Episode 035: Andrea O’Reilly

Prof. Andrea O’Reilly of York University studies motherhood from a profoundly feminist perspective. Deconstructing the taken-for-granted, culturally normative image of mothers has led her to publish over 20 books on mothering. Her most recent work explores the inordinate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mothers.

Transcript

Cameron: My guest today is Professor Andrea O'Reilly of the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies at York University. Professor O'Reilly studies motherhood. She compares the lived experience of motherhood with our cultural representations of motherhood. Spoiler alert, they don't match. I hope you enjoy our conversation. Andrea, welcome to the podcast.

Andrea: Thank you for having me.

Cameron: I am astonished when I look at your CV because you have published four books in 2021 alone, let alone all the previous books that you've published. How do you do it?

Andrea: Well, certainly this year helped, the pandemic lockdown certainly helped. I was on sabbatical last year. But even outside that context, I am a very prolific scholar. That's not to brag or boast. It's largely because my work is driven, I would call, say by necessity and passion.

Cameron: Can you tell me how you go about doing your own research? What kinds of data do you gather?

Andrea: I'm interested in stories. I teach a second year course at York on motherhood. Even though it's a second year course, we take up some pretty complex theories. Sometimes I'll be lecturing and I'm going headway into theory and I'm thinking it's making complete sense, at least to me. And I see those furrowed eyebrows or those glazed eyes and I thought, nobody's getting what I'm talking about. So I stop and I tell a story from my lived experience or from popular culture or something in the news. Once I tell the story and as I'm telling it, I relate it to the theory, the students get it. So I really think as humans, we make sense of life and understand life through stories. So my work as very driven by getting the stories of mothers and their mothering by literature, by interviewing mothers, but as importantly, to get other mothers to share with me in my publications their stories. And I'm not just saying narrative, but theory is story, qualitative research is a story. To ask somebody, what's happening? What is the issue? Tell me, if you will. Right? They tell that story in many ways, depending on their discipline and their methodology, sometimes it's literary analysis, sometimes it's qualitative research. Sometimes it's autoethnography where they weave their lived experience with theory. The term we use sometimes in motherhood studies is that women wear what we call the mask of motherhood, right? We hide behind this idealized, sort of normalized performative image of what a good mother is supposed to act like, look like. So I'm really interested in unmasking motherhood. I see my work very much as kind of excavation. I'm interested in excavating what really goes on behind, as you said in your intro remarks, behind the cultural representations. But then again, relatedly how those cultural representations very much influence, usually in a very negative way a women's lived experiences because women's lived experience of mothering obviously could never live up to those cultural images that we're inundated with on social media, television and so forth.

Cameron: This notion of motherhood is something that for many people it's not even something they would consider theorizing or consider studying.

Andrea: Yes. I mean, that's where I begin. Right? My research and my teaching and yeah, initially it's very unsettling often because my students are younger, younger being in their 20s and they're not yet mothers. And they think no, it's just something you do. It's a given. It's natural. It's inevitable. It's universal. It's timeless. It has no cultural relevance. What I try to do in my writing, my research, my activism and my teaching is to begin there, to begin with the understanding that when we mother, how we mother is culturally determined and derived. I'm really interested in understanding how motherhood quite historically and quite traditionally can be very oppressive to mothers, because it demands self-sacrifice, selflessness, putting everybody before yourself, not having a life outside of motherhood, and motherhood being devalued, not respected, not supported in public policy. But the point of my research among many others is to say, that's not the way it has to be, right? We can mother well, effectively, competently and with joy and purpose and effectiveness without having to require mothers to completely give up on who they are, give up on their life. In fact, most research shows that mothers who are content with their lives have a strong sense of self, feel that their lives matter, what they do matter, who have leisure and friendship and activism and study and work in their lives actually tend to be more effective mothers and happier mothers. That challenges the norm where they say good mothers have to be selfless. In fact, I'm arguing that mothers need to be selfish in the sense that if they are content and supported in their lives and have a sense of purpose in their lives and are in good health and that our society takes care of that health of the mother, mental, psychological, physical, then they're better mothers, right? I've been doing this now three decades and it has been a very uphill battle and struggle that so often the eyebrows would raise, "What are you doing in this? Why does it matter? Who cares? It's not important." And so my passion is to accord motherhood the same seriousness, legitimacy of scholarly inquiry, as you would give any other discipline, whether it be accounting or whether it be the study of war or the study of government. That motherhood likewise is deserving of scholarly inquiry. Then secondly though, that that scholarly inquiry should bring about or hopefully lead to real social implications and change. I mean, you do it in and of itself of course. I think that good scholarship of motherhood matters, but for me it matters more if then we can use that scholarship in a way to effect societal cultural change.

