Conformity and Resistance: Experiences of Domestic Work and Domestic Social Networks

Abstract

Oppression, ideology and subjectivity are understood in this thesis as based in historically specific material social relationships. Domestic work is understood as a necessary aspect of human productive activity. The nuclear family-household, based in a male-breadwinner/female home-maker gender division, is identified as the basis for the social organisation of domestic work in twentieth century New Zealand. This social organisation is identified as having oppressive effects for women. The spread of ideologies about domestic skills as a feminine personality attribute and full time domestic work as natural and appropriate for women, is considered as important in maintaining this oppression. Analysis of a series of in-depth interviews conducted with twenty one Pakeha mothers of children under the age of five, formed the empirical basis for my investigation of women's resistance to, and conformity with, the social organisation of domestic work. Support for the dominant social organisation was found to exist in varying degrees of tension with dissatisfaction and a desire for change for these mothers. Respondents actively tried to overcome some of the oppressive aspects of full time domestic work, and were critical of its social organisation at the same time as they expressed a commitment to it. The social networks of the respondents are considered as both an aspect of their domestic work, and as a mechanism through which they can resist some of the oppressive effects of its social organisation. A pattern of "domestic social networks" is identified, in which most of the respondents' ties are with other women and based in a shared engagement with domestic work. Such social networks may transmit norms and ideals of good motherhood, but also may validate dissatisfaction with the social conditions of domestic work and help to ameliorate some of the oppressive effects of these conditions. Women's subjective acceptance of, and resistance to, the social conditions of their oppression is understood through theoretical consideration of the importance of both ideology and of human agency. Feminist theory has frequently understood women's subjective experience of motherhood through psychoanalytic accounts of the development of gendered personality. More recently post-structuralist understandings of subjectivity as formed in/through discourse have been utilised by feminists to explain how female personality and desires develop in accordance with social norms. I argue against both such perspectives as deterministic. Human agency is put forward as essential to a conception of resistance. Gramsci's conception of ideology as a terrain of struggle for hegemony, and of human subjectivity as potentially contradictory, is found to be most useful in interpreting the contradictory responses of my interviewees to domestic work.