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It has become a truism in much of the contemporary Western world that women suffer from their need to both work in the paid labor force and care for children. The “time bind,” “stalled revolution,” “cultural contradictions of motherhood,” “double shift,” and “you can’t have it all!” imperative signal in different ways the problematic nature of modern motherhood. What possibly could be added to the considerable literature that already exists on this topic?
To my surprise, it turns out a lot. Petra Bueskens’ masterful new book, Modern Motherhood and Women’s Dual Identities, draws on political philosophy, history, sociology, and original, empirical research to cast a fresh eye on this ubiquitous and confounding problem. Through her multidisciplinary approach, Bueskens illuminates the core contradiction that lies at the heart of our contemporary conundrum: “modernity simultaneously frees women as individuals and constrains them as wives and mothers” (p. 86, emphasis in original). This author’s capacity to interrogate the inherent paradox of our conception of woman as autonomous individual and simultaneously self-sacrificing caregiver for others is central to Modern Motherhood. This clearly derives from the author’s familiarity with the origins of the social contract, the history of liberal thought, and particularly the work of Carole Pateman and her feminist analysis of the transition to modern individualism. But it also appears to emanate from Bueskens’ own autobiography, which she generously shares with her reader. In becoming a single mother at age twenty-one and living alone on welfare, she began her experience as “an outsider” (p. 49).
It is in part due to these life circumstances that Bueskens was forced to pursue her academic interests “around a life of care, paid work and vocational training,” and has therefore “worked alone or on the margins of academia” (pp. 51–52). It is from this vantage point on the margins that she witnessed what “phenomenal freedom” her chi