Media Work, Mothers and Motherhood: Negotiating the International Audiovisual Industry 9780367536008, 9780367536015, 9781003082552

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Media Work, Mothers and Motherhood

This interdisciplinary and international volume offers an innovative and critical exploration of the impact of motherhood on the engagement of women in media and creative industries across the globe. Diverse contributions critically engage with the intersections and overlap between the social categories of worker and mother, and the work of media production and maternal caregiving. Conflicting ideas about, and expectations of, mothers are untangled in the context of the working world of radio, film, television and creative media industries. The book teases out commonalities between experiences that are evident across a number of countries, from Hollywood to Bollywood, as well as examining the differences between class, religion, maternal status and cultural frameworks that surround working mothers in various nation states. It also offers some possibilities for ways forward that can improve the lives of women workers who are also mothers. A timely and valuable contribution to international debates on equality, mothers and motherhood in audiovisual industries, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of media, communication, cultural studies and gender; programmes engaged with work inequalities and motherhood studies; and activists, funders, policymakers and practitioners. Susan Liddy  lectures in the Department of Media and Communication Studies in MIC, University of Limerick. Her recent work includes: Women in the Irish Film Industry: Stories and Storytellers (ed.) (2020) and Women in the International Film Industry: Policy, Practice and Power (ed.) (2020). She is Chair of Women in Film and Television Ireland and a board member of Women in Film and Television International, the Writers Guild of Ireland and Raising Films Ireland. She is founder and co-director of Catalyst International Film Festival, Limerick. Anne O’ Brien is Associate Professor in the Department of Media Studies at Maynooth University. She has published on the representation of women in radio and television and on women workers in creative industries, and she has examined why women leave careers in screen production. Her most recent book is entitled Women, Inequality and Media Work (2019).

Routledge Studies in Media and Cultural Industries

1 Community Filmmaking Diversity, Practices and Places Edited by Sarita Malik, Caroline Chapain and Roberta Comunian 2 Reconceptualising Film Policies Edited by Nolwenn Mingant and Cecilia Tirtaine 3 Asia-Pacific Film Co-productions: Theory, Industry and Aesthetics Edited by Dal Yong Jin and Wendy Su 4 Audiovisual Industries and Diversity Economics and Policies in the Digital Era Edited by Luis A. Albornoz and Maria Trinidad García Leiva 5 Political Economy of Media Industries Global Transformations and Challenges Edited by Randy Nichols and Gabriela Martinez 6 Authorship as Promotional Discourse in the Screen Industries Selling Genius By Leora Hadas 7 Transnational Latin American Television Genres, Formats and Adaptations By Nahuel Ribke 8 Media Work, Mothers and Motherhood Negotiating the International Audiovisual Industry Edited by Susan Liddy and Anne O’ Brien For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Studies-in-Media-and-Cultural-Industries/book-series/RSMCI

Media Work, Mothers and Motherhood Negotiating the International Audiovisual Industry Edited by Susan Liddy and Anne O’ Brien

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Susan Liddy and Anne O’ Brien; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Susan Liddy and Anne O’ Brien to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-53600-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-53601-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-08255-2 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For my mother, my daughter and my granddaughter. Kitty (Barry) Liddy, Chloe Liddy Judge and Evie Liddy McDonagh; united on the page. And for Criena Moscone for keeping the faith. To Finn and Odhran, for being cool dudes and being funny (they dictated this) and for giving me first-hand insights into mothering and work.

Contents

List of figures and tablesix   1 Motherhood and media work: an introduction

1

SUSAN LIDDY AND ANNE O’ BRIEN

PART 1

Who cares in screen production?11   2 Inequality, invisibility and inflexibility: mothers and carers navigating careers in the Australian screen industries

13

SHEREE K. GREGORY AND DEB VERHOEVEN

  3 Managing Wollstonecraft’s Dilemma: matriarchs in the Nigerian broadcast news media and the politics of childcare

30

GANIYAT TIJANI-ADENLE

  4 Representing and experiencing motherhood on- and offscreen in Swedish film

45

MARIA JANSSON AND LOUISE WALLENBERG

  5 The mother of a famous child: the media representation of Shirley Temple’s ‘Mother’ in Hollywood, 1934–1940

63

TSZ LAM NGAI

PART 2

Intersectionality and media mothers77   6 Negotiating motherhood in the Colombian audiovisual industry: a matter of capital ALEJANDRA CASTANO-ECHEVERRI AND ANDRÉS CORREA-GONZÁLEZ

79

viii  Contents   7 The future of Muslim women behind the scenes of the Malaysian TV industry

95

NUR KAREELAWATI ABD KARIM

  8 British television production and women without children: exclusionary practice in the turn to care

111

ROWAN AUST

PART 3

Stigma, subjectivity and celebrity127   9 The operation of maternal stigma in the creative and cultural industries

129

TAMSYN DENT

10 Mothers’ subjective experiences of negotiating caring responsibilities with work in the Scottish film and television industries

145

SUSAN BERRIDGE

11 Bollywood mothers: work-life imbalance

160

VIRAJ SUPARSAD

PART 4

Solutions for better futures177 12 The gendered practice of the TV opt-out

179

PERELANDRA BEEDLES

13 Negotiating motherhood: the search for solutions

197

SUSAN LIDDY AND ANNE O’ BRIEN

List of contributors213 Index217

List of figures and tables

Figures 2.1 4.1

Respondent income 23 Paradistorg (Lindblom, 1977). Katha (Birgitta Valberg), medical doctor and single mother of two (and grandmother of three), together with her ageing parents, Wilhelm (Holger Löwenadler) and Alma (Dagny Lind), in Paradistorg by Gunnel Lindblom (1977). Photographer: Johan Nyqvist 51 4.2 Mamma/Mother (Osten, 1982). Gerd Osten (Malin Ek) as aspiring film director in Susanne Osten’s Mamma (1982). Photographer: Hans Welin 53 4.3 Tsatsiki, mom and the police man (Lemhagen, 1999). Intimacy and togetherness between mother (Alexandra Rapaport) and son (Samuel Haus) in Ella Lemhagen’s Tsatsiki, morsan och polisen (1999). Photographer: Anders Bohman54 4.4 Min skäggiga mamma / My bearded mom (Hedman Hvitfeldt, 2003). The mother (Malena Engström) ‘becoming horse’ in Maria Hedman Hvitfeldt’s Min skäggiga mamma (2003). Photographer: Peter Palm 56 4.5 Dröm vidare / Beyond dreams (Sekersöz, 2017). Best friends Sarah (Gizem Erdogan), Mirja (Evin Ahmad), Nina (Segen Tesfai) and Emmy (Malin Persson) in Rojda Sekersöz’s debut film Dröm vidare (2017). Photographer: Alexandra Aristohova 58 6.1 Gender representation by age groups. Women’s representation is at its highest in their twenties, then tends to decrease. Men’s representation is stable between their twenties and thirties, then starts to fade. 83

Tables 2.1 Respondent characteristics 6.1 Parents’ terms of employment 7.1 The profile of participants

18 87 101

1 Motherhood and media work An introduction Susan Liddy and Anne O’ Brien

Mothers, motherhood and the pandemic A growing body of research, including contributions in this volume, has already identified that mothers carry a disproportionate care burden in societies around the world across a range of sectors, including in the audiovisual industry, which is our focus here (e.g., Conor et  al., 2015; O’ Brien and Liddy, 2020; Russell et  al., 2018). While this book was underway prior to the outbreak of Covid-19 and, hence, does not specifically feature an in-depth analysis of the ramifications of the pandemic, it is clear that Covid19 has compounded women’s and mothers’ unequal burden of care. Even before the pandemic women were doing three times as much unpaid care and domestic work as men, but this already ‘gross imbalance’ quickly accelerated (United Nations, 2020, p. 13). The lockdown, the closure of schools and creches, and the exponential increase in the numbers of people working from home, coupled with the sudden unavailability of family members to supply care, boomeranged most of the responsibility back onto the shoulders of parents, principally mothers (NWCI, 2020). The pandemic has devastated lives across the globe and has impacted on women and men, young and old. However, women are more likely to ‘bear the brunt’ of many of the social and economic consequences that result (Burki, 2020). Indeed, the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, notes that ‘nearly 60 per cent of women around the world work in the informal economy, earning less, saving less, and at greater risk of falling into poverty. . . . Millions of women’s jobs have disappeared’ (Guterres, 2020). Similarly, the World Trade Organisation has pointed to long-standing issues around wage and educational disparity, limited access to finance, greater numbers of women in informal employment and social constraints ‘exacerbating existing vulnerabilities’ (International Institute for Sustainable Development, 2020). A report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies found that ‘mothers in the UK were 1·5 times more likely than fathers to have either quit their job or lost it during the lockdown’ (Burki, 2020). Evidence of disproportionate

2  Susan Liddy and Anne O’ Brien consequences is amassing across the board; for instance, it has been suggested that women’s participation in academic research work has been compromised by the pandemic (Fazackerley, 2020). Similarly, the pandemic is ‘hitting female scientists especially hard’ as more people are forced to work from home and women face a double or triple burden (Kramer, 2020). Indeed, there are fears that the impact of Covid-19 on academia itself will ‘increase gender and racial inequity in teaching and service’ (Malisch et al., 2020). Guterres is concerned that the limited progress that has been made on gender equality and women’s rights could be reversed by Covid-19. To compound the problems, there are already signs that the pandemic is likely to impact livelihoods well into 2021. The creative industries appear to be no different as many workers were faced, and in some cases continue to be faced, with delayed or cancelled productions and are experiencing, even more sharply, the precarity of their everyday working lives. In a survey of members undertaken in March and April 2020, Screen Producers Ireland reported that four productions ‘were stood down, a further 59 companies reported having to delay the start of production and many projects have been delayed in post/distribution’ (SPI, 2020). Concerns have been expressed by Women in Film and Television (WFT/WFTV), who identify the gender-specific problems their female members are facing. WFT/WFTV is a global network with over 40 chapters and in excess of 10,000 members working to enhance the interests of women in screen-based industries across the world. WFT Australia identifies specific Covid-19 effects on its members as ‘sudden shifts in childcare access, home education or carer’s isolation’ (WFT Australia, 2020). In the UK, a WFTV survey revealed that 90% of the members who responded had lost all income; 39% had lost their jobs completely and 57% had work either cancelled or paused (WFTV UK, 2020). In a WFT Ireland survey circulated in April 2020, which attracted over 90 responses, there were many concerns articulated about the way in which the Covid-19 crisis was gendered: ‘women have been completely left out of conversations on workplace measures, quarantine procedures, how schools and childcare facilities operate, [it] will fall on women in the workforce. . . . who is hearing all our voices?’(2020). And to the question ‘are there gender-specific problems arising from the Covid-19 crisis?’ Of those who said yes, the answer was: ‘Childcare. Childcare. Childcare’ (2020). Despite a slow and hesitant return to production, armed with Covid-19 production guidelines, it is unclear what the long-term impact on the industry will be or whether, indeed, there will be new outbreaks resulting in further lockdowns in the year ahead. During Covid-19 many people found refuge and consolation in film, television and radio. At the end of a long day of juggling childcare with remote working, often at a kitchen table that doubled up as a home office space, many women sought the distraction of entertainment and the escape

Motherhood and media work 3 provided on-screen. But how often did those same women see their stories reflected on-screen? To what extent do mothers participate in the creation of those stories? A growing body of international research has shown that work in the creative and cultural industries is heavily gendered (Cobb et al., 2016; Conor et al., 2015; Mayer et al., 2009; Wreyford, 2018). Women experience structural and cultural exclusions from media production work (Liddy, 2016; Liddy, 2020a, 2020b; O’ Brien, 2019). Often in the public imagination and in common understandings these exclusions are connected to women’s status as mothers. It has been established that motherhood is a significant cause of women’s withdrawal from work (Creative Skillset, 2010). The existence of a ‘maternal wall’ has been evidenced (Stone, 2007; Wajcman, 1998; Wiliams, 2004), showing the impact of motherhood on careers vis-à-vis women without children. Frequently, however, motherhood is used as the single explanatory variable to account for women’s under-representation in the audiovisual industries. It is assumed that women (choose to?) leave work in order to care for children (Hakim, 2006). However, O’ Hagan suggests that women’s decisions about the ways they will combine motherhood and paid work ‘frequently amount to no more than a series of unsatisfactory trade-offs masquerading as choice’ (2015, p.  77). In reality, there is rarely a straightforward or direct reason why women ‘opt’ to leave work. Many push and pull factors inform women’s constrained choices with regard to ‘quitting’ their careers to engage in care work (O’ Brien, 2014). Reinhold argues that women who are impacted by ‘a company’s rigidity or insensitivity to family life’ are more likely to quit a job than to speak up and ask for what they need to make that job manageable (2005, p.  47). Gill (2014) has also examined the sector’s failure to create family-friendly contexts for mothers. More often, difficulties are overcome with exhaustive individual juggling, mainly by women (Liddy, 2017, pp. 21–25), and these adaptations in the name of care are usually understood as ‘private troubles’ rather than public issues (O Connor, 2006, p.  8). In an analysis of Irish society, but one which resonates in many countries across the world, ByrneDoran observes that the ‘traditional and dichotomous thinking of men as providers and women as carers’ still exists and is an influential factor in the lives of working mothers (2012, p. 108). Much remains to be understood about how motherhood affects workers in the creative industries, and that is the central focus of this book. Despite the fact that many women leave creative work on becoming mothers, some women nonetheless attempt to sustain both their working lives and their caring commitments. Yet, relatively little research attention, in the form of monographs or edited collections, has been given to mothers who continue to work in creative and cultural industries. This book aims to address that gap by examining the experiences of creative work that are particular to mothers in the international audiovisual industry.

4  Susan Liddy and Anne O’ Brien Key analyses in chapters This book offers four key analyses of the ways in which women experience the overlap of media production work with their status as mothers. Firstly, mothers in creative work are penalised because of their parenting role. Contributors outline multiple ways in which motherhood is generally not seen as a benefit but rather as a liability in the formal work context. The slights and rejections that women endure in their working lives are set out across a number of national contexts including Australia, Nigeria, Sweden and Hollywood. In their chapter on Australia, Gregory & Verhoeven use qualitative and quantitative data from a recent national survey detailing the experiences of over 600 carers and parents working in the screen industry to map the challenges faced. They explore how caring and motherhood are discussed in the industry, what the impact of the invisibility of caring and motherhood is on employment in screen work, what policy interventions might be effective and what a film industry that cared more about care might look like. The chapter includes a discussion of forms of care such as ‘self-care’, ‘ethics of care’ and ‘complex motherhood’ to reveal how women’s employment and relational demands are a site of competing tension. The authors also demonstrate that there are Australian stakeholders who want to create a more caring film industry. Ganiyat Tijani-Adenle reviews how women in Nigeria are excluded from broadcast journalism work in the early days of maternity leave and while nursing children. She notes how, during this time, they are removed from hard beats and critical desks and are relegated to ‘pink’ ghettos that affect their progression to management and editorial positions, sometimes resulting in them leaving the industry. Her chapter reviews maternity leave policies in three radio and three television stations in Nigeria and catalogues women’s experience of the industry while nursing babies. Tijani-Adenle also engages with media managers about the implications of maternity leave policies and politics on the status and experiences of women in Nigerian broadcast media. In their chapter on Sweden, Jansson & Wallenberg combine an analysis of women’s experiences of mothering and film work coupled with an analysis of representations of motherhood on-screen. Their study is based on interviews with women film-makers who belong to different generations, and the authors draw on five films representing caring for children in different ways. The need to secure economic subsistence and to cope with ideals of being a present mother are common themes in the interviews. The chapter tentatively argues that women film-makers’ experiences of caring, or being cared for, in a society which defines women as mothers first and foremost affects how women film-makers present mothers on-screen. Further, the films analysed reflect societal changes and continuities in how motherhood is constructed, but, more prominently, they evade any easy or stereotypical interpretation of mothers. Moving to 1930s Hollywood, Tsz Lam Ngai’s

Motherhood and media work 5 chapter unpacks the ideology of motherhood that underpinned understandings of stage mothers during the Great Depression and reconstructs the impact of such mothers whose care work blended with formal work but was often co-opted by the industry to its own ends. Drawing on a case study of Gertrude Temple, the mother of child star Shirley Temple, the author examines Gertrude’s labour and elucidates how film studios attempted to exploit stage mothers like her to train child actors and incorporated motherhood into publicity stunts that forged child star personae. Many mothers of child stars struggled to maintain their power in the field; the public were ambivalent about them because of their media representations as ambitious and self-serving managers – traits at odds with hegemonic definitions of the ‘ideal mother’. However, Lam Ngai explores the ways in which Gertrude Temple effectively manipulated the system to position herself as an ‘ordinary’ mother driven by maternal love and was held in high regard throughout her daughter’s stalwart career. The second key argument presented in the book is that mothers experience exclusion within creative industries in ways that are complicated beyond gender by other aspects of their class, religious, or family identities. Black feminist theorist Kimberle Crenshaw’s (1989) concept of intersectionality is used to unify the various analyses offered in this section. It shows how aspects of social and political identity combine to create unique modes of discrimination not experienced equally by all women. These analyses are offered in the contexts of media production in Malaysia, Colombia and Britain. In her chapter on Malaysia, Nur Kareelawati Abd Karim draws on qualitative data to examine the position of Muslim women in the TV industry. She explores how Muslim women perceive their professional identity, roles and position in the context of a diminishing female Malay workforce. Malay-Muslim women in 2017 occupied the highest rates of unemployment compared with other ethnicities at 142.3 per thousand. The chapter looks at women in three television organisations who hold behind-the-scenes roles in production and asks. It asks why Muslim women choose to stay or leave television work and to what extent their sociocultural norms, upbringing and religious beliefs shape their decisions to remain with or leave the broadcast organisation employing them. Castano-Echeverri and Correa-González explore issues raised by social class and motherhood in the Colombian audiovisual industry. Through a survey of 79 women and in-depth interviews with 13 respondents in Antioquia, the authors identify the emergence of a recurrent theme – the sector is not pro-mothers, particularly as a consequence of the long working hours. The industry is populated with more fathers than mothers and with more young, single, childless women than older women. The latter, if they had been in the industry for more than 20 years, tended to hold managerial positions. The authors examine how class intersects with motherhood and how, depending on women’s position in the value chain of audiovisual production, women

6  Susan Liddy and Anne O’ Brien and mothers have different capacities for negotiating their working expectations and conditions. Rowen Aust looks to the United Kingdom and at how women who do not have children feel about the status of non-motherhood in their workplaces. These women do not acquire the advantages of being male in the television production workforce nor do they access the potential dispensations that having children can offer their mothering colleagues, such as networks and adaptations that mothers can sometimes facilitate for each other. In a longitudinal study based on interviews with women working in television production from the 1970s to the present day, Aust explores how women executives, presenters, writers, actors and producers are bound, or not, by experiences of non-maternity. This chapter records some of the specificities of gendered expectations of the non-maternal within the televisual field from a previously unaddressed angle. The third section of the book explores how the combination of care duties with formal work burdens is internalised by mothers and examines some of the social-psychological impacts of that double burden on women’s work and lives. This section goes beyond describing women’s structural experiences of inequality to explore other cultural or subjective dimensions of the clash between care and work. It illustrates how industry operationalises motherhood to generate stigma, which undermines women’s labour value in the UK context. It also examines the ways that women self-narrate and frame their experiences of negotiating caring responsibilities with work and how they react to inequality in Scotland. The section also outlines the ways in which hegemonic understandings of idealised gender are disseminated via media content about Bollywood actresses as a result of their celebrity status. In her chapter on the United Kingdom, Tamsyn Dent examines how motherhood is seen as a negative and devaluing attribute in the context of creative labour. Her research comprises of a series of in-depth interviews with 39 mothers who worked in the creative sector. It finds that women adopt three distinct identities in response to the psychological operationalisation of ‘stigma’ (Major and O’ Brien, 2005). These are labelled as manage (motherhood) like a man, occupational downgrade and disappearing or absent mothers. Mothers are stigmatised in terms of how they are expected to behave, and certain types of mothering are stigmatised by women themselves in the study. Focussing on Scotland, Susan Berridge explores women’s affective relationships with both work in the industries and in childcare and the potential tensions that emerge. By unpacking in detail how women discuss their experiences and by noting the topics or issues that are absent in their accounts, Berridge seeks to set out the contradictory, complex and ambivalent ways in which women frame their subjective sense of the self as it negotiates care and work. Viraj Suparsad is concerned with Bollywood and examines how English-language Indian media construct and disseminate idealised versions of femininity about celebrity Bollywood actresses who are also mothers. Suparsad notes that a tension unfolds within contemporary Indian femininity between modern and traditional and Western

Motherhood and media work 7 and Indian values. This dichotomy plays out around the subtle yet ongoing strain that Bollywood actresses who are mothers face as a result of continuing to work while mothering. The fourth section of the book looks for ways forward or potential solutions to the ‘problem’ of mothering for women who are also trying to sustain a career in media industries. The conceptual and activist work that remains to be done to address the gendered inequalities that women face as mothers is set out here, where project-based, policy-based and best-practice approaches to reform and change are outlined and critically evaluated by the editors in the final chapter. In a chapter on UK working time patterns, Beedles notes a lack of research on how television production shift patterns may act as a barrier for mothers to carve out long-term careers. Her chapter addresses this gap by asking if a different approach to filming schedules could support caregivers as well as production companies. Deriving data from those TV production managers responsible for workload models and drawing on Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, Beedles shows that by imposing a long working hours culture, the TV industry allocates ‘advantages and obligations’ (Bourdieu, 1984) which are in conflict with motherhood. The chapter itemises examples of existing best practices which could better support production staff with caregiving responsibilities. In the concluding chapter on Ireland, Liddy & O’ Brien describe how mothers attempt to address challenges in order to sustain their working lives. Drawing on the experiences of 48 mothers located in multiple genres of screen production, the chapter itemises the challenges that mothers face as they struggle to accommodate the care of small children with the ‘always on’ culture of work. As well as identifying existing or potential problems, this chapter prioritises the identification and assessment of potential solutions for working mothers, which include addressing a range of childcare models and a review of the current working day on film sets. Crucially, Liddy & O’ Brien note that a fundamental cultural shift is required to more fully normalise equally shared parenting and to remove the workplace stigma that is attached to mothers. Most of the chapters that follow take a qualitative methodological approach to the question of motherhood in media work. They do not seek to achieve statistical representativeness in their findings but rather offer indepth accounts of the lived realities of mothering while also working in screen production. In most chapters, findings emerge inductively, and many are informed by an implicitly feminist epistemological position. In sum, the current gap in our understanding of how women reconcile care work with formal work in the audiovisual industries is thoroughly addressed in this collection, which offers subtle and deep qualitative insights into mothers’ experiences across a number of states. It is anticipated that this book will make a valuable contribution to international debates on equality, mothers and motherhood in audiovisual industries. It is expected that it will facilitate scholars, students, activists, policymakers, and practitioners in understanding the impact of motherhood on the engagement of women in the industry

8  Susan Liddy and Anne O’ Brien across the globe. Finally, it is hoped that it may generate change so that stories of mothers also become stories by mothers.

References Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Burki, T. (2020) ‘The indirect impact of COVID-19 ON women’. The Lancet. Available at: www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(20)30568-5/ fulltext (Accessed: 2 September 2020). Byrne-Doran, J. (2012) ‘A qualitative study of working mothers in Ireland: An exploration of lived experiences’. The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences, 6(11). Available at: http://www.SocialSciences-Journal.com. Cobb, S., Williams, L. R. and Wreyford, N. (2016) Calling the Shots: Women and Contemporary UK Film Culture. University of Southampton, UK. Available at: www.southampton.ac.uk/cswf/project/number_tracking.page (Accessed: 17 May, 2020). Conor, B., Gill, R. and Taylor, S. (2015) ‘Gender and creative labour’. The Sociological Review. Sussex and Malden: John Wiley & Sons. Crenshaw, K. (1989) ‘Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics’. University of Chicago Legal Forum, Article 8. Fazackerley, A. (2020) ‘Women’s research plummets during lockdown- but articles from men increase’. The Guardian Tuesday 12 May  2020. Available at: www. theguardian.com/education/2020/may/12/womens-research-plummets-duringlockdown-but-articles-from-men-increase (Accessed: 8 August 2020). Gill, R. (2014) ‘Unspeakable inequalities: Post feminism, entrepreneurial subjectivity, and the repudiation of sexism among cultural workers’. Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, 21(4), pp. 509–528. Guterres, A. (2020) ‘Put women and girls at the centre of efforts to recover from COVID-19’. Available at: www.un.org/en/un-coronavirus-communications-team/ put-women-and-girls-centre-efforts-recover-covid-19 (Accessed: 2 September 2020). Hakim, C. (2006) ‘Women, careers and work-life preferences’. British Journal of Guidance and Counselling, 34(3), pp. 279–294. International Institute for Sustainable Development: SDG Knowledge Hub. (11 August 2020) ‘Women more affected by trade disruptions from COVID-19, WTO finds’. Available at: https://sdg.iisd.org/news/women-more-affected-by-tradedisruptions-from-covid-19-wto-finds/ (Accessed: 6 September 2020). Kramer, J. (2020) ‘Women in science may suffer lasing career damage from COVID-19’. Scientific America. Available at: www.scientificamerican.com/article/ women-in-science-may-suffer-lasting-career-damage-from-covid-19/ (Accessed: 1 September 2020). Liddy, S. (2016) ‘Open to all and everybody? The Irish film board: Accounting for the scarcity of women screenwriters’. Feminist Media Studies,16(5), pp. 901–917. Liddy, S. (2017) ‘A “female voice”? Reflections on the Irish film industry and beyond’. In Sawtell, L. and Taylor, S. (eds.) Gender and the Screenplay: Processes, Practices and Perspectives. Networking Knowledge Special Issue, Volume 10(2), pp.  19–31. Available at: https://ojs.meccsa.org.uk/index.php/netknow/article/ view/504 (Accessed: September 2020).

Motherhood and media work 9 Liddy, S. (2020a) ‘ “Where are the women?’ Exploring the perceptions of a gender order in the Irish film industry’. In Liddy, S. (ed.) Women in Irish Film: Stories and Storytellers. Cork: Cork University Press, pp. 72–97, February. Liddy, S. (2020b) ‘The road to 5050: Gender equality and the Irish film industry’. In Liddy, S. (ed.) Women in the International Film Industry: Policy, Progress and Power. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Major, B. and O’ Brien, L. (2005) ‘The social psychology of stigma’. Annual Review of Psychology, 56(February), pp. 393–421. Malisch, J. L., Harris, B. N., Shanen, M., Sherrer, S. M., Lewis, K. A., Shepherd, S. L., McCarthy, P. C., Spott, J. L., Karam, E. P., Moustaid  – Moussa, N., McCrory Calarco, J., Ramalingham, L., Talley, A. E., Canas-Carell, J. E., Ardon-Dryer, K,. Weiser, D. A., Bernal, X. E. and Deitloff, J. (2020) ‘Opinion: In the wake of COVID-19, academia needs new solutions to ensure gender equity’. PNAS. Available at: www.pnas.org/content/117/27/15378 (Accessed: 1 September 2020). Mayer, V., Banks, M. J. and Caldwell, J. (eds.) (2009) Production Studies. New York: Routledge. National Women’s Council of Ireland. (2020) ‘NWCI survey findings show 85% of women have increased care responsibility since COVID-19’. Available at: www. nwci.ie/ (Accessed: 2 September 2020). O’ Brien, A. (2014) ‘ “Men own television”: Why women leave media work’. Media, Culture & Society, 36(8), pp. 1207–1218. O’ Brien, A. (2019) Women, Inequality and Media Work. London and New York: Routledge. O’ Brien, A. and Liddy, S. (2020) ‘The price of motherhood in the Irish film and television industries.’ Gender Work and Organisation. Available at: https://doi. org/10.1111/gwao.12612. O Connor, P. (2006) ‘Private troubles, public issues: The Irish sociological imagination’. Irish Journal of Sociology, 15(2), pp. 5–22. O’ Hagan, C. (2015) Complex Inequality and ‘Working Mothers’. Cork: Cork University Press. Reinhold, B. (2005) ‘Smashing glass ceilings: Why women still find it tough to advance to the executive suite’. Journal of Organisational Excellence, Summer, pp. 45–55. Russell, H., McGinnity, F., Fahey, E. and Kenny, O. (2018) Maternal Employment and the Cost of Childcare in Ireland. Dublin: ESRI. Available at: www.esri.ie/ system/files/publications/RS73.pdf (Accessed: 11 July 2020). Screen Producers Ireland. (2020) ‘Return to production guidelines  for the creative screen industry’. Available at: www.screenproducersireland.com/news/ return-production-guidelines%C2%A0-creative-screen-industry (Accessed: 5 September 2020). Skillset. (2010) Women in the Creative Media Industries. London: Skillset. The Sector Skills Council for Creative Media Industries. Available at: www.creativeskill set.org/uploads/pdf/asset_15343.pdf?3. Stone, P. (2007) Opting Out: Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. United Nations. (2020) ‘The impact of COVID-19 on women’. Available at: www. unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2020/04/policy-brief-the-impact-ofcovid-19-on-women (Accessed: 1 September 2020). Wajcman, J. (1998) Managing Like a Man: Women and Men in Corporate Management. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

10  Susan Liddy and Anne O’ Brien Williams, J. C. (2004) The Maternal Wall. Harvard Business Review, October, pp. 26–28. Women in Film and Television Australia. (2020) ‘WFT Australia statement on member and industry impact of COVID-19’. Available at: https://wiftaustralia.org.au/ (Accessed: 2 September 2020). Women in Film and Television Ireland. (2020) ‘WFT COVID-19 survey’. Available at: www.wft.ie. Women in Film and Television UK. (2020) ‘WFTV membership survey reveals over 90% of members have lost their income’. Available at: https://wftv.org.uk/ wftv-membership-survey-reveals-over-90-of-members-have-lost-their-income/ (Accessed: 1 September 2020). Wreyford, N. (2018) Gender Inequality in Screenwriting Work. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Part 1

Who cares in screen production?

2 Inequality, invisibility and inflexibility Mothers and carers navigating careers in the Australian screen industries Sheree K. Gregory and Deb Verhoeven Behaviour is communication. Jocelyn Moorhouse (Unconditional Love, 2019, p. 282)

Introduction The history of Australian cinema abounds with stories that feature dead or absent mothers. From popular early cinema like The Squatter’s Daughter (Hall, 1933) to more recent classics like Muriel’s Wedding (Hogan, 1994), mothers are relegated to implicit roles that are as much out of sight as they are ‘out of sleight’. In an important essay on coloniality in early Australian cinema, William D. Routt (1989) notes how the preponderance of dead or unlikeable mothers acts as a way to accede to the metaphoric power of ‘Mother England’. So often in Australian cinema, mothers are simply a narrative proxy for other representations and concerns, an invisible presence intended to direct our attention elsewhere. The point, then, and the focus of this chapter on screen industries and care work, is not just to bring mothers into sight, but to sharpen our way of seeing them – to improve the quality of our attention to acts of mothering and to look more care-fully. Unsurprisingly, it is no different on the other side of the camera. Despite considerable changes to the role and position of women as carers in advanced economies since the second wave of feminism, the ‘invisible presence’ of mothers and caring in screen-based employment has persisted, and we now have more than three decades of accumulated research findings that reveal the persistence of this problem. This chapter presents quantitative and qualitative data from a 2018 national survey of the experiences of over 600 carers and parents, including 475 women and 135 men working in the Australian screen industries. Known as the Raising Films Australia Screen Industry Survey 2018, it was built on the earlier UK screen industries survey Making it Possible: Voices of Parents and Carers in the UK Film and Television Industries 2016 (Randle, Leung, and Kurian, 2007). It compares these findings to previously gathered

14  Sheree K. Gregory and Deb Verhoeven research on the challenges faced by carers in the screen industries. Based on our findings, we argue for an intervention of ‘care’ to negotiate the future of employment in the screen industries. We ask: • How are caring and motherhood or parenting represented in the Australian screen industries? What, if anything, about these meanings and dynamics might explain the relative persistence of gender inequality (and vice versa)? • How is the effort of making care invisible itself an invisible labour? What is the impact of this sustained invisibility of caring and motherhood in Australian screen-based employment? • What policy interventions might be effective when so many have historically failed? • What would a film industry that cared more about care look like? Although we focus on “motherhood” and care, and while we accept that the vast majority of caring activity falls to people who identify as women, we do not want to reiterate essential or binary gender categories in our analysis. This is a delicate conceptual manoeuvre. On the one hand, for the purpose of this research, we cannot assume that caring is solely the preserve of a socially defined gender category, namely ‘cis, straight women’. On the other hand, it is also not our intention to contribute further to our key finding, which is that significant effort is made to ensure ‘motherhood’, as a specifically gendered practice performed in large part by cis women, is rendered invisible in the screen industries. We are both working mothers ourselves who are identified in our workplaces as women, and we are personally aware of this surreptitious suppression of caring for children in practice. As we move forward, screen industry leaders need to aggressively pursue answers to the question of how we can design gender equality and how we can better value care in the future of screen production work. The findings in this study reveal these are key outstanding policy issues that require remedial attention. The findings also reveal a need for future theoretical and empirical researchers to pay greater attention to the persistence of embedded discriminatory gendered relations that inform work culture and policy. If carers are to enjoy more genuine options than presently available to them and if they are to be supported and valued, then it is critical that more attention is given to the invisibility of motherhood and care in the screen industries. After more than 30 years of feminist research we have still not reached gender equality in care. Women continue to perform the majority of caregiving in households and in formal care settings. Consequently, we focus broadly on ‘practices of care’ that include ‘complex motherhood’ and parenting more generally, as well as other aspects of caring including ‘self-care’, to reveal how women’s employment and the relational expectations made of women are a site of competing tension and also to demonstrate that there

Inequality, invisibility and inflexibility 15 are many dependent stakeholders in the production of a more caring film and television industry. There are also many parties with a vested interest in retaining the status quo of mothers carrying a disproportionate care burden, resulting in the loss of work and pay to their male colleagues and the undervaluing of women and mothers in particular. This chapter is divided into four sections. In the first, we review the literature on care in the screen industries. Next, we discuss the study and respondents. We then examine typical paid employment experiences of carers in the Australian screen industries, highlighting the lack of power and opportunity for decision-making and leadership roles that is a common characteristic, particularly for female carers. The invisibility of care, gender inequality and inflexibility as a barrier to combining employment and care are key features of working in the Australian screen industries. Throughout the findings section, we canvass some of the contemporary themes and issues pertaining to motherhood, parenting and care, particularly work/care conflict and gender inequality. We attempt to move beyond current debates of work/care conflict to develop a conceptual framework that emphasises the value of care and self-care. In the final section is a conclusion that summarises the implications of these research findings.

Work and care and the screen industries Care work is an integral part of the screen industries (both on- and off-set), but it is rarely valued, and, more pointedly, a significant effort is carried out to conceal it, often by the very people who undertake this care (Berridge, 2019, 2020; Dent, 2019; Wreyford, 2018). The invisibility of care work, also known as caregiving and caring, the relationship between those who perform it (carers) and receive it (children, other dependents and even colleagues) and debates about how to best manage and combine care with paid employment are not new questions or social problems. The overlooked and unacknowledged unpaid work that mostly women perform behind the scenes to support others is a social, political and economic phenomenon that individuals, households, organisations, governments and communities struggle to grapple with. The work and care conflict that parents, carers and mothers in particular experience is a national crisis (Collins, 2019). It has been well recognised in Australian research for decades that unequal gender relations and divisions of labour are common for women when caring and parenting – resulting in unequal paid employment outcomes and career advancement opportunities. However, much of this research spans a general reach across populations (see for example, Collins, 2019) rather than specific analyses on the Australian screen industries. Prior to the survey we discuss in this essay, there has been no known specialised study of caring or employees who are carers and their paid employment experiences from a large survey of the screen industries in Australia.

16  Sheree K. Gregory and Deb Verhoeven Overall, there are few studies of caring in the Australian screen industries drawing on a broad population and quantitative approach. For instance, in Australia, research on caring among acting employees in the entertainment industries – including theatre – has been undertaken utilising a qualitative case study approach (Gregory and Brigden, 2017). In her recently published autobiography, Unconditional Love (2019), Jocelyn Moorhouse, an Australian female filmmaker, documents the struggle, challenges and experiences of combining motherhood and paid employment in the Australian and international screen industries. In a pithy conclusion about the prevalence of lip service in the industry, she notes that behaviour itself is communication. A recent edited collection on working life in the global film and television industries covered a range of issues around past and present worker’s lives across ten chapters (Dawson and Homes, 2012). While the issues of gender inequality and women cinematographers in France was covered, no chapter considered caring or childcare issues of workers. The poor treatment of carers and parents working in the Australian and global film and television industries has caused new concern in recent years. Women’s under-representation in screen-based employment and careers frequently coincides with the subjective stress of parenting and the demands of caring roles in family life. Concerns about managing caring and paid employment tensions are often framed as private experiences of working parents. However, they are some of the most vexing public health and policy challenges of contemporary life. Many of women’s family-household responsibilities or demands like childcare and elder care fall under the category of unpaid care work (Folbre, 2006, p. 186). Drawing on the work of sociologist Mignon Duffy and feminist economist Nancy Folbre regarding the invisibility and undervaluing of women’s and mother’s care work, we define a carer as a parent or an individual (usually a woman) caring for an adult family member because of illness, age or disability. Women’s unpaid work as carers and mothers is primarily carried out in the informal, private sphere of the family-household, which continues to be relatively ‘hidden’ (Folbre, 2001) and less acknowledged. This helps to explain the gendered division of labour, the gendered segregation of paid work and the persistence of gender differences in pay (Folbre, 2006). Moreover, carers from this study are not part of the paid care labour force. Rather, they perform unpaid care work in combination with their paid work within the Australian screen industries. We argue that the work of meeting the needs of family members requiring care is a complex activity ‘with profound implications for personal, social, and economic well-being’ (Albelda et al., 2010, p. 6). As Albelda et al. note, the benefits of acts of unpaid care are ramifying: Unpaid care helps people develop and maintain their everyday and future capabilities; strengthens human relationships; improves health; and helps people negotiate the complexities of obtaining paid care

Inequality, invisibility and inflexibility 17 services such as getting to a doctor, finding a good childcare center, or learning about elder-care services. (Albelda et al., 2010, p. 8) This chapter examines some of the less documented factors that shape and explain the experience of carers – including mothers and parents – employed in the Australian screen industries. A theoretical understanding of care highlights the unlikelihood of ‘choosing’ inequality, invisibility and inflexible arrangements. Kittay’s ‘ethic of care’ (1999) for example, focuses on the moral dimensions of paid work and family narratives in order to understand just how inequitable the social practice of gender relations in paid employment is. These elements are evident within the screen industries we examine in this chapter. This chapter explicitly adopts an intersectional (Crenshaw, 1991) approach to the study of care in the screen industries. In the following section, we consider multiple dimensions of inequality including respondent’s gender, ethnicity, caring status and precarious employment status in the Australian screen industries context. This intersectional approach provides a fuller understanding of the persistence of experiences and outcomes of invisibility, inequality and inflexibility. Indeed, our research suggests that the industries’ unwillingness to recognise and accommodate complexity in the form of a conjunction (work and parenting, for example) has necessarily precluded intersectional approaches to policies and practices (gender and race and sexuality and precarious employment such as freelance).

Method Data was collected via a national survey conducted in 2018 across Australia known as the Raising Films Australia Screen Industries Survey 2018, which was built on the earlier UK screen industries survey, Making it Possible: Voices of Parents and Carers in the UK Film and TV Industry (2016). Survey The survey consisted of two parts. Part one of the survey was based on the UK Raising Films survey and focussed on the current Australian screen industries and the impact of caring responsibilities and demands on the sector’s employees. The Australian survey was developed and adapted for the Australian screen industries through a collaboration between the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), Raising Films Australia and Women in Film and Television New South Wales (WIFT NSW), with funding support from Create New South Wales (Create NSW). Part two of the Australian survey is longitudinal in nature and was an optional (opt-in) component containing questions developed from the Women in Australian Film, Television, Video and Radio Industries surveys commissioned in 1987 and 1992 by the Australian Film Commission.

18  Sheree K. Gregory and Deb Verhoeven Recruitment The Raising Films Australia survey (2018) aimed to explore the experience and needs of parents and carers working in the Australian screen industries. The national survey was composed in SurveyMonkey software, launched in May 2018 and closed in June 2018, with respondents from across all states and territories in Australia. Respondents were recruited and involvement was promoted via the distribution of its direct link to over 2,500 people on the Raising Films Australia / WIFT NSW mailing list. Over 5,000 people were reached via social media platforms, and other organisations promoted the survey via mailing lists, including those of screen industries guilds, state screen agencies, unions, screen advocate stakeholders, film schools and film festivals, and key industries news outlets including Inside Film, FilmInk and Mumbrella. Overall, the survey reached more than 25,000 screen industries workers and 400 enterprises. The Australian survey was completed by 618 respondents compared to 640 respondents in the UK. Respondents: who they were Table 2.1 shows that the majority of survey respondents in Australia were female screen employees (77% or 475) who were also carers, aged between 36 and 64 years. Many respondents resided in the states of New South Wales Table 2.1 Respondent characteristics Sex Female Male Prefer not to say Age Female 16-20 21-24 25-30 31-35 36-44 45-64 65+ Male 16-20 21-24 25-30 31-35 36-44 45-64 65+

77% 22% 1%

1% 3% 7% 15% 41% 32% 1% 2% 4% 8% 15% 36% 33% 2%

Inequality, invisibility and inflexibility Location ACT NSW NT QLD SA TAS VIC WA Other

2% 50% 1% 8% 7% 4% 21% 6% 1%

Carer status Females Males

81% 19%

Role Director Producer Writer Crew on-set Crew production office Crew post-production Development Exhibition & distribution Finance, funding, accounts, legal Marketing Performers Education & training Other (please specify) Student Voice artist No longer working in the industries Still trying to get into the industries

8% 18% 9% 13% 4% 17% 3% 2% 2% 1% 2% 3% 10% 2% 1% 3% 2%

Identity Disability Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander Culturally & linguistically diverse LGBTIQ+

5% 1% 22% 11%

Employment status Freelance/self-employed Full-time Part-time Fixed-term full-time Fixed-term part-time Other

56% 20% 7% 7% 3% 7%

Children/Dependent age Under 2 years Preschool Primary Secondary and above

16% 23% 38% 23%

19

20  Sheree K. Gregory and Deb Verhoeven or Victoria – the two largest states in Australia – and were employed as producers. Most respondents (and producers) were freelance or self-employed, and their child/ren or dependent/s were mostly of primary school age. Twenty-two per cent were from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, which, combined with gender (77% were women), carer/parent status (81%) and precarious employment as a freelancer (56%), increases the challenges of a screen industries career: Being a woman of colour, there is an increased difficulty in having funders seeing my stories as of interest to a wider (AKA whiter) audience – this, on top of my lack of availability given my childcare needs, leads to frustration. (Freelance writer) Drawing on the findings of the Raising Films Australia survey, in the following sections we apply a big picture view to the invisible presence of caring in the Australian screen industries. We document the struggles of mothers as carers while forging a career in screen production and navigating the complex management of work and family within a hostile and uncaring employment context.

