Transformative Topics May 2025

Mothers are celebrated in many countries on Mother's Day in May. This month we feature the work on Motherhood that has been a central focus of Liz Parsons (University of Liverpool Management School, UK). In the spirit of the Transformative Topics newsletter, Liz reflects on the importance of motherhood and some of her articles in this space. Have a read. We hope that her insights spark resonance with and appreciation for mothers:

"I stayed at my parents’ house this week because Dad is in hospital, he's had neurosurgery and is still very confused after the operation. Mum has visited Dad every day for the last month, so yesterday I went to the hospital on my own to give her a break. I was just leaving the house when Mum said ‘have you got Dad’s snacks?’ Every day Mum has packed an insulated sandwich bag with things that would be good for Dad to eat and that might tempt him, yoghurts, protein drinks, bananas, fish sticks along with a cool block kept in the freezer overnight to keep them cool until he eats them, although often he doesn't eat them. This story is not unusual it's just one example of the everyday ceaseless, detailed thoughtful planning and care that Mothers (and parents) put into feeding their families. But it’s also a story of hope and optimism, Dad may not eat the snacks that Mum brings, but she brings them anyway in the hope that one day soon he will.

I have shared this story because my mother’s labour no doubt provides the inspiration for my scholarly work in the field of mothering, but also because this ‘work of mothering’ has created the financial and emotional resources for me to pursue my career trajectory in the first place. In this brief essay I want to reflect on three specific papers that I have written with colleagues over the years about the work of mothering, specifically the foodwork of mothering. While this is intertwined with a feminist political project of re-valuing domestic work, (and in most countries across the globe women still take on the larger share of this work), I should also add that in my current household, it is my husband’s foodwork that gives me more space to research and write about the work of mothering (and parenting). The three papers I discuss below are a collaborative project, unfolding over a period of ten years, with Benedetta Cappellini, Alessandra Marilli and Vicki Harman, and no doubt they contain echoes of their own experiences of mothering.

The first paper ‘The Hidden Work of Coping: Gender and the micro-politics of consumption in times of austerity’ was published in 2014. Alessandra and Benedetta interviewed Italian mothers who had experienced a significant drop in their household income about their coping strategies. In the paper we unpack and detail the hidden work of ‘keeping things going’ in hard times, both materially and emotionally. The mothers we spoke to tended to double down on the work of producing meals in attempts to maintain their prior standard of living, for example visiting a range of supermarkets to get the best deals, pickling and preserving food for future use and cooking from scratch more often. To better understand this, we leveraged the anthropological concepts of ‘thrift’ and ‘sacrifice’ (Miller, 1998). We argued that thrift was about doing more with less but that it was also intimately related to control of the flow of resources in the household. We found that this flow and allocation of resources was primarily oriented towards the ‘doing of family’ (de Vault, 1991). While we did find pride in this work, it also necessitated a significant amount of self-sacrifice, and therefore served to perpetuate gendered inequality in the organisation of caring work in the household.

The second paper we published in 2019 ‘Intensive mothering in hard times: Foucauldian ethical self-formation and cruel optimism’. Vicki Harman joined me, Benedetta and Alessandra on the project. This paper builds on the earlier interviews with Italian mothers bringing them together with additional interviews with British mothers on low or reduced incomes.. We explored in more depth how the ‘hidden work of coping’ intersects with mothering subjectivities and impacts on mothers emotionally. There is a significant mismatch between the practical realities of the lives of mothers (particularly those on low incomes) and the ideals and discourses of motherhood that commonly circulate, and which are held as a proxy for ‘good mothering’. The discourse of ‘intensive mothering’ (Hays, 1996) is a particular case in point and is potent in American and European parenting cultures. This mode of mothering involves significant expenditure of focus, time and money on the child. We observed the ways in which mothers internalize intensive mothering discourses through a process of ethical self-formation (Foucault, 1985) which involves detailed self-surveillance and self-discipline and abnegation of their own needs in place of other family members. We found a series of contradictory emotional effects which generate both pride and self-worth but also stress and anxiety. We also observed the presence of an optimistic affective regime within which mothers made sense of these contradictory effects and retained a sense of agency and control over their lives. However, drawing on Berlant’s (2011) concept of cruel optimism, we argue that such affective regimes may be very pernicious in their effects, only serving to hold mothers in a relation that is ultimately impassable and often unfulfilling.

