This study began on a sunny summer day over coffee and conversation between two anthropologistsâDeborah
and Lauren
âa conversation that turned into the first of many, and was subsequently joined by a third anthropologist, Sveta
. At the time of that first conversation, Lauren had moved to the town in Israel where Deborah was living with her son, then 13Â years old. As Laurenâs daughter toddled around the table, we discussed our past work and interests. Sometime later, Deborah called Lauren with an idea. When we met this time, Deborah brought with her a stack of fliers that had been shoved into her postboxâadvertisements for after-school activities, private tutoring, and leisure activities for mothers and children. âLetâs do something about thisâabout how mums are inundated with educational goods and services that tell them how they should be taking care
of their kids,â she suggested. This hit home with Lauren
, who had just given birth to her second daughter and had spent a lot of time checking out possibilities for child care for both daughters. The town in which we lived offered many optionsâfor a price. We noticed almost immediately how our particular locale shaped our experience as mothersâthe abundance of educational goods and services required that we make choices among them, choices that were decisions about what sort of mothers we are or would like to be.
From the perspective of this study, mothering
must be understood in relation to perceptions and practices of what constitutes a proper education
for childrenâsince the two are inextricably interwoven. In todayâs world, education plays an increasingly important role in equipping children with knowledge
and practical and social skills
, as well as defining social location and potential social mobility
. With the onset of industrial society and the burgeoning of nation-states, education of children was removed from the home and replaced by a formal system of compulsory schooling
. Schooling was deemed necessary to adequately prepare children with basic skills, knowledge
, values and sentiments requisite for a future citizen
in the modern nation-state (Gellner 1983) and was put in the hands of professional educators. In this form of social organization, the family fulfilled a supporting role; in this supporting role women were viewed as the most appropriate caretakers of home and as primarily responsible for the childrenâs upbringing and education.
Educationâwithin school and withoutâis a major arena in which parentsâprimarily through the gendered work of mothers
âreproduce their own class and cultural sensibilities. Although family life has undergone changes, and men
are increasingly involved in the upbringing of their children, recent decades have seen the âtransformation of womenâs domestic labour to include extensive educational work in the homeâ (Reay 2005a, 113); mothers take prime responsibility for the âcomplementary education workâ
around schooling (Griffith and Smith 2005) and for decision-making relating to educational matters (Ball 2003). Perceptions and practices of mothering
are culturally embedded and produced in response to changing requirements and expectations of what mothers can and should be doing in relation to their childrenâs education and the demands produced by educational institutions. In seeking to ensure a proper education for their children, mothers are obliged not only to make decisions regarding their childrenâs schooling but also to negotiate a market of âextra-curricularâ ideas, goods and services, all of which hold out the promise of ensuring a proper education for the children. This negotiation requires knowledge, financial resources and timeâputting the middle class at a distinct advantage and, in turn, positing middle-class mothering
as something to be emulated and as a widely disseminated cultural model
of what is considered to be proper mothering
.
In a landmark study entitled The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood, published in 1996, Sharon Hays
coined the term âintensive motheringâ
to describe middle-class motherhoodâa âgendered model
that advises mothers to expend a tremendous amount of time, energy, and money in raising their childrenâ (Hays 1996, x). With its roots in western middle-class sensibilities and values, this model has evolved into a dominant cultural model
and benchmark for proper mothering
among other mothers elsewhere (Arendell 2000; Ennis 2014; Faircloth et al. 2013; Lee et al. 2014; OâReilly 2014). But how far could this construct take us in understanding diverse social realities? We wondered how middle-class mothers
, far removed from the context of the American mothers who formed the basis of Haysâ study, interpret and implement âintensive motheringâ? How are these perceptions and practices elaborated in ways of educating their children?
This study looks at how women reflect upon and make sense of this task. Grounded in an approach that brings together ideas of class
, culture and social positioning
, our study is a comparative, ethnographically
informed interview study of Israeli middle-class mothersâ understandings and modes of engagement in their childrenâs education. Focusing on middle-class mothers from three Israeli social-cultural groups
âRussian immigrants from the former Soviet Union, Palestinian Israelis and Jewish native-born
Israelis1âthe book examines the ways in which these mothers
both share and differ in their understandings of a proper education for their children and of their task as mothers in ensuring this. Propelled throughout by a comparative thrust, our study is guided by four main questions:
- What are mothersâ understandings of a proper education for their children and of their role in ensuring this?
- What perceptions and practices of mothering and education do women share and in what ways do they differ?
- How do class, culture and social positioning conjoin in shaping perceptions and practices of educating children and of what it means to be a mother?
- How do global discourses about proper education and competent mothering interweave with local concerns and possibilities?