Findings Invisibility, inequality and inflexibility characterise the experiences of carers who are employees in the Australian screen industries, drawing on quantitative and qualitative survey findings. These three dominant themes highlight the difficulties of devoting time to caring demands and responsibilities and the hours required to advance in a screen production career. In particular, women hide their status as parents or carers in order to manage their paid employment. A disproportionate number of women are juggling caring demands and paid employment, and the screen industries currently struggle to offer flexibility for family responsibilities, further sustaining the disadvantage that women experience in particular. Changing the mindset of employers and leadership about job share, family life and caring demands is paramount and crucial to retain female talent. In the following, we describe those who care and the key issues they grapple with. Who cares? Women are told all the time Film and TV is not a suitable job for a mother. (Freelance director)

The large majority of survey respondents (65%) from the Australian screen industries are managing caring demands and responsibilities with their paid

Inequality, invisibility and inflexibility 21 employment. The greater proportion of carers (81%) were women, and 22% self-identified as culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD). More than half of the unpaid carer support for screen workers in the survey was undertaken by family and friends. However, this type of care is informal, unstructured and precarious and has been reported also in theatre in the Australian entertainment industries (Gregory and Brigden, 2017). Of the 618 employees of the Australian screen industries who completed the survey, 475 identified as female and 135 as male. Although women only represent 35% of the Australian screen industries workforce (Screen Australia, 2015, p.  4), the majority of the survey respondents were women, reflecting the unequal distribution of caring responsibilities which fall on them and therefore emphasising the unequal gendered dimension of caring and parenting experiences. Women’s labour force participation and parental leave policy in Australia remains structured such that women provide the majority of unpaid care work and family-household work. Put simply, overwhelmingly, care work continues to be the ‘task’ of women and is grossly undervalued. Although childbirth rates in Australia are slowing, there remains a penalty attached to care work. An early report by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) entitled Work, Life and Family Balance (2009 Cat. No. 4102.0, p. 5) made the point that, ‘on average, mothers in couple [heterosexual] families spend more time on childcare activities than fathers’. Moreover, ‘part-time work remains the key strategy for attempting to reconcile work and care’ (Charlesworth and Cartwright, 2007, p. 5). However, a well-documented issue with part-time work is quality of roles, hours and pathways to advancement. The type of paid employment performed by women when they become a caregiver, is part of the picture of work and care conflict.

How carers experience paid employment in the Australian screen industries: invisibility People have said they did not think of me because I just had a baby. (Freelance director)

Invisibility characterises the large majority of carers’ employment experience. In particular, children, dependents and the role and work of caring were, often painstakingly, rendered invisible. Many parents reported the lengths they go to in order to hide their caring status in their paid work. The active production of children’s invisibility reveals how care is devalued within the industries and the role carers themselves take in perpetuating this perspective. A negative implication of the invisibility is that it normalises the idea that a productive environment is a world in which children and dependents are neither seen nor heard (about). This theme is summed up by many women in the survey: ‘At times I almost need to hide the fact I have young

22  Sheree K. Gregory and Deb Verhoeven kids to avoid being “difficult” ’ (Freelance performer). ‘Family often needs to be “invisible” ’ (Part-time in development). And, ‘Not getting renewed contracts if [the] kid situation is not well hidden’ (Freelance producer). Emphasising the gendered experiences of care by employees in the screen industries, one female worker discussed the ‘invisible presence’ of care: ‘In various jobs I have been extremely careful not to mention my child, virtually pretending not to have a child’ (Full-time TV executive). One of the key factors shaping the slow pace of change in how caring is unequally allocated and performed is the powerful embedded assumptions about women’s roles in society. Williams (2000) and Blair-Loy (2003) have argued that the issue of ‘who cares’ is central to analyses of contemporary social life. Folbre (2001) has described how certain ideas about obligation both inform our inclination to care for others and constitute a fundamental social value. Yet, this care work is consistently devalued. Caring norms are costly, particularly to women who pay a ‘care penalty’ when they shoulder a disproportionate share of the burdens of care (Crittenden, 2001; Maushart, 2000). Moreover, it has been acknowledged, for example, that motherhood, caring and the lived experience of combining children or other caring responsibilities with a career exacerbates women’s disadvantage in paid employment as well as at home (Gaze, 2001). Women’s expectations about the negative impacts of combining family life and paid employment have been canvassed by many scholars (McDonald, 2001). As Oakley (1979, p. 1) noted: ‘It is the moment when she becomes a mother that a woman first confronts the full reality of what it means to be a woman in our society’. In contrast, the survey found a slight ‘fatherhood bonus’ in which men with children experienced career advancement rather than penalty. Some men in the survey noted the negative impact that parenting had for their career choices: ‘Off the radar. Cannot commit to jobs requiring long hours away from home’ (Freelancer, camera department) and ‘Not being able to work full time as a director because of needing to be available to care for kids. Limited ability to travel for work. Unable to accept some work offered because of care’ (Freelancer, post-production). However, one respondent acknowledged the different treatment metered to men with children: I swear I get some gigs with repeat clients just so they can hear about or catch up with my son. He is a pretty awesome kid. Has also made many appearances on sets and gets taken seriously as being helpful and intelligent from a pretty young age. (Freelancer, camera department) This man’s experience is also supported by the presence or reward of a ‘fatherhood bonus’, wherein approximate pre-tax earnings from the screen industries for their last financial year show that men who are carers earned

Inequality, invisibility and inflexibility 23

Figure 2.1  Respondent income

substantially more than women who are carers and received a substantial income boost – the ‘fatherhood bonus’ – compared to men without children. A comparison of respondents’ approximate pre-tax earnings from the screen industry for the last financial year (in Australia, July  1, 2017, to June  2018), grouped into ‘carers’ and ‘non-carers’ above and below the Australian median income ($55k). (Visualisation credit: Erin Joly) Inequality I have been asked at job interviews if I have children. (Producer)

Nearly three-quarters of carers surveyed (74%) reported that their caring responsibilities have a negative impact on their paid employment. Of these, 86% were women. In particular, women working as freelancers on lower than median incomes experience a career penalty as a result of their caring (over 30% of carers who reported a negative impact on their careers belonged to this category). This negative impact is further indicated by the number of women who reported a ‘nil to negative’ income and reduced their paid employment opportunity while taking on caring demands. Further, female carers with

24  Sheree K. Gregory and Deb Verhoeven a ‘nil’ or ‘negative’ income outnumber female non-carers in this income bracket by more than two to one. Overall, of the 618 survey respondents 65% reported caring responsibilities and demands. Of the 65%, a significant percentage were women (81%) compared with only 19% who were men. Although only 6% of respondents identified the impact of caring work on their role in the screen industries as positive, a striking 74% reported a negative impact. The larger majority reported ‘somewhat negative’, followed by ‘strongly negative’. Twenty-two per cent who responded are from a CALD background, of which 80% point out that their caring responsibilities have negatively impacted their careers. This inequality reiterated by women’s care work was noted by respondents: • ‘Bias towards men for positions, even if they have children as it’s not perceived they’ll want time off or have “divided loyalties”!’ (Education/ Academic). • ‘I know being a minority female director has cost me unknown opportunities. I’m at a point in my career where I have delivered on time and on budget for almost 20  years, but this has not translated into more opportunities – or client loyalty’ (Freelance director). • ‘I’ve been overlooked for a role where it was expected that I couldn’t do the hours (rather than anyone asking me before offering it to someone else)’ (Producer). One respondent explained the way this bias extended to negotiating not just within screen production settings but in domestic settings as well: Impossible to work on long form production with a young child as a single person without a partner.  .  .  . Difficulty in negotiating time from co-parent father who views his work as necessary and my own as related to my preoccupation with filmmaking rather than my means of earning a living. (Director) Researchers have demonstrated that balancing motherhood and a career is considerably more fraught for women than for men and that inequality is usually articulated in terms of career-family ‘imbalance’ (Castleman et al., 2005, p. 17). The challenge of working freelance in the Australian screen industries while engaging in family life and caring is fraught with tension for some women. Even still, paid employment within the industries is characterised as flexible, autonomous (with some degree of control) and glamorous. We found instead that the offstage reality for carers and parents employed in Australian screen production is much more complex, and the industries are far less flexible than imagined.

Inequality, invisibility and inflexibility 25 Inflexibility My career has been put on hold and I’m exhausted. (Assisting producer)

Carers and working parents identified inflexible and long working hours as typical of the screen industries work culture, which is a key barrier to managing and combining work and life. This confirms findings from the UK survey of the same name wherein 79% of carers reporting that they fared poorly compared to non-carers. Freelancers are the majority of the Australian industry’s production workforce and operate outside conventional parental leave entitlements and guaranteed return-to-work provisions. This, in addition to fear that employers will discriminate against carers, contributes to a screen industries work culture that lacks transparency and limits open discussions about workplace flexibility or broader industrial innovation. Sixty per cent of carers are freelance or self-employed. In particular, long hours, financial uncertainty and unpredictable work commitments are major concerns. Overall, 73% of respondents found it ‘impossible to difficult’ to vary the hours and amount of paid care they access. This was observed repeatedly by survey respondents: • ‘I have been rejected for many roles as the Head of Department wasn’t interested in flexibility in my hours’ (Freelance production designer). • ‘Unable to commit to full-time production, meetings are hard to make and have had to pull out of or reduce acceptance of opportunities due to caring needs. Have pulled away from directing and scaled back to writing as this is more carer friendly’ (Freelance writer). • ‘I often pass on jobs because they don’t fit in with caring responsibilities. I would say I turn down 60 to 70% of the work on offer or available’ (Freelancer, on-set crew). Respondents (both freelance and full-time) noted the way the industry’s inflexibility placed stress on their own and their family’s sense of well-being: • ‘It’s difficult to work for minimal money when you need to pay for childcare. It’s difficult to work from home with small children. It’s difficult to be productive and hold a place in industries’ (Freelance writer). • ‘My health has suffered from working extreme hours and balancing my duties as a parent’ (Full-time composer). • ‘The precarity of the industries makes my partner and myself unhappy, which noticeably transfers to our daughter’ (Freelance producer).

26  Sheree K. Gregory and Deb Verhoeven

From complex motherhood to complex caring I believe support and options should be there and having to leave your career should be a choice. (Full-time director)

How can it be that the achievement of some women’s desire to care for family members and have children seems to have incurred unexpected and often difficult consequences? Acknowledging the complexity of 21st-century domestic relationships, research highlights the persistently unequal nature and expectations of caring and paid employment in family-households and workplaces. Despite transformations in family formation and the distribution of work over the past 40  years or more, the pace and depth of change has been modest at best and uneven at worst. While researchers have called for policy changes to improve the family friendliness of current workplace and industries culture, it appears to have only resulted in what Blair-Loy (2003, p. 196) identifies as ‘largely cosmetic change absent theoretical understanding of the devotional schemas’ – that is, the deeply seated, gendered cultural models of work and family. Blair-Loy (2003, p. 197) claims: Simply introducing new work-family corporate policies is largely futile. Any serious effort to reduce work and family conflict among professional workers must be based on recognition that this is a so-called structural dilemma founded on powerful, taken-for-granted cultural models of how women and men should spend their waking hours. Who cares – who performs the caring – is key to understanding the experiences of women who attempt to combine their career in the screen sector with family life and the unequal relationship they encounter between workplace and household. While we can have progressive policy initiatives that provide for parental leave, on their own they are not enough. In short, if we are serious about supporting women to advance in their participation in paid employment in screen industries, then it is critical to consider carers’ needs, such as creche and childcare, job sharing and other supports.

Conclusion As the sound of the playgrounds faded, the despair set in. Very odd, what happens in a world without children’s voices. I was there at the end. Alfonzo Cuaron (The Children of Men, 2006)

Caring is critical to our well-being, future development and growth and is critical to the foundation of the economy (Albelda et al., 2010). The undervaluing of care and carers at an industrial scale, reported in this chapter,

Inequality, invisibility and inflexibility 27 has ramifying consequences that are indeed cause for the despair expressed by Cuaron (2006). Quantitative and qualitative analysis reveal how inequality, invisibility and inflexibility mediate carers’ experiences and disadvantageous outcomes in the Australian screen industries. In particular, women’s decision-making about their careers in the screen industries is influenced by their caring, which includes, but is not limited to, expectations around mothering. A care-focussed policy approach is critical to better understanding and supporting the lived realities of working in the Australian screen industries. In particular, reframing work and care dynamics is required so as to safeguard the talent in the screen industries to enable inclusive, productive, resilient, sustainable and successful outcomes. Not caring about caring undermines talent and perpetuates existing industrial and social inequalities. This chapter is intended as an intervention of care in an otherwise dystopian workplace culture. Our vision is for more equitable work-care relations that value all carers (inclusive of self-care) and that are directed to long-term sustainability (both individual and industrial) based on a better work-life balance in the screen industries. This includes reframing the representation of caring and motherhood or parenting in the Australian screen industries to ensure their visibility – to be seen and understood as based on more equitable meanings and dynamics that challenge the cultural persistence of gender inequality. Because of the hidden labour of care, making care visible requires revealing the extent to which it is overlooked in the Australian screen industries. In this chapter we have discussed the lengths employees take to care secretly and the invisible presence of caring work, carers and their challenges and lived experiences of engaging in paid employment in the Australian screen industries. Moreover, our intervention of care requires efficacious policy to influence film industry stakeholders to care more about care.

Acknowledgements We would like to acknowledge the generosity of the 618 respondents and the research and report team members: Megan Riakos, Erin Joly and Margaret McHugh. We would also like to thank the organisations who provided support, administration, funding and the dissemination of survey outcomes: Raising Films Australia and Raising Films UK; Women in Film and Television (WIFT) NSW; Create NSW; the South Australian Film Corporation; Adelaide Film Festival; the Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS); University Technology Sydney and Western Sydney University. The authors dedicate this chapter to our children – may they been seen and heard.

References Albelda, R., Duffy, M. C., Folbre, N., Hammonds, C. and Suh, J. (2010). ‘Placing a value on care work’. Communities & Banking, 21(1), pp. 6–9.

28  Sheree K. Gregory and Deb Verhoeven Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). (2009) Work, Life and Family Balance, Cat. No. 4102.0, Australian Bureau of Statistics, Canberra. Berridge, S. (2019) ‘Mum’s the word: Public testimonials and gendered experiences of negotiating caring responsibilities with work in the film and television industries’. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 22(5–6), pp. 646–664. Berridge, S. (2020) ‘The gendered impact of caring responsibilities on parents’ experiences of working in the film and television industries’. Feminist Media Studies. DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2020.1778763. Blair-Loy, M. (2003) Competing Devotions: Career and Family Among Women Executives. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Castleman, T., Coulthard, D. and Reed, R. (2005) ‘Complexities in the career-family perspectives of young professionals’. Labour and Industries, 16(2), pp. 61–80. Charlesworth, S. and Cartwright, S. (2007) ‘Part-time work: Policy, practice and resistance in a manufacturing organisation’. In Fastenau, M., Branigan, E., Douglas, K., Marshall, H. and Cartwright, S. (eds.) Women and Work 2007: Current RMIT University Research. Melbourne: RMIT Publishing, pp. 5–19. Collins, C. (2019) Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Crenshaw, K. (1991) ‘Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color’. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), pp. 1241–1299. Crittenden, A. (2001) The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World Is Still the Least Valued. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Cuaron, A. (2006) The Children of Men. Universal Studios, U.S, 3 September. Dawson, A. and Homes, S. P. (2012) ‘New perspectives on working in the global film and television industries’. In Dawson, A. and Holmes, S. P. (eds.) Working in the Global Film and Television Industries. New York: Bloomsbury, pp. 1–17. Dent, T. (2019) ‘Devalued women, valued men: Motherhood, class and neoliberal feminism in the creative media industries’. Media, Culture, Society. DOI: 10.1177% 2F0163443719876537. Folbre, N. (2001) The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values. New York: New Press. Folbre, N. (2006) ‘Measuring care: Gender, empowerment, and the care economy’. Journal of Human Development, 7(2), pp. 183–200. Gaze, B. (2001) ‘Working part-time: Reflections on “practicing” the work−family juggling act’. Queensland University of Technology Law and Justice Journal, 1(2), pp. 199–212. Gregory, S. and Brigden, C. (2017) ‘Gendered scenes: Conceptualising the negotiation of paid work and child-care among performers in film, television and theatre production’. Media International Australia, 16(1), pp. 151–162. Hall, K. G. (1933) The Squatter’s Daughter. Australia: Johnson and Gibson, 4 August. Hogan, P. J. (1994) Muriel’s Wedding. Miramax Films, U.S, 29 September. Kittay, E. F. (1999) Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency. New York: Routledge. Maushart, S. (2000) The Mask of Motherhood: How Becoming a Mother Changes Our Lives and Why We Never Talk About It. New York: Penguin. McDonald, P. (2001) ‘Family support policy in Australia: The need for a paradigm shift’. People and Place, 9(2), pp. 14–20. Moorhouse, J. (2019) Unconditional Love: A Memoir of Filmmaking and Motherhood. Melbourne: Text Publishing.

Inequality, invisibility and inflexibility 29 Oakley, A. (1979) Becoming a Mother. Oxford: Martin Robinson. Porter, D., McCabe, L. and Grant, K. (2016) Making It Possible: Voices of Parents & Carers in the UK Film & TV Industry. Report for Raising Films. Centre for Gender and Feminist Studies, University of Sterling & Raising Films, Stirling, UK. Randle, K., Leung, W. F. and Kurian, J. (2007) Creating Difference: Overcoming Barriers to Diversity in UK Film and Television Employment. Report to European Social Fund. Creative Industries Research & Consultancy Unit, Business School, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield. Routt, W. D. (1989) ‘The fairest child of the Motherland: Colonialism and family in films of the 1920s and 1930s’. In Moran, A. and O’Regan, T. (eds.) Australian Screen. Ringwood: Penguin, pp. 28–52. Screen Australia. (2015, November). ‘Gender matters: Women in the Australian screen industry’. Available at: https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/getmedia/f20beab881cc-4499-92e9-02afba18c438/gender-matters-women-in-the-australian-screenindustry.pdf?ext=.pdf. Wreyford, N. (2018) Gender Inequality in Screenwriting Work. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Williams, J. (2000) Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What to Do About It. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

3 Managing Wollstonecraft’s Dilemma Matriarchs in the Nigerian broadcast news media and the politics of childcare Ganiyat Tijani-Adenle Introduction Motherhood is a great institution in Nigeria (and, indeed, in Africa). A woman acquires honour, prestige and respect by giving birth to children (Frank, 1983). When a woman becomes a mother, she is seen as a responsible individual contributing to the preservation of the human race and a stakeholder in societal development (Okonofua et al., 1997). A woman with children is perceived to have safeguarded her marriage and procured a secured future based on the expectation that her children would care for her in her old age. A woman who is unable to birth children is seen as a failure (Hollos, 2003). This explains why the pressure on reproduction is placed majorly at the feet of women in Nigeria, despite current knowledge that infertility can result from the man or woman (Okonofua et al., 2005). Another dynamic in reproduction politics in Nigeria is on nursing the children when they are eventually delivered. The woman is expected (by culture and norms) to provide all care for the child, while the man is expected to provide sustenance and guidance, even though the majority of women are still burdened with providing the funds with which to raise their children, in addition to providing care (Yusuff, 2015). Women who are successful in politics and industry are portrayed as true achievers (only) if they are deemed successful in the home front (by keeping their marriages and raising children) as expected by the society and even the media (TijaniAdenle, 2016). Women broadcast journalists in Nigeria are imbued in this culture and they are not exempt from the burden. That is why, even though motherhood significantly impacts their career, research shows that Nigerian women broadcast journalists have affirmed that it is a sacrifice they are willing to make (Tijani-Adenle, 2019, p. 190). This chapter, guided by liberal and African feminist theories and using a qualitative research design, shows how women with children experience working in the Nigerian broadcast news industry.

