Explore to what extent the concept of motherhood is constructed - Essay Example

Those studies particularly show that the most widely accepted notions about motherhood are not innate in women and women were not actually born to fulfill those roles. To understand how the conventional views on motherhood came to be, it is important to study first what construction is. After which, the construction of motherhood will be studied. Studying motherhood construction is necessary in determining what a good and bad mother is. It is likewise important to study these notions about good and bad motherhood and to highlight that those notions are dependent on social contexts.

The conventional views on motherhood are neither innate nor universal. They were a product of different social factors. The creation of these views is called motherhood construction. Several studies have been made in the past few decades concerning the construction of motherhood—its nature, the factors involved in it, and its psychological and social effects on women. A review of literature concerning motherhood shows a consensus among studies that motherhood is socially constructed. For instance, Woodward (1997) noted that different social, cultural, ethnical, and economic factors tend to create their own models of motherhood.

This view is supported by Klee, Jackson, and Lewis (2002) who found that the definitions of good motherhood are neither constant nor universal. Since the construction of motherhood is already well-accepted, the main concern now is to determine the extent to which motherhood is constructed. This study focuses the nature of motherhood construction and the dominant views on ‘good’ and ‘bad’ motherhood. The most dominant view of a good mother is that of a woman who is at the ‘right’ age and is engaged in a stable heterosexual relationship (Unger, 2004, p.182). On the other hand, mothers who are “single, Black, young, working-class, and in lesbian