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"My child has two parents": Swedish women entrepreneurs doing and undoing their motherhood
Umeå University, Faculty of Social Sciences, Umeå School of Business and Economics (USBE), Business Administration. King's Business School, King's College London, London, United Kingdom.ORCID iD: 0000-0002-6186-0659
School of Education and Communication, Jönköping University, Jönköping, Sweden.
Jönköping International Business School, Jönköping University, Jönköping, Sweden; Halmstad University, Halmstad, Sweden.
2025 (English)In: Gender, Work and Organization, ISSN 0968-6673, E-ISSN 1468-0432Article in journal (Refereed) Epub ahead of print
Abstract [en]

In this study, we explore how women who are both mothers and entrepreneurs construct their subject position as mothers in the presence of dominant discourses. Based on multiple interviews with 15 participants, our findings indicate that women engage in doing and undoing motherhood. Although undoing one's motherhood is related to negotiating one's position vis-à-vis social norms and expectations, doing motherhood is related to the construction of new discourses. We illustrate how a norm-breaking motherhood discourse emerges through processes of gender abating and coalescing. In this discourse, child-rearing is not a woman's primary responsibility but is shared between the parents, and the public and private spheres—work and family—coalesce. A good mother is constructed as an individual who can pursue her passions and realize her dreams and who focuses on her relationship with her child through her work as an entrepreneur while mastering desirable attitudes and values in life. We also find that entrepreneurship can be a vehicle for escaping normative assumptions about motherhood and crafting one's "project of the self.".

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
John Wiley & Sons, 2025.
Keywords [en]
doing motherhood, motherhood, mothers, subject position, women entrepreneurs
National Category
Gender Studies
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-238961DOI: 10.1111/gwao.13272ISI: 001484164400001Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-105004459289OAI: oai:DiVA.org:umu-238961DiVA, id: diva2:1962770
Funder
Swedish Research Council, 2015‐0167Available from: 2025-06-02 Created: 2025-06-02 Last updated: 2025-06-02

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Markowska, Magdalena

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