Managing Wollstonecraft’s Dilemma 31

Managing Wollstonecraft’s Dilemma: mothers in the global broadcast news media Feminist media researchers have long identified that women journalists are disadvantaged because they have to juggle family and career responsibilities together in an industry that does not grant adequate concessions for childcare and in which women journalists with children are sidelined to the soft beats or denied promotions (Byerly, 2011; Franks, 2013; North, 2009, 2012, 2016; Williams, 2010). It is important to note that this literature is from the global North, yet the findings are similar to what pertains in Africa, except that men in the global North are more receptive to helping with nursing children while governments also subsidise childcare, unlike in Africa (Tijani-Adenle, 2019). The moment a woman bears children, her career path is significantly altered, as nursing infants greatly moderate how she experiences journalism practice, particularly in the Nigerian (and African) context. It is common for women journalists to make sacrifices for their careers, either in terms of love, marriage or family life. The fact that broadcast journalism is not an 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. kind of career makes it more difficult as the ‘regular’ childcare options available are not adequate to cater for the needs of women broadcast journalists (Williams, 2010). If a woman works late shifts, gives a lot to journalism to reach the pinnacle of her career and breaks the glass ceilings in her path, she would be meeting the masculine culture of not having ‘emotional distractions’. The implications are, however, that she may remain single, childless, unmarried or in uncommitted relationships (North, 2016, p. 320, also, p. 323) thus sacrificing her emotional needs (if they involve having children). Scholars have noted that the ‘relatively few women who do get these jobs at a higher level have few outside responsibilities; for example, they are far more likely than men to be childless’ (Franks, 2013, p. vii; North, 2016). However, if women have children and these commitments make demands on their time and prevent them from spending ‘the long hours required for promotion’ (Metropolitan newspaper reporter in North, 2016, p. 320), or if they request casual leave to attend to children, then they will appear not to fit in and will be judged incapable of meeting the demands required to manage top editorial positions (TijaniAdenle, 2019). Other women journalists limit their ambitions the moment they have children and take only those responsibilities that will give them time to attend to family (North, 2016, p.  323). The implication of this ‘selfcensorship’ is that women journalists tend to keep their jobs but cannot aspire to reach top management positions. Men do not have this dilemma to contend with; even when they have children, it does not affect their career as it is not ‘usually’ their responsibility to care for the children.

32  Ganiyat Tijani-Adenle Male journalists, thus, have a physiological and sociocultural advantage over women. Many factors are considered before deciding who gets promoted to what positions in news companies. Even though ‘in theory women have equal opportunity for promotion’, in practice, only women who are regarded as having freedom and flexibility are actually promoted (Metropolitan newspaper reporter in North, 2016, p.  320). The implication of this is that if management is aware that a female journalist has ‘personal commitments’ that can make demands on her time, she may be denied promotions or appointments to key editorial positions based on that, regardless of whether she qualifies for them or not. Thus, women with family commitments are not likely to ‘protest’ if they are denied promotions because it is an unwritten rule that senior editorial roles ‘are difficult for anyone with other responsibilities’ (Franks, 2013, p. vii). The norm appears to be for male journalists to head top management and editorial positions (Byerly and Ross, 2006; Byerly, 2013; North, 2016) as well as to discriminate against women journalists with marriage and childcare responsibilities (MEAA and IFJ, 1996; North, 2012, 2016) because those responsibilities are believed to distract from and impede the ability to perform the responsibilities attached to heading editorial and top management positions (North, 2016). Women journalists themselves believe that their attention is divided the moment they have children and that women with children are unable to spend the long hours required of such positions (North, 2016; Williams, 2010). It is critical to note that apart from losing promotions and key appointments, women journalists with childcare responsibilities have also reported being offered less critical or senior roles on their return from maternity leave (North, 2009, p. 159; see also, North, 2016). It means, therefore, that women journalists’ positions may not only remain static but that their status can actually diminish due to taking time out to raise children. Women broadcast journalists are, therefore, seriously affected by the challenges of juggling motherhood with media work. Previous anthropological, sociological and cultural studies about women and work in Africa (and Nigeria) note that the burden is completely on women; husbands are not responsible for childcare (it is ‘uncommon or untraditional’ for them to be). Organisations do not provide leverage, and women censure their career progress or make personal sacrifices to ensure they make the tough balance between motherhood and career (Aryee, 2005; Bay, 1982; Fapohunda, 1978, 1982; Okafor and Amayo, 2006; Okeke-Ihejirika, 2004; Pittin, 2002). Unfortunately, the motherhood experiences of Nigerian (and African) women broadcast news journalists are not captured in the literature, and this is the gap this chapter fills. The next section explains how data is gathered to reveal how women with children (who still require care) experience the Nigerian broadcast news industry.

Managing Wollstonecraft’s Dilemma 33

Peeping through a reflexive lens: appreciating the experiences of mothers working in the Nigerian broadcast news industry Qualitative research design was used as a suitable approach for conceptualising and articulating the various aspects of the subjects’ (women journalists) realities (Alvesson and Sköldberg, 2009; Bryman, 2008; Miner-Rubino and Jayaratne, 2007). Two techniques were deployed in gathering data for this study: interviews and archival analysis. Interviews were used in gathering data for this study because it offered me access to the participants’ ‘ideas, thoughts and memories in their own words’ (Reinharz, 1992, p. 19). This is very crucial to this study as its essence is to capture the experiences of women broadcast journalists, and there is no better technique than one that manifests these experiences ‘from the point of view’ (Hammersley, 1992, p. 45) of the women journalists themselves. The semi-structured interview format was used in eliciting responses from 36 participants (28 women journalists [at different stages in their careers: most are in middle-level management, one is just entering the profession and two are in management positions], one human resource manager and seven male journalists in management and editorial positions). The interviews were conducted for this study (from September to December 2019) and from a similar project (from 2015 to 2017 – [Tijani-Adenle, 2019]). Triangulated sampling was used in recruiting participants; this means using a combination of sampling techniques ‘in a multitude of ways to suit the particular needs’ (Liamputtong and Ezzy, 2005, p. 48) of my research. I used purposive, snowball and intensity sampling techniques to recruit participants with relevant experiences about how women experience motherhood in the Nigerian broadcast industry. All the interviewees were anonymised. Informed consent, confidentiality and the security of data are based on guidelines provided by the British Sociological Association (BSA) Statement of Ethical Practice (2009) and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Framework for Research Ethics (2015). The second method used in gathering data was archival analysis. Archival research involves ‘answering empirical questions’ (Goodwin, 2009, p. 372) by using ‘factual information in existing records’ (McBurney and White, 2010, p. 228) that have ‘already been gathered for some reason aside from the research project at hand’ (Goodwin, 2009, p.  386). It was important to understand Nigerian news media organisations’ maternity leave policies (in order to appreciate how their forms, availability, absence or inadequacy affects the career experiences of the country’s women journalists). The employee policy handbooks for two federal government–funded media organisations (a television station and a radio station) and three privately owned news media organisations (two radio stations and a television station) were reviewed for this study. The next section demonstrates the findings and how they impact the status and experiences of mothers working in Nigeria’s broadcast journalism industry.

34  Ganiyat Tijani-Adenle

Matriarchs in the media: mothers in the Nigerian news media and the support networks that keep them afloat Anecdotal evidence shows that it is unusual to find a Nigerian woman journalist who has children, remains in the profession and rises to occupy top editorial and management positions without having a strong support network. The findings I present in this section confirm that this is not a result of incompetence on the part of the women but is due to the highly patriarchal childcare norms in the country. Most women are unable to meet the long hours of work required to reach such positions because Nigerian news companies require journalists in editorial positions to be free of domestic barriers that can affect their availability and concentration. On the other hand, the men do not share in the burden of house and childcare (Aryee, 2005; Okafor and Amayo, 2006), thus making it almost impossible for the women to meet the requirements for the positions. Consequently, it is rare to find among these women those with young children who are able to cope without having family members or trusted help take care of their childcare responsibilities. This section discusses the support structures in the Nigerian media, in journalists’ spouses/families and in the public that help these women to combine two seemingly incongruous roles. Back home, my mother was there, I had other people around who were taking care of my children while I went to work. (EI/10/J/MEP/Female) I got a nanny and she was very reliable and she was a grandmother because I was looking for someone who is older, who doesn’t have children to nurse, so she had enough time to stay back and help me. (EI/13/RJ/MEP/Female) I had my mother-in-law. She was alive and she was helpful with the children. (EI/44/J/MEP/Female) Like these quotes show, it is women journalists with strong support networks who do not have to break or adjust their career paths due to the lack of childcare in Nigeria. Interestingly, Chinese women journalists have been known not to be hindered by childcare because of the strong support system in their extended families, where grandparents help nurture their grandchildren at no cost (Cai, 2008, p. 59). It is not every female journalist who has family members who can spare the time and resources to help them care for their homes and children. Others have to resort to getting paid help to manage their homes. Unfortunately, there are some who neither have family members who can stand in for them

Managing Wollstonecraft’s Dilemma 35 nor have the financial resources to employ nannies. At other times, those who can afford paid help still do so with caution due to security concerns, as cases of child abuse and kidnappings by paid help are now becoming rampant in Nigeria (Obi, 2017). Saddled with the social and cultural need to care for their children, most women journalists will either leave the industry or slow down professionally to maintain a healthy work-life balance, thus remaining in low-status positions.

Lone rangers Despite the extended family structure and relatively affordable cost of nannies and maids, a good number of women broadcast journalists are still unable to get relatives or reliable paid help to assist in caring for their children. Such women find it tough and do unconventional things, like taking their children to work or enrolling them in boarding schools at young ages, for example, just to keep the job and the home front running. Others did have help from family but were not satisfied because they could not raise their children the way they wanted. When my children grew to the point where I could send them to boarding schools, I  mean I  couldn’t just wait, so all of them went through boarding school. (EI/29/J/MEP/Female) I never had time with my son, then. I’m sure if I had time, there are some things that happened to him that wouldn’t have happened to him. (EI/21/RJ/SM/Female) These findings resonate with similar results in other African countries. In Uganda, for instance, ‘Unless one has a very supportive spouse and family, most female journalists will leave the newsroom when they get married’ (Kaija, 2013, p. 325). In the past, the literacy rate in Nigeria was not high, so the women journalists who had their mothers taking care of their children were lucky because the women were mostly uneducated women who did not have paid work or corporate commitments. The use of nannies and house helps was also easier because they were cheap, reliable and readily available. Now, young journalists in their twenties and early thirties entering the profession may not have the luxury of their mothers living with them because the present generations of grandmothers in the country are more educated and have jobs. Paid help and nannies are equally becoming more expensive and unreliable with increasing reports of child abuse by house helps and nannies. Governments and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are equally cracking down on the use of small girls from villages as maids, so things are more complicated. Therefore, the options that

36  Ganiyat Tijani-Adenle worked previously may not be available for the new generation of women entering the news media. But you know those traditional mothers are no longer available. Like me now, I am a grandmother and am still here. (EI/30/J/MEP/Female) Surprisingly, some women journalists believe that the news media is also a place to raise children, especially for women who are not on the news desk but in current affairs where they (sometimes) produce pre-recorded news programmes. This finding is similar to those of Williams (2010) in her study of women journalists in the UK. Her interviewees were also of the opinion that journalism is a good profession in which to raise children. She notes, however, that the journalists who hold these views ‘were not holding such high-powered positions during the period their children were young and needed the most care’ (Williams, 2010, p. 280). It would be insufficient to discuss how women journalists in the media are able to cope with raising children without discussing media organisations’ maternity leave options and how this can have an impact on the experience of women journalists.

Maternity leave policies and politics Carolyn Byerly’s Global Report documents that 75% of media organisations in Nigeria have a maternity leave policy and that women journalists who go on maternity leave can get their jobs back in 86% of media organisations in the country (Byerly, 2011, p. 124). Byerly’s findings are an accurate depiction of how the Nigerian news media operates. According to my personal experience as a former news editor in a broadcast station (Voice of Nigeria) as well as my findings from the review of five policy documents of broadcast stations for this chapter, women journalists are mostly entitled to three months paid maternity leave, and they also get to return to their jobs after the leave. The exceptions are in federal government–owned broadcast stations that give 16 weeks and in government-owned broadcast stations in Lagos State that give six months (for first and second child) and three months for subsequent children. Most organisations also give women nursing babies opportunities to resume about an hour later (than the resumption time) or close an hour early (depending on the options women choose) for about six months after resumption. Others put pregnant and nursing mothers on permanent morning or day shift to make things easier for them. In a situation where a woman has not put in up to 12 calendar months in a news organisation before delivering a baby, she does not get full benefits. Others who have taken their annual leave in a year and then later request

Managing Wollstonecraft’s Dilemma 37 for maternity leave (in the same year) would have the period of annual leave deducted from their maternity leave period. When we’re faced with such situations the person would only take half of her monthly pay during that period. (KII/37/HRM/MEP/Female) The human resource manager and most editorial staff interviewed for this study have complained that women journalists also play politics with maternity leave. The regulation is for women to submit a medical report at least a month before the leave is to commence. Then management will request that they commence their leave two to four weeks to their estimated date of delivery (EDD), but because a lot of women (interviewed for this study) find the (general) three-to-four months maternity leave inadequate, many keep working until they deliver so that they can have more time with their babies. Ordinarily, you are supposed to apply for and commence your mat. leave a month before your due date. That means you are only allowed two months after. But we find out that people are being discreet about their EDD and then they keep saying ‘Oh they’ve not given me at the hospital’ and they will just bring it a day or two before and then you hear they have given birth two days afterwards. (KII/37/HRM/MEP/Female) More than half of the 28 women journalists interviewed agreed that they worked very close to their delivery dates so they could have more time with their babies: So pregnancy, yes, I  was in the newsroom with my tummy, working around, doing my production at a time when I knew it was time for me to put to bed. (EI/13/RJ/MEP/Female) While it is true that women journalists get their jobs back, most are posted out of critical desks, like reporting for the news desk or similar duties with unpredictable schedules, so that women can come to work a little later or close a bit earlier and generally have more time with their babies. While this is considerate and thoughtful of media organisations, these changes, most times, imply slowing down the career progression of women journalists because the beats they cover and the tasks they undertake determine how they rise (especially in the private sector). It is a draw back because when I came back after I have been away for four months I missed out on a lot of things. I won’t lie to you. There are

38  Ganiyat Tijani-Adenle a lot of things, opportunities this year that I should take part in, but due to the fact that I’m a nursing mother I can’t take part but, I must tell you I would do it over and over again because that is the joy of motherhood. (EI/33/J/ML/Female) Yeah, it’s a complex one because once they get pregnant, they slow down. So we give considerations to them in terms of assignments given, in terms of our expectations with their performance. (KII/03/J/MEP/Male) Well, it affects women. Even here in [name of organisation], just this morning they were trying to work out a new roster and they had to, like, factor in the fact that some women are pregnant, some have kids that are not up to a year and all of that, so you find out that a lot of these women find it very difficult to go further in their careers because they are not putting in much of an effort. (EI/19/J/MM/Female) It is interesting that the view of the last interviewee is that women with children were ‘not putting much effort’, rather than appreciating the dilemma women raising children face. Other women journalists who occupy editorial and/or management positions or work on critical beats where flexible schedules cannot be applied have maintained that they did not have such luxuries of considerations and/ or concessions when they resumed from maternity leave. Most of them reported resuming back to their regular schedules as soon as they returned to their jobs. There are no records to highlight the number of outstanding women journalists who have left the Nigerian broadcast news industry based on maternity and childcare issues, but journalists and media managers mention the fact that some women do not return from maternity leave while others resign shortly after returning. Some people, you have them on the track and then they get pregnant and they go on maternity leave and they never come back. They will just call you when the maternity leave is about to end and they say, ‘You know what, I’ve decided I’m just going to stay with my baby’. So you have to develop another hand to master that position. (KII/42/J/MEP/Male) We are unable to say whether these women refuse to resume or resign due to discrimination or due to their perceived inability to combine the profession with their childcare roles. What we do know for certain is that the Nigerian broadcast news industry loses women journalists who are in the childbearing and rearing stages, and this significantly impacts the status of women in the industry.

Managing Wollstonecraft’s Dilemma 39 Although some women journalists have challenges with their organisations and superiors in getting the support and understanding they need when raising babies, sufficient anecdotal evidence suggest that media managers in Nigeria do a lot to assist women journalists who are pregnant or nursing babies. Unfortunately, these managers claim that women journalists get the help they need but that some of them take the system for granted and request frivolous concessions and considerations like taking babies for immunisations, taking day(s) off to attend to sick children or leaving work early due to disappointments from nannies or caregivers.

Excuse peddlers: media matriarchs and the outlooks preventing their career growth Editors and media managers continuously find it taxing having to consider women’s private lives when assigning responsibilities, so a good number of times, they leave expectant mothers or nursing mothers out of some key roles in order to avoid the headache of having to cover for those women when the pregnancy and childcare challenges surface. They don’t want to give you responsibilities that will make you have to be in the office when you should be at home. That’s it. They have this sense that you’ll need to go home anyway, so there are some things they won’t let you do. (EI/15/J/MEP/Female) This senior manager works in a broadcast organisation with a high number of female staff, but the challenge of having to cover for them when domestic roles come up has made the organisation take a very drastic decision: We are thinking of putting a limit to the number of women we are going to employ. . . . Most of them will go on maternity for three months, who is going to cover for them? (KII/27/J/MEP/Male) This male broadcast journalist in a management and editorial position was this frank because he was knew his identity would not be revealed. Interestingly, a similar scenario played out in Ghana in 1982 when the management of the Ghana News Agency (GNA) came to a decision to stop employing women journalists because they gave frivolous excuses like ‘a child is sick’ or ‘a husband is sick’, and they appeared to be, generally, laidback (Gadzekpo and Rivers, 1997; Gadzekpo, 2013). We need to use our discretion as men in the broadcast field to assign them to areas where we can manage effectively and efficiently, add value to our organisation and also be able to manage their home. (KII/39/J/MEP/Male)

40  Ganiyat Tijani-Adenle Women journalists understand this covert policy, and a good number of them who know they are good and are qualified for promotions do not query or contest management decisions when they are replaced by men because they are not ready to make the sacrifices required in keeping those positions. I know if I want that position I must be ready to pay the price, but am I? (EI/22/J/SM/Female) It is important to note that the ‘price’ this female journalist is referring to is either inadequate time for her children or challenges in her marriage due to long work hours. Media managers have argued that women journalists contribute significantly to the inequalities allegedly being perpetuated against them due to the way in which they make excuses and seek special considerations in the name of childcare. This male manager in a leading television station notes: At times someone calls and says ‘Sorry I have to close now because my nanny who is supposed to pick my child from the crèche didn’t go there and I need to go’. . . . That is someone in the middle of a report. (KII/09/J/MEP/Male) Several other male managers expressed similar opinions. I  equally asked women editors and managers if they also think their female subordinates give frivolous excuses and/or request needless concessions, and, interestingly, their responses were the same as those of the men. Women journalists have to, therefore, be as tough and as available as men or they will be seen as laid-back and incapable of holding key positions. Ironically, asking women journalists not to seek concessions, days off or excuses to cater for their children and/or families in a society where husbands hardly ever stay at home with sick children, take sick children to the hospital for treatment or immunisation, go for school open days or help with chores in the house is inequitable and unrealistic because women journalists without mothers, siblings or reliable help to handle these chores and responsibilities will have to do them by themselves, while making them come across as negligent and undependable at work. Combining journalism with motherhood is one of the major factors affecting the career progress of women journalists in Nigeria. If women journalists do not raise children, they are judged as failures. Meanwhile, nursing young children on the job (without a strong support structure) makes women broadcast journalists appear inefficient. The implication is that not much career progression is made when women journalists are within the childbearing and rearing phase. Unfortunately, a lot of women are not patient enough to stay in the broadcast news media without significant progress to outgrow this stage. Those who choose to stay while taking care of their

Managing Wollstonecraft’s Dilemma 41 young families may eventually get to occupy top positions later, but others may never have the opportunity (especially in the private sector), owing to the impressions that their superiors might have formed about them (while nursing infants/toddlers) due to the challenge of managing hectic schedules at work and at home. Equally, women journalists who are unable to cope with the challenges of combining full-time work with the early child-rearing phase leave or start making preparations to leave. Media managers expect this so they also cut back on their investments in such women journalists and limit the responsibilities assigned to them during this period. Unfortunately, the more women journalists sense inequality, the higher the chances are that they leave, and the more women journalists leave the newsroom, the more editors and media managers determine that they are not reliable, making it a lose-lose situation for women journalists, regardless of the choices they make. Related studies on women’s experience of journalism practice in other African countries confirm this reality. A Southern Africa study reveals that fewer women journalists are sent on trainings by news media organisations because their editors expected the married women to stay with their families, while others think they should not send female journalists to trainings on media technologies (Fagbemi and Ohiri-Aniche, 1997). Women journalists in Kenya are also restricted from roles that editors or management perceive could make them ‘marital truants’ by keeping them away from their homes and families. Thus, a lot of them leave the profession when they get tired of working without hope of career progression (Kareithi, 2013). Although women have gained more entry into the Namibian news industry and their numbers have increased on the hard beats, the ‘perception that women are not interested in some media positions, coupled with the lack of support for entering media professions, including lack of child-care options, burdensome travel requirements and continuing societal stereotypes about women’s roles may act as a barrier for many women’ (Nghidinwa, 2013, p.  312) in the country. Women journalists in Uganda also identified lack of career advancement as one of the main factors pushing them out of the industry. Some of the journalists lament that ‘you look ahead and you don’t see where you might be going in the next five years’ (Kaija, 2013, p. 324). Others equally state that ‘unless one has a very supportive spouse and family, most female journalists will leave the newsroom when they get married’ (Kaija, 2013, p. 325) due to the challenges that come with the responsibilities of marriage and childcare. The situation seems bleak in Ghana, where only 67 out of 257 women journalists surveyed in a study commissioned by Ghana’s Trades Union Congress have access to paid maternity leave (Otoo and Asafu-Adjaye, 2011, p. 25), while none of the six Ghanaian news companies sampled in Carolyn Byerly’s Global Report guarantee women journalists the same jobs when they return from maternity leave (Byerly, 2011, p.  96). In all, motherhood continues to be a serious impediment for the career progress of women journalists in Nigeria and Africa.