The most recent paper, ‘Foodwork and foodcare in hard times: Mothering, value, and values’ was published in 2024 with Vicki and Benedetta. This paper again focuses on capturing and revaluing domestic work. Drawing from the fieldwork with British mothers we teased out the complexities of foodwork. Mothers on restricted budgets bring significant skill and resourcefulness to their foodwork, stretching out food across contexts and relations in order to realize economic value (save money). However, we also identified a significant classed dimension to foodwork, finding that mothers used it to gain access to structures of value (Skeggs, 2004) in securing culturally valued positions for themselves and their families. We also developed the concept of foodcare in this paper to capture the relational, reciprocal and nurturing elements of foodwork. We used Tronto’s (1993) ethics of care for inspiration focusing on how foodcare involves an intimate knowledge of the needs of family and how best to meet these needs (DeVault, 1991; Miller, 1998). In closing we argue that foodcare as a concept holds promise in recognising hitherto hidden elements of a diverse economy but that much more work is needed to capture the ways in which race, religion, sexuality and other areas of social identity and social divisions shape its valorisation.

Cappellini, B., Marilli, A., & Parsons, E. (2014). The hidden work of coping: Gender and the micro-politics of household consumption in times of austerity. Journal of Marketing Management, 30(15-16), 1597-1624.

This article explores the coping strategies of women in 10 middle-class Italian families facing economic crisis. We investigate food provision revealing the ceaseless extra work that goes into meal preparation. Adopting anthropological theories of thrift and sacrifice, we unpack participants’ micro-coping strategies, observing their tendency to redirect resources towards their loved ones and abnegating their own needs for the greater good of the family. This sacrifice is done out of necessity, reinforcing traditional gender inequalities in the home. However, there is also evidence that women take pride in their coping, developing new competencies and maintaining control over meal provision and thus the wider patterning of family life. We explore the significance of recessionary times for the constitution of female subjectivities at home.

Cappellini, B., Harman, V., Marilli, A., & Parsons, E. (2019). Intensive mothering in hard times: Foucauldian ethical self-formation and cruel optimism. Journal of Consumer Culture, 19(4), 469-492.

Discourses of intensive mothering now seem to dominate European and American parenting cultures. This is a problem for those mothers who do not currently possess the resources to match up. In a study of Italian and British mothers who are experiencing low or reduced incomes, we observe the ways in which they internalize intensive mothering discourses through a process of ethical self-formation. This mode of self-formation involves detailed self-surveillance and self-discipline and abnegation of their own needs in place of other individual family members, and the family as a whole. We find a series of contradictory emotional effects which generate both pride and self-worth but also stress and anxiety. We advance the theory that mothers operate within an optimistic affective regime to make sense of these contradictory effects and retain a sense of agency and control over their lives and those of their families. However, drawing on Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism, we argue that such affective regimes may be very pernicious in their effects, only serving to hold mothers in a relation that is ultimately impassable and often unfulfilling.

Parsons, E., Harman, V., & Cappellini, B. (2024). Foodwork and foodcare in hard times: Mothering, value, and values. Gender, Work & Organization, 31(3), 937-953.

In this article, we analyze the foodwork of mothers when feeding their families on low and reduced incomes. By exploring their accounts of food shopping and household budgeting, we argue that foodwork is intrinsically linked to other areas of social life and dominant values associated with “good mothering.” Through a careful consideration of the contexts and relations in which foodwork is valued, embedded, and made meaningful, we draw two key conclusions. First, we find that mothers' foodwork is oriented towards avoiding devaluation and maintaining a level of respectability as opposed to accumulating cultural capital. Second, we introduce the concept of foodcare arguing that it potentially offers low income mothers an alternative to the logic of capital for their demonstration of self-worth.

Other Key Readings

Berlant L (2011) Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University.

De Vault, M. L. (1991). Feeding the family: The social organisation of caring as gendered work. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Foucault M (1985) The use of pleasure. New York: Pantheon.

Hays S. (1996) The cultural contradictions of motherhood. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Miller D (1998) A theory of shopping. Cambridge: Polity Press

Skeggs, B., (2004), Class, Self, Culture. London: Routledge.

Tronto, J. (1993). Moral boundaries: A political argument for an ethic of care. Routledge