IMPROVISING IDENTITIES: CAREER REENTRY FOR NEW MOTHERS (WOMEN WORKERS).

Description

In this feminist interpretive interactionist study, multiple qualitative methods (individual interviews, focus group interviews, participant observation, and discourse analysis) were used to explore the experiences and concerns of career-committed women as they became new mothers and then reentered their careers during the first year postpartum. Seventy interviews were conducted with 35 participants during the third trimester, postpartum, and following career reentry. The participants were 71% Euro-American, 14% Asian, 9% African American, 6% Latina. Ninety-four percent were married or partnered, 6% were single; 11% self-identified as lesbians, 86% as heterosexuals. The mean age was 36 years, education was 17 years, and mean years of career involvement 9. Participants were recruited from midwife, obstetrical, and pediatric practices and clinics, childbirth education and postpartum support groups, and by snowball sampling. Results from this study indicate that becoming a first-time mother and experiencing career reentry are part of an ongoing, ever-changing process of Improvising Identities. The study participants' actions and interactions took place in a rapid time frame structured by the phases of becoming pregnant, pregnancy, the birth, a time-out, and career reentry. New facets of identities emerged following epiphanies, or turning point moments, during these phases. How identities are improvised depends on the major subprocesses of managing practicalities and negotiating relationships. Linking these subprocesses are the strategies of questioning, balancing, acquiescing, and resisting. Practicalities, such as arranging for child care and scheduling if, when, and how to return to careers were managed within a network of relationships, both specific and general, structured by conflicting, traditional discourses and unsupported by appropriate social policies and institutional structures. While individual women managed and negotiated differently, all related their dilemmas to inadequate national family policies and child care options. Some participants who examined the traditional discourses and found them lacking, discovered sites for creating new discourses and improvising innovative identities in the gaps between the conflicting discourses. To improvise innovatively it was necessary for the participants to engage in painful questioning of themselves in relationship to social ideologies and structural constraints and opportunities.

Subjects