Image: Gwyneth Paltrow in Vogue.
I saw this presentation – “Marginalising mothers through maternal style” – at a conference recently and it was filled with ‘nail on the head’ moments and as far as I know the authors (Susan Goodwin and Kate Huppatz) have yet to publish their paper so I can’t point you to the full work, instead I offer you this thought-provoking taste from their synopsis.
These days a ‘good mother’ buys the right things, wears the right clothes and has the right body. The importance of maternal style can be seen to have peaked in the emergence of two new motherhood figures: the yummy mummy and the slummy mummy… a real division.. being made between mothers .. is based on mothers’ capacity to consume. In this paper we argue that what mothers consume is part of a larger process of class making. Drawing on feminist Bourdieusian theory, we suggest that the yummy/slummy dichotomy is particularly effective as a class distinction because it is an aesthetic and a moral distinction that makes reference to mothers’ bodies.
Devalued mothers are seen as slothful, lazy and lacking in taste, rather than simply poor. In turn, hypervalued mothers, like celebrity mothers, are seen as assiduous, restrained and tasteful, rather than simply rich. In this way, economic inequalities between mothers are concealed and new ways of regulating women, as mother, have emerged. We suggest that maternal style is thus best understood as a form of ‘gender capital’ that has both class and gender dimensions.
Image: fictional character, Vicky Pollard from Little Britain.
If you’re interested in more of their work a sample chapter from Huppatz and Goodwin’s book The good mother: contemporary motherhoods in Australia (2010) is available from here.
Thaqt picture is priceless. I wonder if tv from other countries is better than US tv.
“Slummy Mummy” – what an ugly term. I’ve never heard it before; it doesn’t seem to have made it’s way to the US yet. “What mothers consume is part of a larger process of class making” = spot on. Looking forward to reading Huppatz and Goodwin’s work.
Slummy mummy is definitely the British/Australian version – also called ‘chav mums’ in England and maybe ‘white trash’ in the US?
hmmmm…not exactly. Fiona Neill has a column in the The Times every Saturday here in the UK and published a book based on it called The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy. She seemed to have coined the term here and it basically means ordinary mothers who struggle to keep up their appearance, keep on top of the housework, and all the administrative tasks that schools send home with their kids. It is a tongue-in-cheek reply to the whole yummy mummy culture. The title of her book is terrible but I actually enjoyed it. For that genre it isn’t so bad. So people in the UK wouldn’t see slummy mummies and chav mums as the same thing. Chav mums are a whole different thing…
Don’t even get me started on Gwyneth Paltrow…
not being a mother or in much contact with any, I’ve only kind of noticed this peripherally… but the whole “now you don’t have to sacrifice style when pregnant” has always sounded distinctly like “we’re no longer going to give you a break from performing femininity and conspicuous consumption while pregnant”
This sounds right on for media representations, but a little flat for my actual social landscape. Yummy mummies haven’t made it here yet.
I live in a neighborhood in Southern California with houses in the $ 0.8 – 1 million range. At the neighborhood park, the other parents got me into the culture of upscale music classes and swim lessons and memberships to all the local museums. But at the same park, people recognize the clothes from the discount stores because they’re buying them for themselves and their toddlers, too. I found out yesterday that I’m not the only mom there whose only available pants options are jeans, and many of us don’t wear makeup, either.
One of the things I enjoyed when I had a baby was suddenly feeling that as long as I was with her, I could look as completely un-put together as I wanted and everyone would still treat me like a rockstar. Since my baby was actually even-tempered and I was pretty well-rested, I felt like I was dancing around in the mask of new motherhood and using it to avoid doing things I didn’t want to do anyway. It probably helped that we’re white and that the baby had red hair.
On the other hand, people also complimented me on having the most lightweight stroller base they’d ever seen and wondering where I got it. “Thanks!” I’d chirp, “We found it in our neighbor’s trash!” And I could tell from their faces that wasn’t the right answer.
Certain consumption choices are associated with good motherhood around here, too, and “part of a larger process of class-making.” But at least where I am and with the age of child I have, that process has a looser grip on my body than it did before I was a mother.
Interesting observations Christina, particularly the bit about you feeling you get a free pass from meeting female beauty standards as long as you have an infant with you, though I wonder what signals you send without even realising it – eg. hair might not be brushed but it has expensive cut/colour job, clothes might not be ironed but you’re wearing expensive shoes and have a nice handbag and you arrived in a relatively new car etc.
