the nation; there is little or no reflection in the press of the impact this has on children, society and “the family”. The same is not true of working mothers. So, she concludes that we should reconsider whether women should adopt the dominant masculine values that permeate contemporary economic structures. Rather than engaging in a detailed critique of hegemonic power hierarchies, she retreats into a difference stance that assumes the ethic of caring and the demands of work binary opposites. Clearly, what is needed is for feminist scholars and activists to deconstruct and challenge the very values upon which the labour market is based. This means challenging the long hour working culture for all, not just working parents (mothers and fathers). Recognition that balance will benefit society (and the economy) in the long run should remain one the key propositions of feminist politics. 

Slaughter’s final conclusions about the role and position of mothers within the family are potentially a dangerous position to take. Media coverage of the (negative) impact of maternal employment on the psychological and social development of children is testament to the power of the hegemonic order. Most social scientists would point out that none of these values are fixed or detached from the pursuit of specific socio-economic interests. Yet the guilt is real for many working mothers. Well meaning childcare providers’ disciplining behaviour towards mothers (it is mostly mothers) who arrive late to collect children at the end of a working day not only shape women’s self perceptions, it also socializes children into the hegemonic discourse. Slaughter’s feelings should therefore not be divorced from the wider social framework that has helped to shape her identity as a professional woman and mother.

The article does what most good feminist writing should do: it asks where are the men? Not just in terms of the absence from the private, but also their role in shaping employment structures. Slaughter is quick to acknowledge the supporting role played by her husband, also a highly accomplished international scholar. Clearly fathers/partners have an important role to play in augmenting equality of access and equality of opportunities in formal employment. Recognition that diversity matters, not just in terms of economic/market gains, but also in terms of social prosperity should then lead to a revolution in the way we conceptualise and structure work (both paid and unpaid). Slaughter opens the door to this kind of contestation but falls short of the intended objective by not challenging the values that underpin this particular gender order and associated economic model.

Laura Sjoberg's (2012) response to Slaughter’s piece picks up on many of these issues, though she reminds us that work-life balance does not matter only for working parents. Her criticism revolves around the expectation that women can, want and/or should be mothers. She therefore calls for a non-essentialist feminist politics that helps us to challenge dominant narratives about what means to be a woman, a mother and a professional. Recognition that gender values (including dominant views about mothers’ and women’s roles in society) are an articulation of a particular social order allows us to uncover relations of power within society, the work place and the family. Sjoberg is right in challenging the focus on mothering, yet this must remain one of the main spaces of feminist contestation and resistance. Dominant assumptions about gender roles and divisions stem from entrenched views of mothering and caring. This should not lead us to buy into essentialist views of gender, but should encourage a continued engagement with critiques of the disciplining role of social values. For these values not only shape the relationship with the public sphere of women with children; ageing population is adding a different, but equally gendered dimension, to the politics of care.

http://duckofminerva.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/having-it-all-and-non-essentialist.html

Slaughter is right in calling for a detailed critique of how we value success and achievement. Recognition that nobody can “have it all” at any one time should be the starting point of a renegotiation of the gender and economic contract upon which contemporary socio-economic structures are based. The sharp decline in fertility rates in some parts of Europe is testament to the changes in women’s aspirations and expectations about participation in the public sphere. I have argued elsewhere that this demographic transition is the result of deeply engrained inequalities that prevent women from being able to reconcile aspirations in the public and the private sphere.

http://www.surrey.ac.uk/politics/people/roberta_guerrina/index.htm

The discourse of “reconciliation between work and family life” or “work-life balance” had come into vogue in the last decade as a way to encourage women’s labour market activation. Despite the gender neutral language of the vast array of policies that have been adopted under this particular umbrella, their main aim is to allow women (mothers) to engage in formal employment. Lip service is often paid to encouraging men to take a greater share of responsibility in caring for children (and increasingly the elderly), yet the socio-economic structures have remained largely unchanged. Ultimately the current socio-economic model is largely exploitative of both men and women.

I find myself broadly in agreement with Slaughter’s position. Managing my professional goals with increasing numbers of family activities is constant juggling act. Yet, I find this process empowering as well as both emotionally and physically tiring. However, my standpoint, much like Slaughter’s, comes from a position of privilege. Not only I work in a profession that is both interesting and intellectually stimulating, I also have the opportunity to work (fairly) flexible hours. This is not the reality for many working women/mothers. One of the most powerful myths of the turn of the century is that maternal employment is a recent development. Working-class women have always had to juggle the reality of work with mothering and caring because of economic necessity. What is different about the current situations is the rise of middle-class values and their dominance in current society. Far from spending less time with children, 21^st century working mother are devoting an increasing amount of time to child led activities. These are the kind of (normative) expectations that shape women’s experience of work and parenting. This vision of society, however, is not gender neutral. Despite recent claims about the advance of the adult worker model, the values that underpinned the male breadwinner model continue to permeate the social order.

Hegemonic gender norms tend to resurface to serve “higher” political and economic interests. We are still trying to assess the long term impact of the current crisis on women’s equality. A lot of work has gone into challenging these values, yet many women (myself included) are trapped between social expectations and personal aspirations. I have long accepted that I cannot have it all, all of the time, but neither have the majority of men and women in history. We must remember that women’s employment is not a new development, what is new are the pressures and demands placed upon men and women in post-industrial societies. Wellbeing and balance should replace “having it all” as a frame of reference as a starting point for developing a society that revolves around people rather than economic interests. 