Cameron: Does anybody get to experience the so-called normal version of motherhood or is it completely fake?

Andrea: Well, maybe a few, but it's so interesting when I teach my undergraduate class -- back in the day when we used to have a blackboard we'd write on -- I'd say, who's the good mother and we'd list all the traits, altruistic, all giving, kind, generous, empathetic, puts herself second, lives for her children unconditionally, never gets angry, is always composed in motherhood, never has a bad moment. And then of course, the good mother is White, middle class, able-bodied, married, in heterosexual relationship with 2.2 biological children. She's not too young. She's not too old, so on and so forth. Then I say to my students, any of you who are mothers, are you a good mother? I don't think a hand has ever been raised in two decades of teaching. Sometimes then I'll say to my students who are not yet mothers, did you have the so-called mother? Occasionally a hand would come up and then I would say, oh, your mother never got angry? Your mother never got impatient with you? She was always happy and content. Of course them hand would slowly go down. Right? So yeah, it's an image. I think we kind of intuitively know that, but it takes residence in mother's heads and society's heads. And so we judge mothers by what is in fact an impossible ideal, even if you're White, middle class, able-bodied, you still can't live up to that. Right? Because you're a human being. But because it takes up residence both in mother's heads but also in society overall, we then blame, shame, surveil mothers who don't live up to what is in fact not possible. And then mothers, because it's in their heads often feel much guilt or anxiety or stress or shame or self-blame because they don't feel they're living up to this impossible standard.

Cameron: Can you tell me about some of the people that this normative view of motherhood particularly is unfair to, people who, for reasons of intersectionality cannot participate in that normative experience?

Andrea: I would give you two examples. The first is actually my area of research and that's one of the SSHRC grants I received. I'm looking at young mothers and young mothers or anyone now sort of roughly between the ages of 14 and 24. We've extended the definition of young mothers to mid 20s, where 30 years ago I think that would've been kind of odd. And 60 years ago, you would've been an old mom at 24, right? That's my point. The meaning of good motherhood changes. If you have a baby now at 18, you're a bad mother, right? You're too young. You're not prepared. You're not ready. And young moms are just automatically assumed to be bad mothers. We don't have to think too hard to come up with all those very disparaging images, right. Babies having babies, teen moms. That evidence is one of fabrication, not of reality. Because the literature shows that young moms, if they're fully respected and supported, in fact are very competent, effective mothers. My research on young moms is really about allowing young moms to give voice to their experiences of mothering and to show how for many of them becoming a young mom was actually a transformative moment that had actually in many ways and for many reasons was the best thing that ever happened to them. In the sense that they got pregnant, they think, okay, I got to turn my life around. I got to go back to school. But likewise in racialized groups, we certainly know a legacy of genocide in Canada about Indigenous mothers, that their children were quite literally kidnapped from them and put into residential schooling. It was assumed because they were bad mothers because they were Indigenous and they were mothering in ways that the colonizer could not understand. They then just wrongly assumed that it was bad mothering, but it wasn't bad mothering. It was superb mothering, but in and of and for that indigenous culture. This isn't often academic, I say to my students, that these views of the good mother, and then relatedly the bad mother, results in pretty horrific stuff. It isn't just ideas. It resulted in thousands of children being taken from their Indigenous families. It results in some young moms losing custody of their children for nothing they did, simply because of their age. For example, in several provinces, they have something called birth alerts. If a young mom comes in pregnant and then gives birth, she's automatically flagged, not from anything she did, just her age. A birth alert to set out to social services that then she then could be investigated with scrutiny that no 35-year-old mother would ever have. So yeah, it isn't just ideas circulating out there. They have real consequences in women's lives. So that's why I'm driven to really unpackage and deconstruct normative motherhood because it causes real harm to mothers, devastating tragedies. Particularly in the incidents of Indigenous mothers and residential schooling.

Cameron: How do you go about getting women -- I shouldn't say just women: mothers! -- how do you go about getting mothers to tell their stories to you?