42  Ganiyat Tijani-Adenle

Conclusion The findings in this chapter are consistent with African feminist theorists’ standpoint that non-abusive marriages, procreation and child-rearing are noble and divine duties that women should undertake with pride (Mikell, 1997; Nnaemeka, 2003; Ogunyemi, 1996). That is why Nigerian women broadcast journalists continue to bear and nurse children despite knowing the prejudice that awaits them once they take that route. An interviewee mentioned that despite missing out on trainings and foreign opportunities due to nursing an infant, she ‘would do it over and over again because that is the joy of motherhood’ (EI/33/J/ML/Female). That is why African feminist theorists do not seek to change that perspective but instead seek liberal ways to ensure the legislation and implementation of laws and policies will alleviate the challenges working women face when raising children. The clamour for increased maternity leave with pay, on-site childcare facilities, guarantees that women will return to their jobs/positions after maternity leave and encouraging men to support in the home to reduce the burden on women are some of the solutions being proffered to this challenge (Fagbemi and Ohiri-Aniche, 1997; Kaija, 2013; Kareithi, 2013; Nghidinwa, 2013; Otoo and Asafu-Adjaye, 2011) because African feminists seek to protect women on the continent without jeopardising ‘institutions which are of value’ (Boyce Davies, 1986, p. 9) to them.

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Managing Wollstonecraft’s Dilemma 43 Cai, C. (2008) ‘Women’s participation as leaders in the transformation of the Chinese media: A case study of Guangzhou city’. Unpublished Thesis (PhD), University of Maryland. Economic and Social Research Council. (2015) ‘ESRI framework for research ethics’. Available at: http://www.esrc.ac.uk/files/funding/guidance-for-applicants/esrcframework-for-research-ethics-2015/ (Accessed: 17 April 2017). Fagbemi, A. and Ohiri-aniche, C. (eds.) (1997) National Gender Training Manual: Module 1. Lagos: Undp/Unifem/Unicef. Fapohunda, E. (1978) ‘Women at work in Nigeria: Factors affecting modern sector employment’. In Human Resources and African Development. New York: Praeger Publications. Fapohunda, E. (1982) ‘The childcare dilemma of working mothers in African Cities: The case of Lagos Nigeria’. In Bay, E. (ed.) Women and Work in Africa. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, pp. 277–288. Frank, O. (1983) ‘Infertility in sub-Saharan Africa: Estimates and implications’. Population and Development Review, 9(1), pp. 137–144. Franks, S. (2013) Women and Journalism. London: IB Tauris. Gadzekpo, A. (2013) ‘Ghana: Women in decision-making – new opportunities, old story’. In Byerly, C. (ed.) The Palgrave International Handbook of Women and Journalism. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 371–383. Gadzekpo, A. and Rivers, A. (1997) ‘Miles to go before we sleep. How effective are women’s media associations?’ Unpublished paper delivered at seminar, School of Communication Studies, University of Ghana, Accra, 23 May 1997. Goodwin, C. (2009) Research in Psychology: Methods and Design. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons. Hammersley, M. (1992) ‘Deconstructing the qualitative-quantitative divide’. In Brannen, J. (ed.) Mixing Methods: Qualitative and Quantitative Research. Avebury: Aldershot. Hollos, M. (2003) ‘Profiles of infertility in southern Nigeria: Women’s voices from Amakiri’. African Journal of Reproductive Health, 7, pp. 46–56. Kaija, B. (2013) ‘Uganda: Women near parity but still leaving newsrooms’. In Byerly, C. (ed.) The Palgrave International Handbook of Women and Journalism. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 315–332. Kareithi, P. (2013) ‘Kenya: “A girl may not sit on the father’s stool” ’. In Byerly, C. (ed.) The Palgrave International Handbook of Women and Journalism. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 266–283. Liamputtong, P. and Ezzy, D. (2005) Qualitative Research Methods. 2nd ed. Melbourne, VIC: Oxford University Press. McBurney, D. and White, T. (2010) Research Methods. 8th Ed. Belmont, CA: Wadworth, Centage Learning. Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) and International Federation of Journalists (IFJ). (1996) Women in the Media in Asia: Participation and Portrayal. Sydney: MEAA. Available at: www.alliance.org.au/docman/view-document/279women-in-the-media-report (Accessed: 29 October 2015). MikelL, G. (1997) African Feminism: The Politics of Survival in Sub-Saharan Africa. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Miner-rubino, K. and Jayaratne, T. (2007) ‘Feminist survey research’. In HesseBiber, S. and Leavy, P. (eds.) Feminist Research Practice: A  Primer. Thousand Oaks: Sage, pp. 293–325.

44  Ganiyat Tijani-Adenle Nghidinwa, M. (2013) ‘Namibia: Women make strides in post-independence newsrooms’. In Byerly, C. (ed.) The Palgrave International Handbook of Women and Journalism. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 301–314. Nnaemeka, O. (2003) ‘Nego-feminism: Theorizing, practicing, and pruning Africa’s way’. Signs, 29(2), pp. 357–385. North, L. (2009) The Gendered Newsroom: How Journalists Experience the Changing World of Media. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. North, L. (2012) ‘‘Blokey’ newsrooms still a battleground for female journalists’. Australian Journalism Review, 34(2), pp. 57–70. North, L. (2016) ‘Still a “blokes club”: The motherhood dilemma in journalism’. Journalism, 17(3), pp. 315–330. Obi, N. (2017) ‘Child safety: Nightmare of house helps’. The Nation, 4 February. Available at: http://thenationonlineng.net/child-safety-nightmare-house-helps/. Ogunyemi, C. (1996) Africa Wo/Man Palava: The Nigerian Novel by Women. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Okafor, E. and Amayo, O. (2006) ‘Parents and their coping strategies in Nigeria: A study of selected working mothers’. International Journal of Sociology of the Family, pp. 87–111. Okeke-Ihejirika, P. (2004) Negotiating Power and Privilege: Igbo Career Women in Contemporary Nigeria. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Okonofua, F., et al. (1997) ‘The social meaning of infertility in Southwest Nigeria’. Health Transition Review, 7(2), pp. 205–220. Okonofua, F., et  al. (2005) ‘A case control study of risk factors for male infertility in Southern Nigeria’. Tropical Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 22, pp. 136–143. Otoo, K. and Asafu-Adjaye, P. (2011) Wages and Working Conditions of Media Workers in Ghana. Research Paper 2011 (01). Accra, Ghana: Labour Research and Policy Institute of Ghana of Ghana Trades Congress. Pittin, R. (2002) Women and Work in Northern Nigeria: Transcending Boundaries. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Reinharz, S. (1992) Feminist Methods in Social Research. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tijani-Adenle, G. (2016) ‘She’s homely, beautiful and then, hardworking! Critiquing the representation of women leaders and managers in the Nigerian press’. Gender in Management: An International Journal, 31(5/6), pp. 396–410. Tijani-Adenle, G. (2019) ‘Women in Nigerian news media: Status, experiences and structures’. Unpublished Thesis (PhD), De Montfort University. Williams, A. L. (2010) ‘Post-feminism at work? The experiences of female journalists in the UK’. Unpublished Thesis (PhD), University of Nottingham. Yusuff, O. (2015) ‘Challenges of women entrepreneurs in rural informal economic activities: Implications for sustainable rural development in Ogun State, Nigeria’. In Olutayo, A., Omobowale, A. and Akanle, O. (eds.) Contemporary Development Issues in Nigeria. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 202–218.

4 Representing and experiencing motherhood on- and off-screen in Swedish film Maria Jansson and Louise Wallenberg

Introduction The idea that women are first and foremost mothers and that mothers are tools for their children to become capable and autonomous individuals (Ruddick, 1995) is omnipresent in societal and cultural representations of motherhood. On-screen, women are delimited to being represented as mothers (or as mothers-to-be), while being circumscribed by Oedipal narrations and representations (de Lauretis, 1984). Women as mothers are made into passive and secondary figures who only exist to help men (sons) become ‘real’ men. Feminist film theory resonates in feminist analyses of mothering, which are careful to distinguish between dominant constructions of motherhood used to discipline and domesticate women on the one hand, and women’s actual practices of motherhood on the other. Meanwhile, it is also noted that these two sides – that is, constructions and experiences – of motherhood are intertwined in women’s experiences of mothering and give rise to feelings of insufficiency and guilt (see, e.g., Rich, 1976). This chapter deals with a Swedish context and aims to explore how women film-makers and their experiences as mothers and daughters inform representations of mothers on-screen. Through analysing interviews with women film-makers and their films we argue that experiences of caring for children result in portraying mothers as persons in their own right on-screen. We also argue that the analysed films display features related to discussions about motherhood in Sweden at the time of the film’s release. Juggling motherhood and a career in film has been reported to be a challenge for women living with children and is an instance which reveals how the film industry is gendered (Liddy, 2017; O’ Brien, 2015, 2019; Wing-Fai et al., 2015; Wreyford, 2013). The Swedish film industry is no exception: in spite of Sweden’s reputation of being gender equal in many respects, women in the film industry still experience trouble combining mothering and film work. Relying on interviews collected for a research project on women and the Swedish film industry, this chapter focusses on six Swedish women filmmakers and five films made by them, spanning over five decades (1977–2017).

46  Maria Jansson and Louise Wallenberg They were chosen because they have made films that relate to issues about motherhood and because motherhood came up in our interviews with these women. The period coincides with the development of gender equality efforts including reforms such as expanding public childcare. This periodisation allows us to investigate how dilemmas connected to motherhood have changed over time and how on-screen representations reflect these changes. All films except one depict contemporary Sweden at the time of their opening. The exception is Suzanne Osten’s Mamma, which is a semiautobiographical film set in the 1940s. In selecting the films, we sought one film in which mothering was a central theme from each decade made by the interviewed women. The focus on mothering enables us to address various aspects of mothering as a practice and relation, rather than viewing motherhood as biologically determined (see, e.g., Holm, 1993; Ruddick, 1995). The chapter is structured as follows: first, we offer a short contextualisation of how motherhood and parenting have been discussed and negotiated in Sweden, and then we review how motherhood has been analysed and discussed in the field of film studies. Following these two sections, we recount how experiences of mothering and working in the film industry are expressed in the interviews before discussing the representation of motherhood in the five films. The chapter ends with short summary in which we bring out our findings.

The Swedish context: motherhood, work and childcare Since the introduction of gender equality as a policy field in 1974, the dual strategy to increase (a) women’s gainful employment and (b) men’s involvement in caring for (their own) children has been promoted by a number of reforms. While 50% of all women worked in 1970, only 9% of all children attended public day care. However, during the 1980s public day care expanded substantially, and in 1995 the government introduced a ‘day care guarantee’ for all children over the age of one year. In 1998 a national curriculum for preschools was introduced and childcare officially became a part of Sweden’s educational system. Today 50% of all one-year-old children, 90% of all two-year-olds and 94% of all children between three and six years attend preschools, while 82% of women work (Martin-Korpi, 2015; Statistics Sweden, 2019). To improve the conditions for combining work and childcare, the parental leave act from 1974, which granted men and women remunerated leave for caring for newborns and toddlers, has been expanded several times and today allows either of the parents to stay at home with an 80% wage reimbursement for 390 days, and an additional 90 days with a lower remuneration. While women and men, under the gender-neutral term ‘parents’, are equally referred to as providers and carers in policies, women still use 70% of the parental leave benefits, and they do almost twice as much work as men in the household, including childcare (Försäkringskassan, 2018; Stanfors, 2018). In addition, many women who

Representing and experiencing motherhood 47 live with children testify to feeling guilt for being absent. This reflects the fact that women and men perform their parenting duties in different conditions and that motherhood and fatherhood are constructed according to different ideals (Alsarve et al., 2016; Elvin-Nowak, 1999; Widarsson et al., 2014). Turning to the film industry, gender equality efforts have led to an increase in the number of women behind the camera. But the conditions for women in the industry are still problematic in terms of budget size, conditions for distribution and screening (SFI, 2018). However, mothering has, perhaps a bit surprisingly given its importance in the general discussions about gender equality, not been problematised in the deliberations about women in the film industry. Meanwhile, in our interviews with women film-makers, mothering does come forth as important to their experience of work. We will now proceed to develop a theoretical framework for understanding the representation of motherhood on-screen and how women’s experiences of mothering may be understood to influence women filmmaker’s portrayal of mothers on-screen.

Theorising motherhood in film In film, representations of women have been largely circumscribed to a few stereotypes or archetypes (Haskell, 1974; Rosen, 1973; Soila, 1991). In tandem with Luce Irigaray’s analysis of women’s social roles, the three most dominant female archetypes on-screen are the virgin, the prostitute and the mother (Irigaray, 1977). While these archetypes are static in themselves, they may start out as one and, through pressures that are both intrinsic and extrinsic, develop or transform into another. But whereas virgin characters may turn into prostitutes or mothers, and prostitutes may become mothers, mothers seldom become prostitutes. If understanding film as a ‘gender technology’, instructing us how to perform gender (i.e., what we can do and be), then women spectators too are circumscribed (de Lauretis, 1987). And since most films reproduce the original Oedipal story, film is about boys becoming men through overcoming obstacles and about girls becoming women and mothers through domestication (de Lauretis, 1984). Hence, mothers (or mothers-to-be) constitute central figures in film. While being crucial for men’s existence, they always remain secondary because of the supportive roles that they are given, assisting men (sons) in becoming real men while also serving to prove men’s heterosexuality. Academic literature that connects the maternal with the cinematic apparatus and experience has a long history (see Braudy, 1976; Eisenstein, 1949; Krakauer, 1985). The relation between the spectator as infant and the screen as mother has also been brought forward by feminist film theory as a way to debunk the male-dominated aspects of cinema and spectatorship. This line of research has turned the treatise of Hollywood cinema as

48  Maria Jansson and Louise Wallenberg phallocentric (Mulvey, 1975) upside down in two ways: first, by focussing on the empowering mother as screen, exchanging the paternal discourse for a maternal one, and secondly, by countering the exclusion of women as possible spectators and subjects. One of the most influential texts to validate the maternal in relation to spectatorship is Gaylyn Studlar’s ‘Masochism and the Perverse Pleasures of Cinema’ (1984). Building on Gilles Deleuze (1967), she asks us to deconstruct the psychoanalytic belief in the Father (and the Symbolic as his domain) and instead to imagine the Mother as the most central and powerful figure in the child’s life. The mother, she argues, is powerful because of the safety she offers, but she is equally powerful in that she makes visible an obvious male lack. Studlar’s theorisation on spectatorship is important for the conception of film representation and also for the critique of phallocentric Freudianism: not only does her work challenge Freud’s tenets regarding the aetiology of masochism as a response to the father, it serves to invalidate the Oedipal scenario. Studlar’s study was published after the height of analytical work on two of Hollywood’s most canonical melodramas: Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937) and Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945), both of which focus on a (single) mother (see, e.g., Cook, 1978; Kaplan, 1983; Williams, 1984, 1988). Here, Kaplan’s reading of Stella Dallas (1983) stands out. She fleshes out how the mother is useful only as long as she is nurturing and life-giving (Kaplan, 1983). This, of course, is not the case only in Stella Dallas, but in most mainstream films: once a (any) female character is no longer of use, she is made obsolete. Following Irigaray, women can only be sexual objects (virgins and prostitutes) or they can be nurturing bodies (mothers). Some 15 years after the focus on maternal melodramas, Lucy Fischer published Cinematernity, which explores representations of motherhood within specific film genres while also discussing how genre has been gendered by (mostly male) theorists (Fischer, 1996). Fischer contends that motherhood has played a fundamental role, not only in ‘feminine’ genres such as the melodrama but in the overall cinematic representation and experience. In a more recent collection by Addison et  al. (2009), a number of scholars discuss the 21st-century obsessions with the maternal star body and media’s maternal scrutiny. In line with Fischer, they too argue that film’s obsession with motherhood is nothing new: ‘mothers have indeed always been central figures, and as such, they have always served a political and ideological agenda, not seldom serving misogynistic and conservative ends’ (Addison et al., 2009, p. 4). In the five films that we have chosen to analyse, mothers are central, but they are outside of the Oedipal structure. Instead, they are there in their own right, struggling and trying to cope as mothers, as women and – in some instances – as professionals. Before discussing the five films, we will focus on their makers and how they describe their own experiences of mothering while working in the film industry.

Representing and experiencing motherhood 49

Experiences of motherhood and working in the film industry Having access to childcare and other parental benefits has probably contributed to the non-problematisation of women’s caring responsibilities in contemporary discussions about women and film. However, our interviews reveal problems similar to studies in other European countries pointing to how the organisation of film production produces problems for women who are living with children. These include irregular incomes and irregular working hours as well as problems making use of benefits and rights for parents (see O’ Brien, 2015, 2019). Precarious conditions and informal hiring (Wing-Fai et al., 2015) hinder women from using their rights out of a fear of losing their jobs or future job opportunities, and, further, they do not want to be considered ‘difficult little bugger[s]’, as editor Lena Runge (Interview, March 19, 2019) puts it in describing her fight for her legal right to shorter working hours. The organisation of work in the film industry rests on ideas about the creative process, described by director and producer Mia Engberg as a ‘notion that one has to organize the film set and the shooting so that everyone works 12 hours per day . . . until one almost pukes from exhaustion’ (March 8, 2018). The discrepancy between the organisation of work in the film industry and the eight-hour workday and five-day workweek upon which childcare services are based stands out as a problem in our interviews. However, while the practical aspects of day care are important, the interview participants also testify to feelings of guilt as they relate to ideals of the present mother. Katinka Faragó, once a continuity supervisor who turned producer, has mothering experiences from the 1960s and 1970s, when she relied on nannies. Her work included travelling and sometimes meant staying away for long periods: I was six weeks in the US filming, and the telephone operator did not know how to connect me with Sweden so I had to teach her in order to be able to call home. . . . All that guilty consciousness . . . it was terrible. One should not be away from one’s children. (May 15, 2018) Director Maria Hedman Hvitfeldt, whose child was born in the early 2000s, felt that the long stays away from home were ‘not worth it’. The father of their child worked in their home town and managed pick-ups and daily care, but even so, she ‘heard from preschool that [child’s name] suffered from my extensive travelling’ (April 9, 2018). These two examples of maternal guilt are separated by almost 40 years, yet they indicate that norms for mothering work to induce guilt in mothers. The more recent example illustrates how even Swedish childcare reforms are entrenched with the ideal of a present mother (Bekkengen, 2002; Elvin-Nowak, 1999; Jansson, 2001).

50  Maria Jansson and Louise Wallenberg Another concern for mothers relates to the project-based work model with no steady income (see, e.g., Wing-Fai et  al., 2015). Several of the women interviewed testify that the discontinuity of income is problematic. They describe how they take on jobs, such as lecturing and teaching, for survival. For instance, Faragó describes how she felt herself forced to take on extra work just after finishing a Bergman production: ‘It was 1971, I think. It was November. Two children looking expectantly at their mother, saying: “Soon it is Christmas, mom!” And I thought to myself, how the heck am I going to fix this?’ The experiences of combining work and motherhood narrated by women film-makers reveals feelings of guilt for not being present or good enough. While the project-based organisation of work in the film industry chimes badly with the way preschools are organised, the experiences of film workers reflect problems reported by women in other sectors as well. This leads us to explore how women film-makers, who have experience of caring for children or of being cared for by a mother in a society that largely defines womanhood in terms of motherhood, portray mothers on-screen.

Paradistorg / Summer paradise (1977) In 1976, actor Gunnel Lindblom is approached by Ingmar Bergman to take over a film project based on a novel by Swedish author Ulla Isaksson. She takes on the project and brings in Faragó as producer. Most of the film crew consists of women, from the two main protagonists and the supporting roles to costume design, editing and set design. Paradistorg deals with female friendship across generations and social class. The characters spend summer days in a beautiful house in the archipelago while debating motherhood, childcare and the current development of society. The character Emma, a social worker, argues that it is damaging for children to be left in day care at an early age, and she reprimands women who go back to work too soon after having given birth. Refuting her is her best friend Katha, who is a medical doctor with her own practice and also a mother of two and grandmother of three. She has managed to bring up her two daughters by herself while also being successful in her profession. Paradistorg reflects the worries in the 1970s in Sweden, when it became obvious that women were not home, the supply of public day care was lacking and many children were left alone after school. Gunnel Lindblom tells us (April 27, 2018) that ‘the difficulties of being a professional woman’ is a theme that runs through all her films. Women caring for children at home were not as convinced as the politicians that public childcare was the best option for children (Jansson, 2001). The worry that dissolving the bond between mother and child was detrimental for the child’s development informed the debate about so called nyckelbarn – children with both parents working outside the home who, hence, must wear a house key on a string around their necks so as to have access to their home after school. These

Representing and experiencing motherhood 51

Figure 4.1 Paradistorg (Lindblom, 1977). Katha (Birgitta Valberg), medical doctor and single mother of two (and grandmother of three), together with her ageing parents, Wilhelm (Holger Löwenadler) and Alma (Dagny Lind), in Paradistorg by Gunnel Lindblom (1977). Photographer: Johan Nyqvist

children, it was argued, risked becoming drug addicts and criminals, a fear that producer Faragó experienced herself: So, that [childcare] was a bit tricky. I thought they would take drugs and smoke when they were ten, but none of them have even looked at a cigarette. And they are very successful ladies, now in their fifties. But, there were times when it was difficult. . . . Talk about having a guilty conscience! The debate about nyckelbarn, along with the debate about day care as a prerequisite for women’s gainful employment, clearly informs the media debate spurred by the film’s release (see Gustafsson and Runesson, 1977; Sima, 1977). When interviewing Lindblom, she tells us that she thinks the media discussion was unfair in its interpretation that the film was against preschools and ‘on the wrong side of feminism’ (April, 27, 2018). From her point of

52  Maria Jansson and Louise Wallenberg view, the film problematises the individualisation and privatisation spurred by the idea of self-realisation (through a career), and the message is that people have to engage in societal issues, for instance, the well-being of children.

