No description available.

No description available.

This ethnographic study explores the experiences of seventeen young women, their significant others, and midwives, from pregnancy realisation through the early years of motherhood. It examines changes to significant relationships (as defined by the young women) over this period. Through an initial examination of the history of illegitimacy and the theme of 'unwanted ness' , I map changing attitudes to young women's reproductive activities and discuss moral discourses on adolescent subjectivity, especially as it pertains to adolescent motherhood. This thesis contributes to empirical research on the sociology of the adolescent female body at the convergence of two major life cycle transitions: adolescence and motherhood. Through an empirical analysis of embodiment and social construction, the diverse ways in which a selected sample of young women 'do' maternity are explored. The transmission of childbearing and rearing knowledges and practices, as passed from mothers to daughters, is also of central importance to this thesis. 2 Medical discourses play a significant role in policing and regulating women's bodies, in defining appropriate female behaviours, and in authorising socio-cultural constructions of femininity. Pregnancy and childbirth signalled the beginning of a different relationship between young women and their bodies as most had previously experienced little contact with medical services. Becoming a mother heralded an unaccustomed emphasis on the body and an expectation that young women would submit themselves, and their children, for regular monitoring and assessment. This thesis provides another set of lenses through which to examine the interplay of power and personal agency in the lives of young mothers, and to examine the relationship between the body and self-identity. Finally, the roles played by midwives and other health and related professionals, and the 'workings' of hierarchically organised institutions, are examined through respondents' narratives and set alongside discourses of choice and control in the contested arenas of female reproduction.

The rapid increase in the rate of female participation in the labour market in the post-war period is a well-documented trend. However, the experiences of mothers balancing paid work and childcare responsibilities have received academic attention only in recent decades. Working class mothers, who have a long history of combining paid work and domestic responsibilities, have been neglected in the literature. There has also been a lack of research examining the impact of intergenerational transmission on the values and practices of mothers within families. This thesis addresses this gap by examining the childcare strategies of two cohorts of working women: grandmothers and mothers. Grandmothers and mothers in fourteen family chains were interviewed and their strategies for combining paid work and domestic responsibilities were examined. It is argued that these strategies have changed across time and the complexity of childcare strategies has declined reflecting changes in government policy. The younger generation have benefited from policy changes aimed at encouraging mothers to return to the labour market. It is also argued that the role of intergenerational transmission is of key importance in understanding mothers' decisions about combining work and childcare responsibilities. Indeed, the behaviour of mothers was influenced by their own mothers' actions, either positively, by 'mimicking' their role or negatively, by avoiding the reproduction of their mothers' behaviour. Whilst intergenerational ties were found to be important, the role of grandmothers as providers of childcare was not as important as argued elsewhere. An important finding of the thesis is that very few grandmothers provided childcare because most continued to be economically active. It is concluded that the changes to policy stemming from the Labour government's National Childcare Strategy have had a positive impact on working mothers' lives but further changes are still necessary to address the childcare needs of all families.

No description available.

This thesis explores the consumer practices of a group of young mothers in the city of Bristol. A staged and incremental research design was followed, which incorporated aspects of participant observation, activity based focus groups and a photo elicitation exercise. The study focuses on how a group of young mothers managing on limited incomes engaged with expansive markets for maternity and the new baby, and the meaning and emotion they attached to "baby stuff". The research describes how for the young women in this study buying for babies was a priority and part of their everyday caring work, involving the careful management of budgets and the skilful negotiation of consumer markets as well as the negation of mothers' own consumer projects and youth identities. While perhaps a financial necessity, it is suggested that the focus on meeting the 'needs' of babies over those of mothers enables these young women to locate themselves as 'good mothers', who put their children first. The thesis also explores how for the participants in the research material goods, and in particular the adornment and presentation of infants, played a crucial role in displaying maternal competence in the face of a sense of public visibility and condemnation. Appearance was everything and commodities provided protection for both mothers and children from the negative associations of poverty and an inability to consume. Further to this, the research examines the practices of giving gifts to babies and the making of maternal memory as significant aspects of the materiality of maternity for these young women. It is suggested that giving gifts to babies represents an important form of contemporary gift giving, which enables the expression and constitution of relationships between babies and their social networks. The collection and collation of "baby stuff" provides a means of creating childhood memories and histories which can be recalled through these objects. In this part of the investigation the practice of giving "mum" jewellery and getting the names of babies tattooed on mothers' bodies emerge as two furthers sites where these young women make the maternal visible. The study highlights the significance and myriad roles that consumer culture plays in the lives of young mothers, providing a rich account of the experiences and struggles of young mothers through an original lens. This work fills a gap in the literature on motherhood and consumption and makes a relevant contribution to a number of additional areas of scholarship including youth and consumption; low-income consumption; and indeed young motherhood, engaging also with contemporary debates over commercialisation and commodity consumption in late modernity and discourses about 'disordered' working class consumer practice.

