ABSTRACT

This chapter examines the ways in which contemporary cultural expectations and practises of motherhood and fatherhood fit with the logics of the marketplace. This examination is undertaken at a time when most families in the UK are also working families and as recent policy initiatives appear to signal new opportunities for combining workplace and childcare commitments. Using qualitative longitudinal data, the ways in which new mothers and fathers are culturally and morally positioned and so narrate caring and working ‘choices’ and selves is explored. The obduracy of particular gendered histories in relation to primary carer and worker identities is revealed.