ABSTRACT
Neither mothers’ involvement in their children’s education nor mothering more generally are seen as worthy, substantial or theoretical topics by academics working in the mainstream. For them-mostly men-the issues are about ungendered parents (Glatter and Woods, 1993; Macbeth, 1995). Similarly, in the British schooling system, government policy emphasizes ungendered, unclassed and ‘unraced’ parents as individual consumers of their children’s education in the marketplace (David et al., 1996). Both these trends serve to disguise the contribution that mothers make to their children’s education. They are further reinforced by a tendency to view mothering as ‘caring’ both within and without feminist writing; a construction which I argue elides important differences of class and ‘race’ between women. Below I elaborate how constructions of mothering as caring have operated to deny the work women do as mothers.
