Creating Shadow Mothers
Creating Shadow Mothers
This chapter discusses the creation of the so-called shadow mothers and describes a different kind of management strategy for nannies that involves managing both the image of the mother-nanny division of labor and what that division of labor means. Most of the mothers interviewed strongly believed in the ideal of being in mother-appropriate places at mother-appropriate times and this leads them to devise a complex supervisory subtext that delineates what aspects of childcare the nanny is to engage in and what aspects are for the mother only. This chapter describes a particular portrayal of shared mothering that mother-employers and caregivers collaborate to establish and sustain and suggests that this co-care is created within the context of a dominant cultural ideology that values only intensive mothering performed by the biological or adoptive mother, not by a hired provider.
Keywords: shadow mothers, nannies, management strategy, division of labor, childcare, shared mothering, cultural ideology
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