Mothering the Self : Mothers, Daughters, Subjects (Transformations)

Rating:
Summary: One of the best books I have ever read on mothering
Review: Lawler's work on the mother-daughter relationship combines the highest standards of academic scholarship with a deft craft of sociology so often missing from social research. The result is a highly informed study, drawing on a wide canvas of social theory, of social relationships which we so often take for granted. Lawler achieves the sociological imperative: to detail the mundane; to problematize the ordinary. The work avoids many of the clichés that are common to an analysis of gender and social class by continually returning to the narratives provided by the group of women who remain the centre of the study (themselves both mothers and daughters). In doing this, Lawler avoids any tendency towards theorizing 'above and beyond' the women's lives. The result is a fascinating account of how the social world impacts upon, and organizes, our social relationships. I was struck by the way in which Lawler successfully criticises the prevailing view that it is our individual psychology or innate subjectivities that construct our relationships. On the contrary, she argues, it is our place within the social world which delimits and structures our ways of being. But I was also very pleased to see that Lawler had accounted for subjectivity as itself a form of agency and, therefore, not reduced individuals to 'cultural dupes'. The work is valuable because it offers us, as mothers and daughters, ways of understanding how the personal and the political (the social and the individual) structure our everyday lives. If you read this book, 'self help' manuals just won't be the same again!