Andrea: Yeah, that's a good question and often a hard one because people, mothers and academics are very busy over extended people. I have a lot of ways, I suppose. Usually it's an idea, right? For the book that I published March 2021, I published with Fiona Green, a professor at University of Winnipeg, a book on Mothers, Mothering, and COVID: Dispatches from the Pandemic. It actually came out on International Women's Day, so very appropriately. It's huge. I haven't got it in front of me, but it's like 550 pages. It has I think 70 contributors, 45 chapters from 15 countries. So yeah, that was a daunting task. We wanted it out when it still had relevance in the sense that we didn't want it published two years from now looking back. We wanted it to be published in the moment so that as we're living the pandemic and then as we're hopefully moving from it and learning from it to a better normal as people are talking about, that means you put a call for papers out, but you put it out. You hope with passion and you get it in who you hope are the right people's hands. And then you hope those people spread the word far and wide. From experience, it generally works, but it has to be conveyed with your own passion and determination or the email won't be opened or won't be responded to. It's always like putting a call. I put it out in the world and I see what happens. I keep putting it out in the world if it doesn't happen. Right. I've been very fortunate. I've edited now over 20 books since my first book, I guess was 1998. Some time ago. But with every one of them, it was an idea. Usually I co-edit. I prefer co-editing because again, I think they say it takes a village to raise a child. I often say it takes a village to publish a good book. You know, one thing about feminist theory and feminist practice is a real emphasis on challenging that individual private scholar up in the attic somewhere. Right?

Cameron: The sole-authored paper.

Andrea: Yes. I mean, I'm not alone in that. I think women's studies has really been at the forefront of that commitment to creation of knowledge beyond that individual self. So not all my books are co-edited, but I generally prefer that if I have a choice. So for the COVID book, it initially was my idea. I thought, I can't do this alone. I don't want to do this alone. Again at 3:00 AM the morning, I'm thinking, who can I work with? I've known Fiona Green for two plus decades, and she's a brilliant, hard working scholar. So I sent her an email at 9:00 AM. "Fiona, do you want to do this book with me?" By 9:15 she said, "Yes, let's go." Off we went, right? For emergent scholars, people doing the PhD or new to academia, I really emphasize that as a way for joy in your research, but also for productivity. I think you get more done and do it better if there's more than one person involved in the project.

Cameron: You've got a virtual conference coming up on this topic?

Andrea: The conference is virtual, partnered with Mother Matters, they're an activist motherhood organization in Vancouver. It is a conference not just for academics, it's deliberately a conference of activists, practitioners, scholars, researchers, mothers, NGOs, policymakers to come together through a virtual platform to say, what did we learn from this? What did the pandemic show? I think we know that now. It showed really the cracks in our society. We have to take this moment and we really have to -- I'm so adamant about this -- we just cannot go back to normal and pretend this didn't happen. We have to say, what did we learn from this? For my work, it's about pre-pandemic how taken-for-granted and how invisibilized mother work was. I think during the pandemic, we couldn't turn away anymore, that every study right across the spectrum from very conservative think tanks to very progressive think tanks, they were all saying the same thing. Women have always done the bulk of domestic labour, childcare, home making, and then add in later, remote learning for children. They always have. And so I think what happened in the pandemic, that work increased because of pandemic protocols, loss of family, no after school programs, no communities, no playgrounds. What happened was we saw it almost for the first time -- and us, we've been doing this for 30 years, we're getting a bit impatient, we've been telling you this for 30 years -- that women are burnt out, exhausted, overwhelmed because of the disproportionate work they do caring for homes, raising our families. Suddenly, right-wingers are talking about it and saying, this is not sustainable. We know the pandemic was hardest on women and particular mothers. They left the workforce in droves, and not because they wanted to, because they couldn't do a full-time job in the paid labour force and then a full-time job at home with no, under the pandemic there was no societal support, no grandparents coming in, no daycares, no teachers. I really think that's what the conference is. Okay. We have all this evidence now of how unfair it is, but also how damaging it is to families, to mothers, to communities. So how can we begin the conversation about how to change that? How can we create families where there is more gender equality in the homes, that fathers step up more in heterosexual relationships? How can we create better public policy to allow mothers to more effectively manage the demands of paid labour and those labour of the home?

Cameron: So during the pandemic, when everybody's on Zoom right from their homes, you get this incredible exacerbation of these gender differences in work and family. Does this mean that when the pandemic someday ends and things return to "normal" that mothers are going to heave this great sigh of relief and be the biggest beneficiaries of that?

