‘Of course they can,” says Dr Venitha Pillay, feminist author and University of Pretoria academic whose single-motherhood status inspired her to undertake a study on women academics who are also mothers.
Prior to conducting research for her book, Academic Mothers, Pillay found that most literature on women and work tends to be cluttered with arguments around balancing the two lives — motherhood and work — without really explicating the notion.
‘When I started writing the book I said [to myself] we have to strike a balance between motherhood and work for them to find a common place.”
When Pillay finished her PhD in education, many people asked her how she managed being an academic and a single mother of two. ‘For me, I could do a PhD because I was a mother. And I found the question strange. Doing the PhD was a fulfilment and … I wanted to talk to adults for a change.”
Her research delves into the lives of three white academic mothers, Sally, Ann and Sue (all fictional names). The three academics have recently become mothers and are finding it difficult to deal with being both mothers and academic high flyers.
All three hold senior academic positions at top universities and are attempting to balance work and family.
Sally is forced to choose: she has to prioritise between her child and work. Inevitably she chooses her child, but still cannot reach the said balance between work and home. All her attempts are equal to an imbalance because, no matter how hard she tries, she still cannot devote enough time to her child.
Sue seeks to separate work and home. Her attempt does not succeed because when she is at work, she feels guilty about not being at home with her child.
As for Ann, taking her children to work seems a workable approach to strike a balance. Eventually this approach does not work because traditionally, institutions of higher learning are not designed to facilitate childcare.
What Pillay is getting at is that the balancing-two-lives approach to motherhood and work is not feasible. She says motherhood inevitably appears to imply feelings of guilt, which are externally created and perpetuated as well as internally reinforced.
She says mothering is what mothers have been socialised to believe as being their sole responsibility, and that they are the only people capable of nurturing.
Pillay also points out that, despite the academic mothers’ conscious and subconscious efforts to change their intellectual stances, motherhood remains a subjugated knowledge.
In the end she suggests that motherhood is almost impossible to do alone. She stresses that had her subjects been without helpers or husbands who occasionally attended to the children, they could not have achieved what they have achieved. She concludes that mothering should be the married couple’s responsibility, not the mothers’ only.
Academic Mothers aims to make women not feel guilty about leaving children at home when they go to work. She says women need to give up the guilt, which is perpetuated by ‘mysterious” suggestions that they need to strike a balance between work and motherhood.
Apart from looking at how Sally, Ann and Sue deal with motherhood and work, the study seeks to redefine intellectual labour. Traditionally, she says, men have defined intellectual labour in male terms, excluding the role of women.
The author also brings her political activist past into the frame to justify her decision to research white subjects as opposed to black.
Pillay says researching white female academics was shaped by years of reading research material about Africans. After attending a research conference at Stanford University where researchers from the First World presented papers on blacks and the Middle East, she vowed to bring about change. ‘I took the decision to research white people from the onset. I wanted to remove the blackness in everything that we do.”
Academic Mothers also touches on how the author coped with her PhD thesis while caring for her two daughters, one of whom suffers from hydrocephalus (an abnormal accummulation of cerebral spinal fluid on the brain), and managed to run the household after her divorce.
Venitha Pillay is currently working on Politics of Race and Methodology, which looks deeper into the issues dealth with in Academic Mothers