The book Academic Mothers is about women who are middle class, who have some form of access to child care, who live in a democracy and who have legal rights and protections. More specifically it is about academics who are mothers. It is about the freedoms that we have not yet achieved.
It is about liberating thinking, about rethinking what knowledge is and how it is constructed and about breaking the boundaries of scholarship and intellectual work. I suggest that bringing the academic self and motherhood self into mutually integrative and supportive spaces, to find their inclusivity, is one way of extending the boundaries of thought.
The academic mother constitutes a unique duality. She is engaged in intellectual work that traditionally has been the domain of men. Thinking, over the centuries, has been described by Western philosophers as rational, unemotional and logical. At the same time this very woman is a mother and mothering is traditionally associated with nurturing, loving, emotion and sensitivity.
I endeavour to inquire how perceived oppositional identities, the academic and the mother, live within the same person. Academic Mothers interrogates the apparent bifurcated existences of academic mothers, the “Jekylls and Hydes” of academia. It is this bifurcation of self that I believe is destructive to women academics, particularly academic mothers. It results in potentially paralysing fragmentations of thought and being.
A dominant point in the literature on motherhood and work is that working mothers live two separate lives — their work and their home lives. A related point is the tacit assumption that the separation between work and home, between professional and private, is inevitable and that how one balances these oppositional aspects is what working mothers are concerned about. My question is, to what extent is it possible to move beyond the “struggle to balance two lives” mindset?
As a way forward I show the “balancing two lives” approach to motherhood and work is not really feasible. In the main my argument is that the notion of balance implies elements of equilibrium and harmony which the experiences of academic mothers do not attest to.
Indeed, I suggest that the idea of balance is fraudulent, a myth, and that what was really expected of the academic mother is an imbalance, one which favoured the academic and not the mother.
Secondly, I suggest that motherhood inevitably appears to imply feelings of guilt. I show that such guilt is both externally created and perpetuated as well as internally reinforced. I link the understandings of guilt and potential for liberation from guilt to my third point that mothering is what mothers often believe is solely their responsibility.
In other words, I examine the ownership of nurturing and show that what remains fixed and stubborn is the socially constructed notion that mothers are responsible for nurturing. I argue that this understanding of nurturing is oppressive and restrictive for mothers, fathers and children.
Finally I contend that motherhood is indeed a subjugated knowledge that remains on the margins of epistemology. I show that despite the academic mother’s conscious and subconscious efforts to change her intellectual stances in the main we allow motherhood to remain a subjugated knowledge. I argue that whether we like it or not, whether we seek it or not, motherhood is implicated in intellectual work.
Dr Venitha Pillay is a University of Pretoria academic who conducted a study on women academics who are also mothers and produced the book Academic Mothers. This is her response to an earlier article about the book. Email: [email protected]