Mamma/Mother (1982) Susanne Osten established an independent theatre group in the 1960s and has since been an influential force within the political (and feminist) theatre movement. Mamma, her first feature film, was made as ‘a redress of the invisible, an issue that we pursued in the women’s movement at that time’ (April  16, 2018). Mamma is a semi-autobiographical film about Osten’s mother, film critic Gerd Osten, who aspired to become a film director in the 1940s. Osten tells us that she made the film after receiving her mother’s diary: ‘[Reading the diary] I thought, this has never been portrayed on screen. An intellectual woman who makes film’ (interview April 16, 2018). In the film Gerd expresses how she wants to make a film that ‘shows a woman’s real face, a woman who loves’. In her way are traditional gender norms and expectations – and several men who first encourage and then dismiss her film ideas. We also learn that there is a more private obstacle in her way: Gerd’s daughter Nelly, whose presence obstructs her creative work. Gerd is constantly fighting conventions and says, quoting Jacques Prévert’s ‘Notre vie c’est maintenant’ (‘Our life is now’). She so wants to live, but there is clearly no room for Nelly in the life she aspires to live. The timeless theme of this representation of motherhood is depicted from the view of the woman who does not want to lose her autonomy, while clearly also connecting with the discussions about women’s liberation in the early 1980s. Mamma does not condemn the mother, but rather the portrayal of the mother makes her choices and her not-so-good mothering intelligible. The explanation offered in the film points to the organisation of society as the reason why women cannot both have children and be professionals. Interestingly, there are two parents to care for Nelly, yet the film shows how rules and expectations clearly hold the mother responsible as main carer for the child. When spending a day off with her two girlfriends at a public swimming pool, Gerd says: ‘One should be able to live with children, work, love – surely. But it doesn’t work’. One friend answers: ‘The worst thing is that one wasn’t told before, told that one has to make a choice’. The other friend says, as she turns to Gerd: ‘I do think your film should end with them having a child once she has liberated him. And that HE takes care of it’. They all laugh out loud as if that would be an outrageous idea. Time passes, and Gerd never gets to make her film. Encountering one setback after another, she finally becomes mentally unstable. As the film ends, there is an image of her as an old woman sitting in an institution, and there is a voice-over that says ‘Gerd continued as a film critic in the 1950s. She became mentally ill. She lost all her friends. She died in 1974. Mom never got to make her film’.

Representing and experiencing motherhood 53

Figure 4.2 Mamma/Mother (Osten, 1982). Gerd Osten (Malin Ek) as aspiring film director in Susanne Osten’s Mamma (1982). Photographer: Hans Welin

While Osten depicts how problematic it was for women in the 1940s to combine motherhood and professional life, the film also features obvious references to the debate about women’s situation in the early 1980s. The statement about the swapping of roles – with women being free and men caring for children – is possibly a wink to Gerd Brantenberg’s novel Egalias döttrar from 1977, which was popular in the women’s movement of which Osten was part. There is one big difference between the mother in the film and the daughter, though: while Gerd never got to make her film, her daughter did. And while the film is about a specific woman who is turned down in a phallocentric system, it is also a film about a woman who desires and demands change for a more equal society. In this way, Gerd refuses to be a secondary figure, as does Osten when making the mother the very central figure in her film (and in Gerd’s life).

Tsatsiki, mamman och polisen / Tsatsiki, mom and the police man (1999) Ella Lemhagen has been directing feature films since 1996, and most of her work caters to larger audiences. Tsatsiki, mamman och polisen is based on two novels by Moni Nilsson-Brännström, and the script was written by Ulf Stark. Tsatsiki, about a child’s longing for a missing father, is also a film

54  Maria Jansson and Louise Wallenberg about single parenthood. Tsatsiki has never met his father, but knows that he is from Greece. His struggling wants-to-be a rock star mother has a heart of gold, and while she seems to lack control over her life, her love for her son is portrayed as endless, as is his for her. In several scenes, their intimate and loving connection, their togetherness, is depicted as ideal (and as one that ought not to be in need of a third party). While his mother may appear irresponsible, she is a present mother putting her child first. Here, it is the fathers who are problematic: Tsatsiki dreams about his father and imagines him as loving, however he is absent. His mother’s boyfriend, on the other hand, is present, but uninterested and aggressive. Further, the school teachers seem all to be caring women, whereas the principal is a man who hides in his room doing paperwork. The caring for children is, however, not completely gender divided: courting Tsatsiki’s mother is a kind, slow and soft-spoken police officer who takes care of him when the mother is busy. The importance of a child having a present father has been a recurring theme in Swedish debate (Elvin-Nowak, 1999; Klinth, 2002). This belief rests on an understanding of women and men as biologically and psychologically determined to take on different roles in upbringing. While mothers are caring and nurturing, the role of the father is to impose general principles and norms that guide children’s entry into society and provide a male role

Figure 4.3 Tsatsiki, mom and the police man (Lemhagen, 1999). Intimacy and togetherness between mother (Alexandra Rapaport) and son (Samuel Haus) in Ella Lemhagen’s Tsatsiki, morsan och polisen (1999). Photographer: Anders Bohman

Representing and experiencing motherhood 55 model to boys (Elvin-Nowak, 1999). Tsatsiki’s desire for his father, which is encouraged by his mother’s stories about him, reflects his longing for a male role model. The film displays an ambivalence in embracing the boy’s need for a father while showing that living with a present father is not a necessity: he adores his mother, and although she is a bit unorganised, she is a person in her own right who has agency and who clearly strives to be more than just a mum. And as the film comes to closure, the mother secures two father figures for Tsatsiki: she takes him to meet his biological father and she gets romantically involved with the nice policeman. The negotiation of motherhood reflects the more accepting attitude toward single mums in the 1990s, and the depiction of the superhero-mum flirts with the trope of the amazing single parent introduced by single parent interest organisations formed in the mid-1990s. For instance, the names of the organisations Makalösa föräldrar and Enastående föräldrar are both a play on words. Makalösa connotes both ‘exceptional(ly good)’ and ‘without spouse’, while enastående translates to ‘standing alone’ as well as ‘amazing’. The film also represents the single mum’s longing for love and how to include ‘new’ men into the mother-child relationship – in doing so, the film provides images of ‘new’ family constellations, which coincide with a bundle of new words (e.g., ‘plastic’ mum or dad) in the late 1980s and 1990s.

Min skäggiga mamma / My bearded mom (2003) Based on a script by Marianne Strand, Maria Hedman Hvitfeldt directed the short film Min skäggiga mamma in 2003. After this success, she directed four productions before leaving the film industry for a job as lecturer at Stockholm University of the Arts. Min skäggiga mamma deals with two young sisters living isolated on a small, remote farm together with their father who is suffering from physical injuries and depression after a car accident. The sisters are trying to apprehend why their mother has abandoned them to go and live with another man. The film is told from the children’s perspective and contains clearly magic realistic components: as the older sister tries to retell what has happened to her younger sister, she constructs a narrative in which the mother slowly transforms into a horse. This is paralleled with sequences showing the two sisters, who, bored in their clearly isolated milieu, are dreaming of having a horse of their own. The becoming-horse story is thus used to explain why the mother has left them, since a horse, the older sister says, ‘has to run free’. In the flashbacks, the mother is shown fighting extreme hair growth – all her body parts are increasingly being covered with thick, dark hair. She is desperate and is shown shaving and waxing her face and body all the time, leaving her with open wounds. Finally, she transforms into a big, beautiful horse and leaves. While it would be suitable to apply Studlar’s theory to this film, with the (missing) mother absorbing the screen through the children’s memory of

56  Maria Jansson and Louise Wallenberg her, the film also invites us to read her in terms of becoming. In becominganimal, she refutes her obligations as mother, and through the process of becoming-horse, she achieves a non-identity, which may be the very condition of freedom (Braidotti, 2003; Deleuze and Guattari, 1996). Before the mother finally transforms into a horse, she gets warmer and warmer, and she starts undressing and leaning out the window to get some fresh air. Her home is suffocating, and we can easily see how this suffocation is not only tied to the house and to the fact that she is in the midst of transforming into another species – it is also tied to her role as mother and wife. She is clearly in agony, and this is one that may be read in terms of a sense of loss of autonomy. Following Adrienne Rich, this feeling is constituted by the overwhelming helplessness of the child and the imperative for mothers to care, combined with ideas of the home as the proper place for women and children to reside (Rich, 1976). The portrayal of suffocating motherhood can also be tied to the critique of neoliberal and neoconservative ideas that emerged in the 1980s and the proliferation of biological discourses about birthing, breastfeeding and mothering that followed in the 1990s. In Sweden, this biologist turn in the debate (Borélius, 1994; Robert and Uvnäs Moberg, 1994) about women and motherhood was criticised and argued to

Figure 4.4 Min skäggiga mamma / My bearded mom (Hedman Hvitfeldt, 2003). The mother (Malena Engström) ‘becoming horse’ in Maria Hedman Hvitfeldt’s Min skäggiga mamma (2003). Photographer: Peter Palm

Representing and experiencing motherhood 57 produce feelings of insufficiency and guilt in mothers by feminist scholars, journalists and activists (see Ekman et al., 2002; Elvin-Nowak, 1999).

Dröm vidare / Beyond dreams (2017) Rojda Sekersöz was the youngest student ever to get into the Dramatic Institute in Stockholm at the age of 19. Beyond dreams is her first feature film, and it deals with a group of women in their early twenties living in a suburb of Stockholm, where they hang out and dream about going to Montevideo. To realise their dream, they plan a heist in a jeweller’s shop. However, Mirja, the main character, is pushed by her sick mother to get a job and start paying rent. She finds a job on the black market as a hotel cleaner. Things are going well until her friends find out about her job and accuse her of betraying them and their dream. When the mother dies, Mirja is left with her younger sister Isa and concludes that she has to give up the dream and take care of Isa. The obligation to care for the sister causes several crucial turning points in the film. For instance, when Mirja brings her sister to work because her mother is in the hospital, disaster follows and she is fired. An important aspect of the film is that it breaks with the idea of motherhood as biological. Mirja and her friends are visually presented to be ‘brown and have tits’, as Rojda Sekersöz explains in an article (Wettersten, 2017). However, Mirja’s mother is blond, and originates from Finland, a fact that becomes a bit of a surprise to the viewer when the mother first appears. The contrast between her dark skin and hair and her mother’s and younger sister’s blond appearance makes the audience aware of their own presuppositions. Sekersöz tell us that the surprise was intended and that the choice to have a Finnish mother was made to produce a genealogy of the discrimination of immigrants from the Finns of the 1960s and 1970s to the African and Middle Eastern immigrants of the 2010s (March 22, 2018). She tells us that her next film will also feature ‘a Finnish mother’ but that she is thinking about how to portray her in order to avoid stereotyping: ‘Finnish women are always portrayed in a specific way in Swedish film – so for my next film I will try to create a different Finnish mother’ (March 22, 2018). Sekersöz, who is not living with children herself, thinks mother characters are important in representing other aspects of women, like ethnicity. The mother figure thus becomes a person, a signifier of different aspects of what it means to be a human in society. The problematisation of biology in the film continues as Mirja becomes the primary carer for Isa when her mother is in hospital and later dies. As the primary carer, Mirja has to deal with the same problems as most women living with children do, and juggling caring for the sister with work leads to a chain of events that results in her losing her job. The message in the film is that it is not the biological bond that creates problems but that social structures (whether having a proper job or pursuing a career in crime) are not built to facilitate caring for children. Thus, the film challenges the

58  Maria Jansson and Louise Wallenberg

Figure 4.5 Dröm vidare / Beyond dreams (Sekersöz, 2017). Best friends Sarah (Gizem Erdogan), Mirja (Evin Ahmad), Nina (Segen Tesfai) and Emmy (Malin Persson) in Rojda Sekersöz’s debut film Dröm vidare (2017). Photographer: Alexandra Aristohova

notion that the conflict between mothering and care has been solved by the welfare state and reintroduces the material aspects of this problem and how they arise from structures based on gender, class and ethnicity. These aspects are all built into the representation of the mother and of Mirja herself, who takes on mothering duties when her mother dies.

Conclusion The films and experiences discussed in this chapter stretch over five decades, a period during which motherhood both as ‘practice and institution’ (Rich, 1976) changed due to the expansion of childcare. The representations of mothers in the five films reflect changes in both discourse and conditions of mothering, such as the increased attention to single parents (Tsatsiki) and the reinvention of the material aspects of mothering due to austerity policies (Dröm vidare). However, they also reveal continuities. The interview participants have mothered under very different conditions regarding access to childcare, and they also differ with respect to the presence of a care-sharing partner. But despite this, they all express feelings of guilt for not being present. We interpret this as a continuity where motherhood is

Representing and experiencing motherhood 59 socially constructed to reinforce women’s (lack of) autonomy. We believe that while the film-makers’ individual and particular experiences may not inform the films, their more general understanding of what it means to care for or be cared for, while also wanting to do something more, shows in how mothers are portrayed in their films. For instance, the negotiation of autonomy and individual freedom in relation to mothering is present in the films, whether through a political argument, a desire to live and create, a dream of leaving the suburb or becoming-horse. Our analysis supports the argument that women living with children are complex and nuanced persons (and characters) and that they cannot be reduced to being the means for someone else’s (men’s) becoming. This is most obvious in the films where the mother is perceived from the perspective of the child (Mamma, Tsatsiki and Beyond dreams): here, the mother is represented as anything but secondary, and although her choices may cause the child to suffer, they are still intelligible and legitimate. When reading the five films, it becomes clear that all of them invalidate the Oedipal scenario described by de Lauretis in the way that they place women and women’s stories at the centre (de Lauretis, 1984). Some films have men as supporting (and romantic) characters (as in Tsatsiki), but the majority of them position men as having little value for the advancement of the story (Paradistorg), or they are next to absent (Dröm vidare). Further, they problematise motherhood from a variety of different angles, making motherhood (and mothers) into a heterogenous and miscellaneous group. Through their diverse and at times aberrant (My bearded mom) representations, these films serve to deconstruct the conventional representation of the mother as an archetype that has dominated mainstream cinema. From Osten’s aspirational Gerd, via Lindblom’s independent Katha and Hedman Hvitfeldt’s mom-becoming-horse, to Lemhagen’s and Sekersöz’s imperfect but loving moms, the portrayal of the mother as altruistic and sacrificial is somewhat turned on its head. Surely, they all nurture to a certain degree, but they have very little in common with Stella Dallas or Mildred Pierce: these mothers lead their own lives, and in doing so, they demand that their children (most of whom in all films are daughters) care for themselves. If the mothers get ill or die, as in Mamma and Dröm vidare, it is not because they are punished or made redundant by the film narrative as useless mothers: rather, their endings, however sad, are used as a critique of the gendered inequalities that characterises society. There is no invitation to cry for them, but with them.

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60  Maria Jansson and Louise Wallenberg Sweden’. in Grünov, D. and Evertsson, M. (eds.) Couples’ Transitions to Parenthood: Analysing Gender and Work in Europe. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 79–100. Bekkengen, L. (2002) ‘Man får välja. Om föräldraskap och föräldraledighet i familjeliv och arbetsliv [One have to chose. On parenthood and parental leave in family life and working life]’. Diss., Karlstad Univeristy, Karlstad. Borélius, M. (1994) Sedan du fött [After givning birth]. Stockholm: Fisher. Braidotti, R. (2003) ‘Be-coming woman: Or sexual difference revisited’. Theory, Culture & Society, 20(3), pp. 43–64. Brantenberg, G. (1977) Egalias døtre. Oslo: Pax førlag. Braudy, L. (1976) The World in a Frame: What We See in Films. New York: Anchor Doubleday. Cook, P. (1978) ‘Duplicity in Mildred Pierce’. In Kaplan, E. A. (ed.) Women in Film Noir. London: BFI. de Lauretis, T. (1984) Alice Doesn’t. Film, Feminism, Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. de Lauretis, T. (1987) Technologies of Gender. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Deleuze, G. (1967) Le froid et le cruel. Paris: Les éditions de Minuit. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1996) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 3rd ed. London: Athlone Press. Eisenstein, S. (1949) Dickens, Griffith and the film today. In Leyda, J. (ed.) Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, pp. 195–255. Ekman, K., Hermele, V. and Westerlund, U. (eds.) (2002) Hjärnsläpp. BANG om biologism [To Draw a Blank. BANG (journal title) On biologism]. Stockholm: Bang Förlag. Elvin-Nowak, Y. (1999) Accompanied by Guilt. Modern Motherhood the Swedish Way. Stockholm: Department of Psychology, Stockholm University. Fischer, L. (1996) Cinematernity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Försäkringskassan. (2018) Mammor tar ut största andele av föräldrapenningen [Mothers use the major part of the parental leave insurance]. Stockholm: Försäkringskassan. Available at: www.forsakringskassan.se/!ut/p/z0/LckxCsMw DEDRs3TwKOzSrVtuEbIUEauJiS0ZXWu3xQ6fR4_LnGOC-MoG3oRxnp5Pt f27Oh7uD-mkFZhJ3ajl5J1YSuDQuoX7J9GOVNFzsQhNWxNFBwVPg7mouYIv1mJAQe8RbFmxU7MhbfYj-n2BU1YQyo!/ (Accessed: 27 April 2020). Gustafsson, A. and Runesson, H. (1977) ‘En skam vara kvinna’. Sydsvenska Dagbladet/Snällposten, March 8, 1977. Haskell, M. (1974) From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies. Baltimore: Penguin Books. Holm, U. (1993) Modrande och praxis [Mothering and praxis]. Göteborg: Daidalos. Irigaray, L. (1977) Ce sexe qui n’en est pas une. Paris: Les éditions de Minuit. Jansson, M. (2001) Livets dubbla vedermödor: Om moderskap och arbete [The twofold labours of life: On motherhood and work]. Stockholm: Stockholm Studies in Politics, no. 80. Kaplan, E. A. (1983) ‘The case of the missing mother: Maternal issues in Vidor’s Stella Dallas’. Heresies, 16, pp. 81–85. Klinth, R. (2002) Göra pappa med barn. Linköping: Linköping Studies in Culture. Krakauer, S. (1985) ‘From film theory’. In Mast, G. and Cohen, M. (eds.) Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 7–20.

Representing and experiencing motherhood 61 Korpi, B. M. (2015)’Förskolan i politiken. Stockholm: Regeringskansliet’. Available at: www.regeringen.se/contentassets/7d83393009994779a340d8b839e5e8ae/for skolan-i-politiken – om-intentioner-och-beslut-bakom-den-svenska-forskolansframvaxt-u015_007.pdf (Accessed: 27 April 2020). Liddy, S. (2017) ‘In her own voice: Reflections on the Irish film industry and beyond’. Gender and the Screenplay: Processes, Practices, Perspectives, Networking Knowledge Special Issue, 10(2), pp. 19–31. Mulvey, L. (1975) ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’. Screen, 16(3), pp. 6–18. O’ Brien, A. (2015) ‘Producing television and reproducing gender’. Television  & New Media 16(3), pp. 259–274. O’ Brien, A. (2019) Women, Inequality and Media Work. London: Routledge. Rich, A. (1976) Of Woman Born. Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: Norton. Robert, R. and Uvnäs Moberg, K. (1994) Hon och han: födda olika [She and he: Born different]. Stockholm: Brombergs. Rosen, M. (1973) Popcorn Venus. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan. Ruddick, S. (1995) Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace. Boston: Beacon Press. SFI (Swedish Film Institute). (2018) The Money Issue, Gender Equality Report 2018. Available at: https://www.filminstitutet.se/globalassets/2.-fa-kunskap-omfilm/analys-och-statistik/publications/other-publications/sfi-gender-equalityreport-2018---lowres.pdf. Sima, J. (1977) ‘Gunnel Svarar Kritikerna: Jag Gör Inte Film För Er’. Expressen, 20 February. Soila, T. (1991) ‘Kvinnors ansikte’. Philosophical Dissertation, Stockholm University. Stanfors, M. (2018) ‘Vad gör folk hela dagarna? Tidsanvändning och jämställdhet bland svenska kvinnor och män.’ Ekonomisk debatt, 4, pp. 1–18. Available at: www.nationalekonomi.se/sites/default/files/NEFfiler/46-4-ms.pdf. Statistics Sweden (SCB). (2019) ‘23 000 barn går inte i förskola’. Available at: www. scb.se/hitta-statistik/artiklar/2019/23-000-barn-gar-inte-i-forskola/ (Accessed: 27 April 2020). Studlar, G. (1984) ‘Masochism and the perverse pleasure of the cinema’. Quarterly Review of Film Studies, 9(4), pp. 267–282. Wettersten, R. (2017) ‘Ifrågasätter Liberala Drömmar’. Proletären. Available at: http://proletaren.se/kultur-intervjuer/ifragasatter-liberala-drommar (Accessed: 27 April 2020). Widarsson, M., Engström, G., Berglund, A., Tydéen, T. and Lundberg, P. (2014) ‘Parental stress and dyadic consensus in early parenthoodamong mothers and fathers in Sweden’. Scandinavian Journal of Caring Studies, 28, pp.  689–699. DOI: 10.1111/scs.12096. Williams, L. (1984) ‘Something else besides a mother: Stella Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama’. Cinema Journal, 24(1), pp. 2–27. Williams, L. (1988) ‘Feminist film theory: Mildred pierce and the second world war’. In Pribram, E. D. (ed.) Female Spectators: Looking at Film and Television. London: Verso. Wing-Fai, L., Gill, R. and Randle, K. (2015) ‘Getting in, getting on, getting out? Women as career scramblers in the UK film and television industries’. The Sociological Review, 63, pp. 50–65.

62  Maria Jansson and Louise Wallenberg Wreyford, N. (2013) ‘The real cost of childcare: Motherhood and project-based creative labour in the UK film industry’. Studies in the Maternal, 5(2), pp. 1–22.

Filmography Dröm vidare (Rojda Sekersöz, Sweden, 2017) Mamma (Suzanne Osten, Sweden, 1982) Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, USA, 1945) Min skäggiga mamma (Maria Hedman- Hvitfeldt, 2003) Paradistorg (Gunnel Lindblom, Sweden, 1977) Stella Dallas (King Vidor, USA, 1937) Tsatsiki, mamman och polisen (Ella Lemhagen, Sweden, 1996)

5 The mother of a famous child The media representation of Shirley Temple’s ‘Mother’ in Hollywood, 1934–1940 Tsz Lam Ngai Introduction At the age of six, Shirley Temple was one of the most famous celebrities in the United States and for four consecutive years in the mid-1930s became the number one box-office draw in Hollywood (Balio, 1995, pp. 146–147). No actor, not even an adult, had ever had such a record. She was a household name and a source of widespread merchandising whose photographs appeared more frequently in the press than President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s (Harmetz, 2014). What is less known about Shirley Temple is that her mother, Gertrude Temple, played a significant role in grooming Shirley for stardom and burnishing her image as innocent and unspoiled by such fame. Indeed, by the mid-1930s, Gertrude was one of the most famous and widely covered mothers in the country. Thus, she merits our attention as a woman who came to embody particular ideologies about ideal motherhood during the Great Depression, especially in the ways that she shrewdly crafted her public image. Gertrude was also a paradoxical figure at the time: a paid stage mother who cast herself as just the opposite – as simply a doting, nurturing mother  – by foregrounding her motherly care work over her professional achievements. Drawing on a range of primary sources published in the 1930s when Shirley was a star, including mainstream local and national newspapers (e.g., Chicago Tribune, New York Times), women’s magazines (e.g., Saturday Evening Post, Parents’ Magazine), fan magazines (e.g., Pictorial Review, Photoplay) and movie industry trade magazines (e.g., Variety),1 this essay shows that Gertrude too reached celebrity status at the height of Shirley’s popularity and examines how she contributed to her daughter’s stardom, literally and symbolically. It also draws from the biographical and autobiographical materials about Gertrude and Shirley Temple for more contextual information, especially attitudes about women’s employment, motherhood and childhood in the 1930s. And this essay will lay out the particular ideology of successful motherhood that Gertrude Temple came to embody in the press.

64  Tsz Lam Ngai Film history has not yet adequately recognised Gertrude’s role in the cultivation of her daughter’s star persona. Previous studies of Shirley Temple find that the film characters she portrayed were often orphaned and that she would use her innocence to charm fathers or father figures to protect and save her (Studlar, 2013). Film historian Jeanine Basinger, for example, stresses that it was the pure love between Shirley and her ‘daddies’ that rescued both herself and the men from loss, poverty and danger in the movies (Basinger, 2013; Hatch, 2015; Robertson, 2016). But off-screen, in press accounts, it was Shirley’s mother, not her father, who lovingly groomed Shirley for stardom. Moreover, the literature on Shirley Temple has not considered how the media coverage of Shirley’s mother as loving and altruistic was crucial to preserving the superstar’s aura of cuteness and innocence. In the 1930s, movie studios carefully crafted the distinctive identities of stars; the studios often organised publicity stunts and supplied feature stories and photos to the newspapers and magazines to control their stars’ images (McDonald, 2000). Moreover, Hollywood had become the thirdlargest news source in America by the 1930s (Gamson, 1994, p. 27). Celebrity journalism that purportedly took you to the ‘behind the scenes’ lives of stars appealed to ordinary people, especially lower-middle-class women, who supposedly viewed private life as more fulfilling than the world of work and public achievement (Ponce de Leon, 2002). The press was a crucial meaning-making outlet as the readership of magazines and newspapers was high during the 1930s, with monthly magazine circulation at 100 million and newspapers absorbing one-third of all advertising money in the country (Young and Young, 2002, p.  152). Gertrude’s image as the ideal mother, which was the result of a collective, negotiated effort by the Fox Film studio (20th Century-Fox in 1935 and after), Gertrude and a complicit press, was important in cultivating the distinctive star personality of Shirley Temple. Multiple media outlets showcased how Gertrude took care of Shirley and her career but emphasised her maternal practices rather than her canny understanding of show business and shrewd news management. Such image management was crucial because of the prevalent negative stereotype of the ‘pushy stage mother’, which stood in sharp contrast to its opposite, the ‘selfless, doting mother’. That the Washington Post, for example, cast Gertrude as a ‘superwoman’, a perfect role model for mothers, is just one indication of Gertrude’s success (‘Mrs. Temple Outlines Precepts at Basis of Daughter’s Career’, 1935, p. 1). Certain journalistic frames about Gertrude emerged that repeatedly cast her as the exemplar of successful mothering. Frames in the press, which are ‘persistent patterns of cognition, interpretations, and presentation, of selection and emphasis that are largely unspoken and unacknowledged’ (Gitlin, 2003, p. 6), routinely organise discourse. The first part of this essay will elucidate Gertrude’s influence on Shirley’s stardom and how the press framed this influence as primarily maternal, which downplayed Gertrude’s actual professional achievements. The second part will demonstrate how press

The mother of a famous child 65 coverage about Shirley insisted that she and Gertrude were highly altruistic. Other media frames included managing Shirley by love and maintaining acting as a healthy activity for Shirley. The last part will investigate how the press framed Gertrude’s intensive mothering, which kept Shirley disciplined and unspoiled, as powerful but also easy for mothers to imitate.

Theoretical framework Media historians Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels (2004, pp.  286– 360) note that the idolisation of celebrity mothers in the media goes back at least to the 1920s. They trace the rise of an over-romanticised ideal of motherhood in the media in the late 20th century and argue that despite the women’s movement, the press still reinforced the notion that women are the best child caretakers and would only become fulfilled if they have children. To prove how much they loved their children, mothers should devote as much time and energy to them as possible. Douglas and Michaels called this ‘the new momism’, which required intensive mothering and relied in part on idealised portraits of celebrity mothers and their relationships to their children. These portraits, typically based on interviews and profiles, reaffirmed that motherhood was always joyful and perpetuated and amplified the ideology of devoted, selfless motherhood (Douglas and Michaels, 2004, pp. 359–360). The case of Gertrude Temple could be seen as a precedent of ‘the new momism’ ideology in the 1930s. But unlike the many celebrity mothers who have been studied, Gertrude was not a celebrity in her own right, but became famous because of her superstar daughter. The media coverage of Gertrude concerned the impact of her motherhood on Shirley rather than how Gertrude herself chose between motherhood and other aspects of her life. Also, unlike other celebrity mothers, there was no clear separation between care work and professional work in Gertrude’s case, as providing motherly care to Shirley was part of her job as her daughter’s ‘trainer’ at the Fox studio. Her idealisation in the media did not only romanticise the mother-child love in private; it also promoted the idea that children could make the most of their talents in public if their nurturing mothers cultivated the ‘right’ personal habits and mental discipline in private. In other words, the ideology of benevolent motherhood was tied to romanticised mother-child love as well as to the idea that motherly love could shape the child’s temperament and personality. During the Depression, with so many men out of work and anxieties high about the stability of family life, biases against women working outside the home were strong. Yet Gertrude Temple was, in fact, a working mother. How did the media representations of her substitute a positive stereotype of the working mother in place of its negative imagery? And despite her being a working mother, and being lauded as such, how did she nonetheless reaffirm the primacy of mothers not working outside the home?

66  Tsz Lam Ngai

Shirley’s private director and manager Despite Gertrude’s job title as Shirley’s ‘trainer’ at Fox between 1934 and 1940, Gertrude was actually Shirley’s agent, business manager, acting coach and public relations consultant, besides being her loving mother. In Shirley’s later life, she insisted that she and Gertrude were united in everything regarding her profession (Hammontree, 1998, p.  215). In 1937, multiple media outlets followed up on the progress of Gertrude’s recovery from surgery because the girl could not act without her mother present, as child labour laws required Gertrude to be on the set with her (‘Child Star’s Mother Going Under Knife’, 1937; ‘Shirley Temple’s Mother in Hospital for Surgery’, 1937; Shaffer, 1937). Besides the legal requirements, Shirley Temple described her mother as her private director who answered all her questions about acting, and if her mother had not helped her, she would not have known how to act (S. Temple, 1935, p. 42). The girl told the press that every night before work, Gertrude would read the scripts herself, help Shirley understand and memorise her lines, and teach her the right facial expressions and tone of voice (Thornton, 1938, p. 22). Gertrude Temple was also a shrewd and canny promoter. She changed her daughter’s birth year from 1928 to 1929 to make Shirley seem younger and more precocious (Basinger, 1976, p. 17). In her later life, Shirley disclosed that her mother told her to avoid being seen with other child performers, such as Jane Withers, in front of the media, so as not to share the spotlight (Temple, 1988, p. 63). Shirley also revealed that when the studio needed a stand-in for her, Gertrude Temple played safe and chose a girl whose mother was her good friend to avoid potential competition (Temple, 1988, p. 70). How Gertrude Temple assiduously shielded her daughter from other child actors with whom she felt she might compete was mostly unseen in the press. Instead, Gertrude told the Detroit Free Press, for example, that she studied hundreds of the fan letters herself every month and would prioritise Shirley’s replies to disadvantaged families (‘Deluge of Mail Surprises Tiny Shirley Temple’, 1934, p.  2; Spiro, 1936, p.  4). Gertrude also reportedly met hundreds of fans and writers every week and brought a publicist along on a family vacation (Neville, 1937, p.  1; ‘Shirley Temple Will Drive to New York for Summer Vacation’, 1938, p. 15; ‘Shirley Temple’s Contract Will Not Be Renewed’, 1940, p. 1). A few pamphlets that documented their family trips, including Shirley Temple: The Real Little Girl and Her Own Honolulu Diary (Temple, 1938), were then published. As Shirley’s agent, Gertrude handled her contracts and had the final say on her daughter’s career. Fox’s executive, Winfield Sheehan, arranged meetings with Gertrude to discuss Shirley’s career plan from 1934 to 1940 (Hammontree, 1998, pp. 41–42). When Shirley’s stardom was about to decline in 1940, the press noted that the girl reached the ‘awkward age’ and lost her signature babyish cuteness (Heffernan, 1939a). The mother said Shirley could not go on to play the perfect heroine in fairy tales, such as Sara in The

The mother of a famous child 67 Little Princess (1939) (Spiro, 1939, p.  30). Gertrude told a few different media outlets that Shirley could either be in the top spot or make a graceful exit (Graham, 1939; Heffernan, 1939b, 1939a). In 1940, Gertrude Temple formally announced that she decided to buy out the remaining 14 months of her daughter’s contract to Fox (‘Shirley Temple’s Contract Will Not Be Renewed’, 1940; The United Press, 1940). Media coverage affirmed Gertrude’s determining role in Shirley’s stardom, while not casting her as exploitative of her daughter or overstepping the boundary of her authority. Time magazine featured a cover story about the pair in 1936 when Shirley’s stardom reached a peak, and the caption read, ‘Mrs. Temple and daughter’, not ‘Shirley Temple and mother’ (‘Peewee’s Progress’, 1936). It suggested that Gertrude contributed significantly to Shirley’s stardom, if not more than Shirley herself. Gertrude supervised Shirley on the set, and Time called Shirley a ‘peewee paragon’ who obeyed her mother. Yet, in media depictions, Gertrude’s work never transgressed a mother’s care work. The Washington Post cast Gertrude as the best ally and friend of the film-makers, as she would correct the child but never intervene with the directors (Neville, 1937, p. 1). A gossip column also quoted Gertrude, saying it was her daughter’s special talents, not Gertrude’s management, that made her a star (Bell, 1935, p. 16). The press also stressed Gertrude’s role as a mother by foregrounding her grooming work, which could be easily deemed as merely a mother’s care work. A gossip column quoted the mother: ‘I wouldn’t know what to do if I didn’t have that little head of hair to curl every day’ (Spiro, 1937a, p. 11), as if nothing else Gertrude did was as important as that. The press assured readers that Shirley’s signature blond ringlets were ‘curled by her mother’s fingers’, with love and care (‘Peewee’s Progress’, 1936, p.  39; Thornton, 1938, p. 22). The mother told Pictorial Review, ‘I would never let anyone touch her hair’ (Cocks, 1936, p.  80). Even when Mrs. Roosevelt invited Shirley to go swimming, the child declined and said, ‘because of my hair’ (‘Shirley Temple Visits Hyde Park’, 1938, p. 5). The mother also told the Washington Post that she favoured a new hairdo change only if it was temporary, as Shirley’s curls were her brand (Kahn, 1937, p. 1). While the fan magazine Pictorial Review reported that she used only water and her fingers to make the curls (Cocks, 1936, p. 81), Shirley later in her life revealed that her mother would use peroxide to enhance the blond colour (Temple, 1988, p. 69). Thus, press accounts aside, Shirley’s signature blond curls were made by Gertrude, who was more akin to a professional hairdresser than a mother who simply loved to toy with her daughter’s hair. Although the press downplayed Gertrude’s accomplishments as a businesswoman and foregrounded her role as a mother, she was, in fact, doing a ‘man’s job’ by managing the superstar’s grooming, acting, publicity and contracts. In the 1930s women had very few opportunities to become management personnel and film-makers. No more than 22% of workers were women, and only 14% of employed women were in professional services

68  Tsz Lam Ngai in the 1930s (Ware, 1984, pp.  22–23). In Hollywood, by 1940 only one out of ten screenwriters were women (Ware, 1984, pp. 188–189). Moreover, working women were stigmatised for robbing men’s chances to find jobs during the Great Depression (Diedrich, 1990, p.  3), as one out of four people was unemployed in 1932 (McElvaine, 1984, p. 75). Working women had to carefully keep their power under check and not be a threat to men. This social stigma did not stop some married women from finding jobs; more than 15% of wives worked outside the home during the Great Depression, not for self-fulfilment but to provide for the family (Scharf, 1985, pp. 160–161). Thus, working outside the home could be seen as an extension of maternal responsibility. In the media, Gertrude appeared to be a mother merely doing her care work, so her public persona aligned with the expectations of women in society. This image muted suspicions that she was simply an ambitious businesswoman or, worse, assuming career prerogatives meant to be reserved for men.

The loving mother and the happy child Press accounts insisted that the management of Shirley’s career was guided almost exclusively by Gertrude’s maternal instinct, not by her canny understanding of show business, and Gertrude’s motherly love and care kept the superstar a happy and healthy child. In 1935, Gertrude published a 50-page pamphlet titled How I  Raised Shirley Temple with the fan magazine Silver Screen. In the media interviews, Gertrude asserted that she had never planned to get her daughter into professional acting and that sending the three-year-old toddler to a dancing school was purely for fun (G. Temple, 1935, pp. 26–27; Thornton, 1938, p. 22). ‘I had no reason not to develop the talents’, she asserted (Peak, 1934, p. B5), because her daughter began to dance as soon as she could and, she insisted, possessed a pair of pretty legs at birth that no other child had (G. Temple, 1935, p. 26). Shirley began her acting career when a director discovered her talent at the dancing school in 1932. Despite her daughter’s tremendous success, Gertrude contended, ‘I would have taken parenthood seriously even if Shirley had not been lucky enough to become a screen success’ (Sullivan, 1939, p. 1). Journalists also assured readers that Shirley was enjoying her work under her mother’s protection and was not being exploited. The Boston Globe characterised the ways Gertrude directed Shirley to act and wrote: ‘It was perfectly obvious that the child was playing a game’ (Peak, 1934, p. B5). The reporter praised the mother for this strategy, noting, ‘If acting is play to Shirley, it’s hard work to her mother’. Shirley also reportedly called acting a ‘party’ on the set (Parsons, 1934, p. 141). In Shirley’s own account, she recalled one time her mother scolded a director who tried to make her cry for a scene in the movie (Temple, 1988, p. 49). On another occasion, the gossip columnist for the Detroit Free Press reported that Gertrude heard a loud sneeze from Shirley on the set and quickly bundled her up and took

The mother of a famous child 69 her home (Spiro, 1938). The columnist affirmed what her mother had done was right because Shirley was back to work after two days with no signs of illness. Again, the mother emphasised that it was the ‘sensible thing to do with any child at the first sign of the sniffles’. Gertrude presented herself as down-to-earth, sensible and, especially, not trying to profit from her daughter’s success. In 1936, Photoplay reported that Gertrude turned down a radio option that was worth a few hundred thousand dollars because she feared that it would overwork the child and impact her health (Jackson, 1936, p. 16). In the next year, according to the Detroit Free Press, when the spirited Shirley insisted, ‘I’d love to be on the real radio, Mommy’, Gertrude still refused: ‘I think you are doing quite enough now, dear’ (Spiro, 1937b, p. 11). When less than 1% of people in the United States earned over $10,000 a year, Shirley’s salary and bonus arrangement for pictures alone ran between $3,000 and $4,000 a week; however, Photoplay emphasised that the Temples lived like a typical middleclass family in California and lived exclusively on the parents’ salaries (Jackson, 1936, pp. 27, 90). The parents claimed that they put all her earnings in a trust fund and Shirley would get the money when she reached maturity (Sullivan, 1939, p. 1). Media accounts maintained that Gertrude had not planned to groom Shirley for stardom and that she would prioritise Shirley’s happiness and health over anything. Yet cracks in this portrayal emerged. In 1937, Shirley revealed to Pictorial Review that her mother was only pretending that she did not care about her screen success. In fact, her mother had insisted on sending her to the dancing school despite her father’s initial objections (S. Temple, 1935, p. 39). Shirley also said she had the feeling that her mother wanted to be a child star herself when she was little (S. Temple, 1935, p. 41). Darryl Hickman, a former child star, remarked in a documentary about Shirley Temple, ‘I think if Mrs. Temple hadn’t been as formidable as she was, I think that Shirley would not have turned out the way she turned out’ (Feldman, 1992). He affirmed Gertrude’s role in shaping Shirley’s stardom but also hinted that Gertrude was not as easy-going as the media portrayed. Nevertheless, in the media, Gertrude personified the ideal mother who put her child’s interests over any selfish economic motivations, the opposite of the stereotype of aggressive stage mothers, who took up maledominated jobs to manage child performers and were seen as living out their own dreams through their children. As Hollywood reporter Ed Sullivan put it, most stage mothers forced their children to act and were ‘truly dreadful creatures, shrews of uncertain temper, selfish, inconsiderate, mercenary’ and were the ‘persona non grata’ in show business (Sullivan, 1940, p. 17). Sullivan assured the reader that Mrs. Temple was not one of them. A Parents’ Magazine reporter also remarked, ‘There is nothing of the typical stage mother about her’ (Foster, 1938, p. 23). These stereotypes about stage mothers intersected with the broader gender bias that women should not take jobs from men when employment was scarce during the Great

70  Tsz Lam Ngai Depression. Moreover, the ideal of sacred, priceless children amplified the negative stereotypes about stage mothers. Children were economically useful until child labour laws were enacted in the first two decades of the 20th century (Zelizer, 1985, p. 62). In the 1930s, across most social classes, the appeal of children lay in their sentimental value, not their economic productivity. To preserve this notion that the child is sacred, Gertrude had to affirm publicly that money was only a happy by-product of the acting game, especially as Shirley was the number one ‘money-making star’ for four consecutive years in the mid-1930s (‘Never in History of This Industry Has a Company Won Such Recognition!’, 1939). The public persona of Gertrude as simply a loving mother countered the pushy stage mother stereotype and offset the negative imaginary of working mothers as being aggressive, overstepping their boundaries, robbing men’s jobs and exploiting children’s innocence. The Fox studio and Gertrude’s own pronouncements bolstered press accounts of Shirley as ‘America’s Sweetheart’, a guileless, innocent girl who was brought up by a capable, altruistic, ‘superwoman’ mother. By casting her managerial work as care work, Gertrude’s press coverage appeared to acknowledge and celebrate the mother’s experience by increasing the diversity of how ‘being a mother’ was represented. Gertrude’s professional work was novel because the patriarchal society often considered motherhood as a barrier to career progression. Nonetheless, overcoming the stage mother stereotype did not displace the negative connotation of working women or represent the genuine struggles of mothers (Hall, 1997, p. 270). Gertrude’s emphasis on her altruistic motherly role over her canny business calculations seemed to tell women: ‘Stand back. Be a good mother. That is enough for you to be great’.

A role model for mothers The press cast Gertrude Temple as a role model for many mothers who hoped to emulate her success in raising a star (M. S. McEvoy, 1938), especially how she kept Shirley disciplined and unspoiled by fame. Shirley reportedly received about eight thousand fan letters every month in 1936; most of them asked Gertrude for child-rearing tips (‘Deluge of Mail Surprises Tiny Shirley Temple’, 1934; Spiro, 1936). In the 50-page pamphlet titled How I Raised Shirley Temple, Gertrude (1935) detailed how she coached Shirley, groomed her and, most importantly, kept her superstar daughter unspoiled. The press obliged and dutifully praised how she kept her superstar daughter innocent with the ‘right amount’ of balance between self-control and compassion (‘Fruit Whip a la Mother Goose. Shirley Temple Gives a Party’, 1936, p. 76; ‘Mrs. Temple Outlines Precepts at Basis of Daughter’s Career’, 1935, p.  1). Because Shirley was such a big star, she received more than 135,000 gifts on her birthday in 1938 alone (Basinger, 1976, p. 84). Still, gossip columnists asserted that, because of Gertrude’s training, the child

The mother of a famous child 71 star was ‘better mannered than 999 out of 1000 children of the same age’ (Sullivan, 1939, p. 2). Gertrude advised mothers of talented children not to let them think they are overly important (M. S. McEvoy, 1938, p. 45). The press reported how the mother reinforced this: when Shirley once asked her mother whether a movie premiere was a compliment to her, Gertrude wisely told her, ‘It’s a compliment to a picture, not to the person who’s in it’ (Neville, 1937, p. 1). Gertrude also told Photoplay that she insisted the superstar clean her own room and share her heaps of presents with disadvantaged children (Kirtley, 1938, p. 70). Although Shirley earned more than her parents, Gertrude said she would remind Shirley to feel that everything revolved around her father in the home, not Shirley (Temple and Sharon, 1935, p. 14), which assured the reader that their family was a typical patriarchal household, despite Shirley’s huge success. The mother stressed the importance of discipline; for example, she told American Magazine, ‘It is hard to refuse her anything. But I will not spoil her’ (G. Temple, 1935, p. 26). In Shirley’s autobiography, she revealed that her mother would only kiss her in front of the camera, and Shirley herself assured that her mother had done the right thing to discipline her (Temple, 1988, p. 74). Gertrude noted in her pamphlet, ‘If the day ever comes when I feel that Shirley is becoming self-conscious or too aware of her screen performance, I shall cancel her contract immediately and let her grow up into a normal young girlhood, far from Hollywood and its studios’ (Temple and Sharon, 1935, p. 40). Gertrude said parents should not force children to do things they did not like, though they should ‘insist upon absolute obedience’ (Temple and Sharon, 1935, p. 20). As depicted by the celebrity journalists, Gertrude would correct her daughter immediately with no apology on the set, but reportedly the correction was so pleasantly conveyed that it would not hurt Shirley’s spirit (Sullivan, 1939, p. 2). Parents’ Magazine reported that she used a firm, but not too sharp, voice to direct the child on the set, ‘That’s enough now, Shirley. Let’s attend to business’ (Shultz, 1938, p.  72). When asked what motivated her to be so well behaved, Shirley said, ‘I love her [Gertrude] too much to want her to feel bad’ (Foster, 1938, p. 22). The reporter from Parents’ Magazine assured the reader that the mutual respect between ‘the daughter and the mother’ was real: ‘I’ll eat the paper this is written on if it isn’t true’ (Foster, 1938, p. 23). Press coverage insisted that Gertrude’s child-rearing practices were based on her common sense and did not require much thought. Gertrude asserted that every mother could discipline her child as she did Shirley, if the mother had patience and time (Temple and Sharon, 1935, p. 12). Gertrude also detailed in Red Book Magazine how she took time to prepare her daughter’s meals, such as rolling meat into meatballs and baking a seven-layered birthday cake (Temple, 1937, pp. 47, 102–104). The mother stressed that she simply relied on ‘common sense’ (Temple, 1937, p.  47), and it was nothing out of the

72  Tsz Lam Ngai ordinary to do regular checks on her daughter’s physical health (Spiro, 1937c, p. 4). Although Gertrude said what she did was normal and common, she also noted that it required a lot of energy and time. Gertrude told the Ladies’ Home Journal that there were always eyes on her as if she shared parentage with fans (Thornton, 1938, p. 22). She was extremely attentive to the child’s needs because ‘If Shirley were allowed to get the least bit thin or peaked, people would say that I am starving her to death’ (Spiro, 1937c, p. 4). Although Gertrude’s public persona stressed that it was her motherly responsibility to keep her daughter unspoiled, in fact, it was part of the business decision: as Shirley recalled after she had retired from movies, the Fox studio ordered Gertrude to keep Shirley innocent of her fame because otherwise it will show in her eyes in the films (Temple, 1988, p. 42). Moreover, unlike an average mother, Gertrude was formally employed by Fox to take care of her daughter, as the Saturday Evening Post noted: ‘A lot of mothers do as much for their children and don’t get a thousand dollars a week for it’ (J. P. McEvoy, 1938). The media depictions of Gertrude doing just ‘ordinary’ care work downplayed the institutional support she got in managing Shirley, which legitimised and promoted the unrealistic standards of child-rearing for mothers. These standards became normalised and naturalised not only through the promotion of mothering as intrinsically joyful in the media since the 1930s (Douglas and Michaels, 2004) but also through the notion that motherly love and care was powerful in shaping her child’s temperament and personality. The formalisation of child-rearing practices in the 1930s amplified the idea that proper parenting, especially mothering, was crucial to child development (Hulbert, 2003, pp. 105–107). Popular child-rearing experts suggested that mothers should not only be caring but also self-conscious to avoid demanding excessive docility from their children to let them develop a wholesome personality (Hulbert, 2003, p.  111). Press accounts about Gertrude assured readers that she made a wise choice by putting the talented, spirited Shirley into a dancing school, as under the notion of priceless childhood, acting was seen as a valuable educational opportunity rather than an exploitative form of labour for children who would naturally enjoy performing (Zelizer, 1985, pp. 92–96), and Gertrude’s compassion and selfcontrol gave rise to Shirley’s extraordinary achievements. Such media coverage aligned with the master plot of celebrity journalism in the 1930s, which instructed readers that celebrities could make the most of their talents in public because they cultivated the ‘right’ personal habits and mental powers in private (Ponce de Leon, 2002, pp. 106–140). It reinforced the idea that mothers should be caring, but not over-indulgent, so that their child could become a lovable, happy, self-disciplined person. These discourses amplified mothers’ impacts on child development, which normalised intensive mothering and promoted unrealistic standards of child-rearing, putting an unreasonable burden on mothers.

The mother of a famous child 73

Conclusion Shirley and Gertrude Temple united literally and symbolically regarding Shirley Temple’s acting career. Gertrude was Shirley’s acting coach, manager and publicist, besides being her loving mother. In media interviews, Gertrude shrewdly presented herself as a caring, doting mother and played down her industry acumen and business calculations. She tried to avoid the criticism of doing a ‘man’s job’ by deploying public relations skills without looking like she was. It was extraordinary for a woman, and even more so for a mother, to exert such considerable influence on a star in Hollywood in the 1930s, and her public relations work further demonstrated her shrewdness in show business. Gertrude Temple was, in some ways, a pioneer in celebrity mothers’ presentation of self that was, in retrospect, calculated but effective at the time. Her public persona was also sold as a spectacle of motherhood in the media, which was an integral part of Shirley’s star persona and enhanced her aura. While many stars in Hollywood were called out for their scandals in the 1930s, the press cast Shirley as innocent, pure and unspoiled by fame. The media attributed Shirley’s innocence and extraordinary achievements to her mother. Press coverage assured that Gertrude would never use her parental authority and rank self-interest to force Shirley to act; instead, she managed Shirley by love, guaranteed that acting was a healthy game for Shirley and would never try to profit from her daughter. Gertrude, who embodied the qualities of modern altruistic, doting, effortless motherhood, was cast as the opposite of the image of ‘stage mothers’. Such press accounts reinforced the aura of Shirley as ‘America’s Sweetheart’ in Hollywood. Constructing a favourable identification with care work, like the media coverage of Gertrude Temple, is still an effective public relations strategy today. Such press representations seemingly celebrate the mother’s experience, which has been abjected in the mainstream, by increasing the diversity of how ‘being a mother’ is represented. The story of a capable, altruistic, ‘superwoman’ mother is novel as it reverses the evaluation of the popular stereotypes of working women, which are still prevalent nowadays. However, as Gertrude’s case showed, playing down her accomplishments as a businesswoman and foregrounding her role as a mother erased the woman’s enormous professional contributions to Hollywood. It also reinforced and amplified the ideology of selfless, joyful, effortless motherhood and promoted unrealistic, intensive mothering. The amplified impact of motherhood on child development arguably gave mothers a false sense of empowerment, but also a burden to do better. The positive image of selfless, loving mothers challenged but did not displace or undermine the earlier negative imaginary of working women, as the binaries between care work and professional work still remained in place.

74  Tsz Lam Ngai

Note 1 The sample of newspapers includes the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune and the Atlanta Constitution, which covers the diverse interests across the United States. The magazine sample includes leading women’s magazines in the 1930s such as Parents’ Magazine, Red Book Magazine, Hearst’s International – Cosmopolitan, Ladies’ Home Journal and Saturday Evening Post; fan magazines including Photoplay and Pictorial Review; movie industry trade magazines including Variety and Boxoffice; and general news magazines including Time and The Sun. I  access these articles through the ProQuest Historical Newspaper Archive, the Readers’ Guide, and the Media History Digital Library. I locate the articles by inserting keywords such as ‘Shirley Temple’, ‘Gertrude Temple’, ‘mother’ and ‘mum’.

References Balio, T. (1995) Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 19301939. Berkeley: University of California Press. Basinger, J. (1976) Shirley Temple. New York: Pyramid Communications, Inc. Basinger, J. (2013) A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930– 1960. New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Bell, N. B. (1935) ‘Preview groups make selection of hit subjects’. The Washington Post, 16. Child star’s mother going under knife, 1937. Los Angeles Times, 2. Cocks, D. (1936) ‘Beauty secrets of a star’. Pictorial Review, 37(65), pp. 80–81. Deluge of Mail Surprises Tiny Shirley Temple. (1934) The Washington Post, 2. Diedrich, M. (1990) Women and War: The Changing Status of American Women from the 1930s to the 1950s. New York: Berg Publishers. Douglas, S. J. and Michaels, M. W. (2004) The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women. New York: Free Press. Feldman, G. (1992) ‘Shirley temple: America’s little darling’. Hollywood Collection, Wombat Productions. Foster, C. J. (1938) ‘Mrs. Temple on bringing up Shirley’. Parents Magazine, 13, pp. 22–23, 63–65. Fruit Whip a la Mother Goose. (1936) ‘Shirley temple gives a party’. Photoplay, pp. 76–77, 86. Gamson, J. (1994) Claims to Fame Celebrity in Contemporary America. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gitlin, T. (2003) The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Graham, S. (1939) ‘Shirley temple brings gold to all with whom she comes in contact’. The Atlanta Constitution, 1. Hall, S. (1997) Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: SAGE Publications Ltd. Hammontree, P. G. (1998) Shirley Temple Black: A  Bio-Bibliography. London: Greenwood Press. Harmetz, A. (2014) ‘Shirley temple black, Hollywood’s biggest little star, Dies at 85’. The New York Times. Hatch, K. (2015) Shirley Temple and the Performance of Girlhood. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

The mother of a famous child 75 Heffernan, H. (1939a.) ‘Miss Shirley temple arrives at the “awkward age” ’. The Sun Sunday Magazine, 6. Heffernan, H. (1939b) ‘Shirley, 10 today, shows no sign of having reached awkward age’. Boston Globe, C3. Hulbert, A. (2003) Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Jackson, M. (1936) ‘Protecting the future of the greatest little star’. Photoplay, pp. 26–27, 99. Kahn, A. (1937) ‘Shirley temple’s coiffure taxes filmdom’s brains’. The Washington Post, 1. Kirtley, B. (1938) ‘A goddess grows up’. Photoplay, pp. 14–15, 70. McDonald, P. (2000) The Star System: Hollywood’s Production of Popular Identities. London: Wallflower. McElvaine, R. S. (1984) The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941. New York: Times Book. McEvoy, J. P. (1938) ‘Little Miss Miracle’. Saturday Evening Post, 211, pp. 10–11, 71–73. McEvoy, M. S. (1938) ‘One little wonder’. Woman’s Day, 1, pp. 6–7, 45. Mrs. Temple Outlines Precepts at Basis of Daughter’s Career. (1935) The Washington Post, 1. Never in History of This Industry Has a Company Won Such Recognition! (1939) Variety, 133, p. 36. Neville, L. (1937) ‘Shirley minds mother, sometimes gets a “bop” ’. The Washington Post, 1. Parsons, L. O. (1934) ‘Hollywood is my home town. Hearst’s international’. Cosmopolitan, 97, pp. 48–49, 141–146. Peak, M. (1934) ‘Beautiful blonde of 42 pounds: 5-year-old Shirley temple is Hollywood’s latest wise little star’. Boston Sunday Globe Magazine, B5. Peewee’s Progress. (1936) Time, 17(36), pp. 39–44. Ponce de Leon, C. L. (2002) Self-Exposure: Human-Interest Journalism and the Emergence of Celebrity in America, 1890–1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Robertson, W. (2016) Shirley Temple as Streetwalker in Fantasies of Neglect. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Scharf, L. (1985) To Work and To Wed: Female Employment, Feminism, and the Great Depression. Westport: Praeger Publishers. Shaffer, G. (1937) ‘Invite doctors to preview of hospital film: “Chicago fire” ready for cameras in June’. Chicago Tribune, 27. Shirley Temple’s Contract Will Not Be Renewed. (1940) The Washington Post, 1. Shirley Temple’s Mother in Hospital for Surgery. (1937) Chicago Tribune, 21. Shirley Temple Visits Hyde Park. (1938) New York Times, 5. Shirley Temple Will Drive to New York for Summer Vacation. (1938) Chicago Tribune, 15. Shultz, G. D. (1938) ‘Mrs. Shultz visits Shirley temple’. Better Homes and Gardens, 17, pp. 46, 70–73. Spiro, J. D. (1936) ‘On the lots with the candid reporter’. Detroit Free Press, 4. Spiro, J. D. (1937a) ‘On the lots with the candid reporter’. Detroit Free Press, 11. Spiro, J. D. (1937b) ‘On the lots with the candid reporter’. Detroit Free Press, 11.

76  Tsz Lam Ngai Spiro, J. D. (1937c) ‘On the lots with the candid reporter’. Detroit Free Press, 4. Spiro, J. D. (1938) ‘On the lots with the candid reporter’. Detroit Free Press, 8. Spiro, J. D. (1939) ‘On the lots with the candid reporter’. Detroit Free Press, 8. Studlar, G. (2013) ‘Cosseting the nation: Or, how to conquer fear itself with Shirley temple’. In Precocious Charms: Stars Performing Girlhood in Classical Hollywood Cinema. London: University of California Press, pp. 51–89. Sullivan, E. (1939) ‘Young America take a bow!’ Chicago Tribune, G1. Sullivan, E. (1940) ‘Looking at Hollywood: Abdication’. Chicago Tribune, 17. Temple, G. (1935) ‘Bringing up Shirley’. American Magazine, 119, pp.  26–27, 92–94. Temple, G. (1937) ‘Shirley temple’s recipes: Shirley’s own mother tells what Shirley eats’. Red Book Magazine, 69(47): 102–104. Temple, G. and Sharon, M. (1935) How I Raised Shirley Temple? Akron, OH: The Saalfield Publishing Company. Temple, S. (1935) ‘My life and times’. Pictorial Review, 36, pp. 7–9, 39–42. Temple, S. (1938) Shirley Temple: The Real Little Girl and Her Own Honolulu Diary. Akron, OH: Saalfield Publishing Company. Temple, S. (1988) Child Star: An Autobiography. New York: McGraw-Hill. Thornton, M. (1938) ‘Miracle Moppet’. Ladies’ Home Journal, 55, p. 22. The United Press. (1940) ‘Shirley temple leaving screen, mother states’. New York Times, 47. Ware, S. (1984) Holding Their Own: American Women in the 1930s. Boston, MA: T-Wayne Publishers. Young, W. H. and Young, N. K. (2002) The 1930s. Westport: Greenwood Press. Zelizer, V. A. (1985) Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children. New York: Basic Books.

Part 2

Intersectionality and media mothers

6 Negotiating motherhood in the Colombian audiovisual industry A matter of capital Alejandra Castano-Echeverri and Andrés Correa-González Introduction In this chapter, we study the relationship between gender, capital and the ability to negotiate motherhood in the audiovisual workplace. We argue that in the Colombian screen industries, there are implicit considerations about gender, parental responsibilities and capital background that constrain the prospects for women’s and mothers’ careers. In this context, the most disadvantaged women are those who do not run their own business or do not count on an advantageous cultural, social or economic capital that allows them to find a balance between their personal and professional lives. The higher the position in the audiovisual production chain, the less challenging their motherhood negotiations are. On the contrary, the lower their role in the production chain, the more complicated their negotiations of motherhood and work are. In our study, mothers running their own businesses and performing above-the-line roles count on the availability of social and capital resources to delegate childcare responsibilities. In contrast, most mothers performing below-the-line jobs have limited capital resources, which, in turn, sometimes forces them to temporarily or permanently sacrifice their careers. However, in both cases, mothers’ negotiations of motherhood and the outcomes of these negotiations also rely on social expectations and the mother’s philosophy of what is a ‘good’ mother. Issues of work quality, gender, ethnicity or class are surprisingly absent from the Latin American literature about the cultural and creative industries (CCI). Until very recently, only a handful of reports had recognised the importance of understanding the profile of those who work in the creative sector and the pros and cons of their working conditions (Alcaldía de Medellín, 2018; Castano-Echeverri et al., 2019; Compás Urbano, 2019). To help close the gap, we present the results of a pioneering study conducted in the city of Medellín, Colombia, between August 2018 and March 2019. For this collection, we focus on our data about perceptions of motherhood and parenthood and mothers’ negotiations of childcare with work in the screen

80  Castano-Echeverri and Correa-González industries. The findings of our exploratory research emphasise the urgent need for more qualitative data from the sector to produce a better informed intersectional analysis that provides depth and context to issues faced by female workers.

Colombian audiovisual industries In recent years, Colombia has experienced an expansion in the audiovisual business due to sectorial tax incentives, a current law that promotes and develops national CCI (Law 1834 of 2017) and an aggressive promotion of the country as a diverse and multicoloured filming location. According to the numbers from a recent industry report (Gobierno de Colombia, 2019), between 2015 and 2019, audiovisual industries increased their income by 4.4% (USD 105 million), and exports of national content increased by 20% (USD 50 million). Eighty per cent of the material produced in the country is exported to the US. Medellín, the second-largest city in Colombia, has built on the national enthusiasm for the promotion of the sector, adding further tax incentives to audiovisual productions. The city is home to 386 registered companies in the screen industries; 84% deliver production services for the local and national public broadcasting systems, 68% produce corporate videos and 65% produce films (Castano-Echeverri et al., 2019). Audiovisual industry growth began in the 1980s, the golden years of the audiovisual sector (Yancés, 2015) when the first regional public television channel in Colombia came live from Medellín. Those early days not only marked the beginning of the operational dynamics of audiovisual production in the city but also created the social networks that determined the role and place of its members and future members to this day. At the onset of the local screen industries, women played an essential role as general managers of the major audiovisual production companies and television broadcasters (Garcia, 1995), paving the way for other women along the production chain. However, this has had little impact on pervasive ideologies about gender roles, especially when parenthood comes into play and work has to be negotiated. On the contrary, masculine work patterns have been perpetuated, leaving mothers with scarce margins and opportunities to establish a healthy balance between their personal and professional lives.

A review of the literature The audiovisual industry is the flagship of the Colombian CCI (Gobierno de Colombia, 2019). With their growth rates in production and exhibition, as well as worldwide recognition, the screen industries promise to be the ideal place to work and to find self-realisation (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2013). More than ever, national industry reports and policies are produced with outstanding regularity for those who wish to witness the burgeoning business of domestic audiovisual production. Most of these reports promote the

Negotiating motherhood 81 CCI as egalitarian, meritocratic and accessible to anyone who has the right amount of talent and passion to devote to them (Alcaldia de Bogota, 2016; Buitrago Restrepo, F. and I. Duque Márquez, 2013; UNCTAD, 2018). Nonetheless, an extensive body of scholarly research has proven exactly the opposite (Castano-Echeverri et  al., 2019; Conor et  al., 2015; