Mothers who participate in the formal workplace confront the ongoing difficulty of mediating the relationship between home and work (O’Brien and Liddy, 2020; Crowley-Henry and Weir 2007; Gregory and Milner 2009). This negotiation is often seen to compromise their status, engagement, and well-being in both spheres, with implications for mothers’ work and their everyday lives (Gatrell 2007; Gatrell et al. 2017). The neo-liberal individualization and self-responsibilization (Gill 2002, 2007, 2011) of care further serves to obscure the gendered sociocultural and power dynamics that profoundly disadvantage mothers. Worker-mothers are frequently both pushed and pulled out of the workforce because of sociocultural assumptions denying them equitable career advancement opportunities (Gatrell et al. 2017) and because of the impossible task of finding the “balance” between care and work (Stone 2008). The insidious argument that mothers agentially “choose” to leave work or that they are “opting out” (Belkin 2003) presents mothers as uncommitted to their work, while simultaneously belying the irony that work is structurally biased against sustainable careers for mothers. Cultural narratives often perpetuate the image of idealized working and caring motherhood and fail to acknowledge the actual experiential realities of mothers as they work and care (Hochschild and Machung 1989; Apple 2006; Dean et al. 2021).