No description available.

No description available.

The British government established the Teenage Pregnancy Unit in 1999 to reduce early pregnancy. Current policy initiatives have a significant geographic dimension: specific English neighbourhoods have been identified as the sites where most early pregnancy occurs and have been targeted for intervention. The aim of this thesis is to explore the factors that influence teenage sexual and reproductive behaviour by drawing on the neighbourhoods effects literature. Within this body of research, teenage reproduction is believed to be affected by a multiplicity of factors operating within different domains. The analysis (of survey data and qualitative material collected in three locations) was guided by two research questions: which factors within neighbourhoods, family and peer contexts are the most important in elucidating the causal pathways to teenage sex, pregnancy and fertility; and do the importance of these factors vary between neighbourhoods? Overall, factors within neighbourhood and peer contexts were found to be less significant than family and individual-level factors. The analysis of British Cohort Study data showed that, for example, women who experience teenage pregnancy or birth lived in deprived areas at age 16, but other neighbourhood variables were not significant in multivariate analysis. There were some differences between neighbourhoods, but the cohort member's attitude to school was, generally, the most important factor associated with teenage sexual and reproductive behaviour. The qualitative data supported these statistical results. There was little evidence that women had been influenced by either their friends or others within their neighbourhoods (though some women reported knowing high numbers of teenage mothers), and nearly all the young mothers had low educational attainment. In conclusion, individual and family-level influences on sexual and reproductive outcomes are paramount, but behaviour is also subtly informed by wider social factors.

This thesis is about women's experiences of their adult children's home-leaving. It argues that the privileging of the child's shift to adulthood that occurs through their home-leaving occludes the mother's parallel but different transition; her experiences of this time are generally silenced. In consequence, our knowledge regarding the later phase of a mother's life course is extremely limited so that, to date, there remains very little acknowledgement of what mothering means to women once their children achieve the sociocultural status of 'adult' and leave home. The thesis provides an exploration of mothers' experiences of this phase of the life course and as such aims to redress this imbalance. The research undertaken for the thesis takes the young person's movement out of the family home as the catalyst of change for the mother. The focus of its enquiry thus falls on mothers' understandings and experiences of this time and forefronts not only the changes but also the continuities in mothers' relationships with their adult daughters and sons. Drawing on data from interviews with twenty-five women, the thesis explores how the research participants attempted to reconcile the two opposing phenomena of rupture and continuity experienced post separation from their adult children. It argues that the goals of successful motherhood within a western context remain focused upon the adult child's achievement of an independent and autonomous lifestyle. As such, a mobile and flexible adult citizen clearly emerges as the desired outcome for research participants' children. The thesis proposes that this signals a shift in the performance of mothering when discussed in the context of late modernity. In opposition to sociocultural representations of women's lives during this phase of the life course, the thesis also argues that mothers' lives do not remain static once their children leave home. Rather, each research participant was intent on pursuing goals and desires of her own, whilst simultaneously sustaining a sense of self as mother under changed conditions of interaction with the adult child. In and of itself, this engendered a reconfiguration of the mother/adult child relationship.