Andrea: I don't know. I mean, because we're still in it, I'm not sure. In some cases, the cracks have led to change. I interviewed mothers, I published an article. Gosh, it was very early in the pandemic. It came in I believe July 2020 so it was really raw research. I was just so frustrated with how the issue of mothering was so ignored and so dismissed in those early months of the pandemic, early weeks. I saw ad after ad thanking first responders, truck drivers, doctors, pharmacists, retail workers, good. They needed to be thanked, of course, they did, they were keeping us fed. They were keeping us safe. But not one meme, and I did a massive search, not one meme thank mothers. I saw dozens, maybe more. I was just so frustrated. I said, how come no one is thanking mothers? They're a frontline worker here. They're keeping our families going, right. They're doing the impossible. Many of them were still in paid work so they're doing paid work with children under foot. They're sanitizing every vegetable that came in. They're trying to entertain children and educate children now that the children's school is gone. Friends are gone, play groups are gone. Doing anything under pandemic protocols was much harder. From lining up in grocery stores, waiting to get in, to only being able to go in by yourself. For never having a moment away from your children. They couldn't, as I said, go visit a friend. They couldn't have a friend in. Nobody was talking about this. I kept thinking, what's going on here? Because I have many mother friends and colleagues and they were telling another story about how overwhelmed they were, how exhausted they were, how frustrated they were. They didn't think they could cope anymore. That they had to leave their job, that their marriages were crumbling, their children were acting out. So it was out of this frustration of this disconnect between what was going on in the mainstream media and what was going on in our kitchens and our living rooms. The interviews I did in June -- well, I didn’t interview, I just said in an email, what's going on in your life? About 25 women responded. It was really alarming and depressing. They were hanging on by a thread and they were only making it work by such creative, innovative, resilient strategies. They'd set their alarm at three o'clock in the morning to get their work done so they wouldn't get fired or they were doing very innovative, clever, juggling with their partner. But time and time again, the mother said, you know, when the kid acts up or there's trouble with their homework or whatever, the father could literally be sitting beside that child and they'd walk right across the house and say, "Mom, I need you." The moms were so frustrated, like ,"We're both working with mom here, how come you keep coming to me?" I was just daunted and overwhelmed by how bad it was, but how their resiliency was. But that was about three months in. And all the women said, I can't do this much longer. So I haven't returned to those women, but that was 14 months, 15 months ago. I think there's been, well, we know that mother PhD students for example, left the programs. We know that they took a leave of absence. We know many women took leave of absence from work, or they dropped down to three work days if their boss allowed it. Or they did all kinds of things to somehow manage the unmanageable. But they were making those sacrifices at expense of their career, their workplace, their health, their leisure, and their very mental wellbeing. In fact, a lot of literature said there's another pandemic, mental health, yes, but largely mental health of primary caregivers which are overwhelming mothers, but not exclusively. There's a bunch of pandemics happening now that I don't think we're addressing. The mental health of mothers I think is a really glaring one. We are seeing more coverage in mainstream media now. You turn on your TV at six o'clock or go to a newspaper link, it is being taken up now because of concern. They need these women back in the workforce for the recovery, but can they go back? Do they have childcare? Are they able to physically, psychologically and so forth? I'm not sure if I answered the question, but yeah, I think we saw things that we couldn't turn away from. And quite literally, because people were in our homes, right. They were literally in our homes. I heard from so many mothers, they were in a Zoom meeting. We saw funny examples of that on TV, but some that weren't so funny. The mother is trying to have a meeting and the kid is screaming or throwing something or acting out or fighting with her sister. The mother is trying to keep her composure. Her boss or her colleagues are getting increasingly frustrated with her, but they weren't accommodated. One woman said, she just asked if the meeting could be between 1:00 and 3:00, because that's when her child napped and they refused. They said, no, you figure it out. So she said, a meeting would start at three. My kid would get up cranky from a nap and I couldn't tend to him. I couldn't give him his juice or change his nappy because I had to be in a meeting even though she requested some accommodation. They were in our homes and I think we saw this in a way that we never saw before. The one that always stays with me, I have a colleague who is a professor at a university in the United States. She was in a meeting with her dean. She's a single mother of teenager and about a 10 year old. She wrote this beautiful piece and she just said, "I want the dean out of my kitchen." Like she's trying to have a meeting with the dean. And he demanded the video to be on and simultaneously she's trying to make supper and she's trying to soothe a cranky eight year old and a teenager who can't do his math homework and it's chaos. The dean saying, "Get it together." She says, "I can't get it together. I've got to make supper. His homework needs to be done." I think the pandemic, we went into people's homes for the first time in a way that we never would have been allowed or even could have imagined. I think we need to learn from that, not to be voyeuristic, but to think, my gosh, we see the unbearable load that mothers have always carried, but even more so during the pandemic.

Cameron: The goal then is not simply to document the experiences of motherhood but to change them.

Andrea: Yes.

Cameron: What happens after your research is done collecting those stories? What's your theory of change?

Andrea: Yeah, that's a hard one. Very hard one. I mean, I think there's several layers of change. I mean, the most immediate is to validate mother's experience. I created a mothers and COVID-19 Facebook page very early on in the pandemic. It was May 1st, I think, 2020. I just wanted a safe space where mothers could support each other where they could vent, where they could perhaps share resources. And maybe not! Just say, "I can't, I'm not doing okay today." A mother says, "Yeah, I know. I've been there." To validate and really recognize what mothers are going through. I think that's hugely validating for mothers and for their mental health. So that at the first level is to recognize what's going on and validate mothers. Mothers are saying, "If you get up in the morning, get your kid fed and dressed and get some homework done, you've had an exceptional, amazing day. Congratulations to you!" That is the first level. You can never underestimate that level. It might not bring about social change, but it's bringing it about for those individual mothers so that they understand that the personal is political. It's not about their failings. It's about a system that has literally fallen apart as a result of the pandemic. But in terms of social change, yes. I think the more evidence that's out there in terms of the unequal distribution of labour in the homes, I think more and more workplaces are going to have to recognize that and be accommodating. For example, if somebody asked for meeting not be at 1:00 and 3:00, can you maybe accommodate that person? Provide job flexibility, job sharing, working from home, irregular hours. During the pandemic, I heard from a lot of mothers that they still had to log on between nine and five and that was very frustrating for them because their kids were at home and they were trying to oversee homeschooling and run a household. And yes, for meetings you'd have to be there. But they said, "Why couldn't I work between 6:00 or 7:00 and 10:00 when my partner is home or the kids are watching a TV show and I had some free time?" Workplaces weren't allowing that. Good workplaces were saying whenever you need to do the work, do it, but this is what you need to do for this week and just get it done. Three times you have to be at certain time. All that stuff, I think may be better workplace practices. And then in terms of public policy, yeah. During the pandemic, we had no policy for unpaid labour. We had CERB and we had the Wage Subsidy Program. It was very innovative and very important and very necessary public policy in terms of public support. There was not one policy related to caregiving, right. And there could have been, they could have said, demand workplaces to give employees two weeks off perhaps or share, you know, all kinds of creative stuff could have been implemented in terms of policy related to caregiving. There wasn't one throughout the entire pandemic, which is shocking, right? We couldn't even get the paid sick days. Right? I'm hoping that what we've seen during the pandemic will change workplace policies and practices and perhaps public policy.

Cameron: These public policies don't change by themselves. What's the link between being an academic and engaging in activism?

Andrea: Mothers have been doing activism to improve the lives of their families and their children since forever. I mean, you think about gun violence and gun control. Dozens of those organizations are run by mothers. You think of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. You think about many, many mother organizations that protest militarism and war, or even small scale mother activisms to clean up neighborhoods from gun violence, drug activity, gang violence, mother activism just to get a stop sign put in. The mothers have always been engaged in activism to change law and policy, right? That's one way it's done. And it's Black Lives Matter is a parallel movement, but a lot of people don't know this, or it's not played on the media: huge numbers of women in the Black Lives Matter movement are mothers, right? They're Black mothers who are in this movement because of the maiming and murder of their children by police, that has brought about, of course, huge social change and change in law and policy. That's kind of the activism that we hope can lead to change in law and policy. But that activism then is also informed by research, right? Activists read our research and us researchers better know and participate in the activism to make it a much stronger movement. Right. I mean, you can't do activism without theory and you can't do theory without activism, I don't think, if you want it to be good theory and strong activism.

Cameron: Your research sounds like it's getting more and more important as the pandemic progresses. I trust that you'll be fully engaged in it once the pandemic is over.

Andrea: Yes!

Cameron: Andrea, thank you so much for sharing your story.

Andrea: Well, and thank you for having me. It's been an honour and a delight.

Links

Andrea O’Reilly’s Wikipedia page

Andrea’s book, Mothers, Mothering and COVID-19: Dispatches from the Pandemic, published by Demeter Press

Credits

Host and producer: Cameron Graham
Production assistant: Andrew Castillo
Photos: York University
Music: Musicbed
Tools: Squadcast, Audacity
Recorded: November 3, 2021
Location: Toronto