Rethinking Olmi's 'Beside the Sea', by Gill Rye

Our featured text at our first workshop, in May 2012, was Véronique Olmi’s superb novella Beside the Sea (2010; originally published in French as Bord de mer (2001)), which is about maternal ambivalence and despair, ending with a mother’s murder of her children. My paper on the text focused on the mother’s voice and perspective in the novel, considering its various literary techniques and effects. 

http://www.sas.ac.uk/videos-and-podcasts/culture-language-literature/infanticide-ambivalence-desperation-mother-s-voice-v

As part of my argument, I stated that the narrative was relatively coherent and thus did not fall into the category of ‘trauma fiction’ (as defined by Anne Whitehead (2004)), that is, fiction that mimics traumatic narratives, and includes techniques such as repetitions, ellipses, flashbacks, blank spaces, non-chronological narratives and screen memories, to evoke the effects of trauma. However, since then, I have thought more about this point, because there are silences in the text – as indeed I mentioned in my paper – and I would now tend to argue that haunting the narrative of the events leading up to the mother’s killing of her children are traces of another narrative, suggesting a trauma behind – or at the root of – the tragic outcome. This trauma narrative is, then, not the narrative of child murder, or even of maternal ambivalence.  Rather, it is to be read in the silences and fragmented comments about the narrator’s family background and her physical and mental state (for example, asides about broken teeth and shoulder problems suggest she has been subjected to physical violence), implying that the killing may partly be the outcome of some trauma that cannot be spoken. My paper is still work in progress and I intend to explore this aspect further in due course.

Since the book, which has been translated into a number of European languages (including Italian, Dutch, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Danish, Hungarian and Polish), generated a great deal of discussion at the workshop, and there is much more to be said about it, perhaps we could kick off the virtual reading group by discussing it further now. So, I’d like to invite participants who were at the first workshop and anyone else who would like to get involved to post their thoughts about this text here. If you have not yet read it, it is available in English translation from the publisher, http://www.peirenepress.com/ and in English and other languages from various on-line booksellers.

On starting the network, by Gill Rye (Principal Investigator)

The Motherhood in post-1968 European Literature Network is something I have been thinking about for some years. As much feminist work has shown, motherhood is best treated in an interdisciplinary environment. Indeed, scholars of literature commonly draw on feminist work from sociology, psychology, psychoanalysis, politics, social policy, philosophy, and so on, to inform their readings of representations and narratives of mothering in literary texts. However, although this cross-fertilisation does sometimes happen in the reverse, it is not quite so usual. Like me though, my colleagues here at the cross-cultural Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London, believe that motherhood in literature – and in women’s writing in particular – has plenty to offer other disciplines, and so we are delighted to have received support from the Arts & Humanities Research Council to develop this Network. We are also really encouraged to have received so much positive interest already from researchers from many different disciplines. As I explained in my introduction to the first workshop in May 2012, our impetus for this work is the climate of changing family demographics in Europe – as a consequence of changing family patterns, new reproductive technologies, mass migration and globalisation, hybridisation of identities, the economic crisis, and high unemployment figures – which are creating new experiences, challenges and opportunities for women as mothers, and new issues and challenges for feminisms and feminist scholars and researchers of motherhood and the family. We think literature can contribute useful insights in such a climate.

http://www.sas.ac.uk/videos-and-podcasts/culture-language-literature/motherhood-theories-methods-and-narratives-introduct

Effective interdisciplinary work is exciting but difficult. Even with the very best of intentions and will, problems and tensions arise to do with individual disciplinary methodologies, different understandings of the nature of evidence, discipline-specific vocabulary and terminology, and this can also be the case in cross-cultural and comparative discussions. Across the Network workshops, and the conference in October 2013, we aim to make all sessions interdisciplinary, so that papers on literature come into direct dialogue with those from other disciplines, and to try to deal with any attendant problems as we go along.

We are also including featured texts, discussion of passages from literature, author readings, and I plan to start a virtual reading group on this blog.

Welcome to the blog for the Motherhood in post-1968 European Literature Network.

The Network is funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (UK) and is based at the Centre for Contemporary Women’s Writing at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London.  It was launched on 1 March 2012 and will continue until 30 November 2013.

The aim of the Network is to initiate cross-cultural, transnational, and interdisciplinary dialogue on motherhood. It is bringing together researchers from the UK and Europe studying motherhood in contemporary European literatures, with researchers and practitioners working on motherhood from philosophy, psychoanalysis, sociology, ethnography, politics and law, as well as art and film studies.

Through a series of workshops, online resources and activities, readings, and a major conference and exhibition, the Network is exploring what representations and narratives of motherhood in women-authored literatures may have to offer different disciplines engaged in the study of motherhood and mothering. Further, we are considering ways in which these discussions can feed into wider social, cultural, and political discourses, thereby contributing to the impact agenda.

This blog will serve as a forum for discussion, and for spreading information about the Network's events and publications, as well as other events or articles related to the study of motherhood and mothering.