I suspect anyone obviously middle or upper-middle class gets a bit of leeway on some of this stuff and that the real people to feel the yummy vs slummy bite are those seen as coming from low socio-economic areas. There is a fantastic quote from Anne Enright in her book Making Babies which is about the public hostility towards mothers and the readiness to categorise and judge mothers and so isn’t exactly about this yummy/slummy thing but it makes an excellent point about inadvertent signalling -
“All women with buggies look as though they are on welfare. Pushing a buggy makes you look as though you’re on the way to the methadone clinic. You look as though you had this baby in a working-class, selfish sort of way – you had this baby even though you couldn’t afford a car. A man pushing a buggy looks as though he is someone the global economy left behind. This is why the middle classes have taken to the three-wheeler. People with three-wheelers look as though they go jogging up mountain tracks, whereas in fact, all they do is plonk their fat, post-partum arses behind the steering wheel of their cars. Because, even though it folds up, a three-wheeler is too heavy and unwieldy to get on to a bus. You can only get a three-wheeler into the back of a Volvo estate”.
I imagine you’re right about inadvertent signaling, since privilege often does work by making itself seem invisible and natural. Even if you don’t dress the part, if you’re in your 30s or 40s and you’re out during the work day with your toddler, it tends to imply that you’ve been a professional or else married to a professional.
I think it’s also possible that I’ve unconsciously stopped going to places where my appearance wouldn’t fit in. I remember thinking last year that the people downtown, where the high-end shopping is, seemed colder to me than the ones in the stores closer to home. It didn’t occur to me at the time that class-signalling might’ve been involved, but either way, I didn’t go back downtown as much.
However, a lot of consumption class pressure takes place through the people you interact with regularly, who can comment on what you’re doing, and whose opinion you’re more likely to care about. This is where I don’t feel pressure on my appearance anymore–whereas before I became a mother, I did feel it. For one thing, my mother-in-law has stopped harping about what I wear now that she can micromanage her granddaughter’s appearance at family functions. But also, some of the clothes I wear are nicer than others, and the clothing options that get reinforced at my local park aren’t the nice ones. It’s more “Hey, we match!” when we’re both wearing plain brown knit shirts, or people liking my do-rag, or talking about how we need haircuts. Bonding over your guilt about not following normative beauty standards can reaffirm them indirectly, but that’s not most of what’s going on.
One of the contributing factors to our park’s microculture may be the proportion of people there–10-15% on any given day?–who aren’t actually mothers. There are also grandparents and nannies who take care of children, but there aren’t enough of them to form their own separate social groups, so they tend to socialize with whoever else has children their age. With small scale cultural groups like this, individual personalities also make a big difference, and two of the dominant figures at the park are women in their forties who are actively inclusive and seem interested in knowing as many people as possible.
Anyway, forgive the navel gazing. This is all a long way to say that I’ll be curious to check out Goodwin and Hoopatz’ work. Because despite the yummy mummies on TV, cultural trends like waiting to have children, anti-consumption rhetoric, and so on seem to have some emancipatory potential for the bodies of professional class women. I’m not sure how much it migrates to other social locations.
[...] Blue Milk discusses class and the idea of the “good mother” in ‘Classism and mothers’. There’s a great collection of essays edited by Sue Goodwin and Kate Huppatz, called The Good [...]
And, you know, some of us with running strollers have them because WE RUN and can only afford one stroller.
Yeah, the Anne Enright quote annoyed me a bit for that reason. We live in medieval town in the UK with cobbled streets and lots of country-walkways and we have an industrial stroller because, aside from babycarriers, it is the only way to go on long walks with the child in the countryside and get over the cobblestones without losing a wheel. We don’t have a car so it we invested a lot in the sturdiest, most well-made (and thus most expensive) stroller we could find. I also use it everyday to take the child to nursery (a 2.5 mile walk) so a flimsy stroller just wasn’t practical. Ugh, how ridiculous that I am even defending my choice of stroller.
Way back when we did the same thing. I did have a cheapie stroller from B-gW and I discovered that with our daily walks on a footpath with the toddler, the plastic wheels were in danger of cracking off. So we invested in a 3 wheeler which is designed for walking and jogging. It is still going, now in semi retirement, living at the grandparents place, waiting for the next grandchild to visit the grandparents. But it has lasted well and saves my inlaws who live OS trying to lug strollers on the plane.
I am a bit confused about the terminology (buggy vs stroller etc seems to be different in New Zealand) but anyway, we got a big three-wheeler for another reason. Our one stacks two children on top of eachother. A small light one won’t do that.
I haven’t heard “slummy mummy” in NZ yet, perhaps it’s only a matter of time?
This.
Also because I live in an area where many parking lots are dirt or gravel and it’s so much easier to get around on that with a jogging type stroller than the other kind.
Then again, I’m not big on taking a stroller into stores or things like that because they are so hard to get around with, but I guess using a sling or baby carrier makes me look even more yuppie-ish.
[...] excerpt on Blue Milk is [...]
[...] blue milk writes about “Classism and mothers” and how much of the divide is made on the ability of a mother to consume. [...]
[...] thematisiert den Zusammenhang von Klassismus und Mutterschaft. Wer als ‘gute Mutter’ angesehen wird, hängt nicht nur von den ‘richtigen [...]
[...] and an abundance of criticism is unlikely to produce very confident mothers. There is a lot of discussion about the construction of motherhood at the moment, and the experience I’ve made is that the [...]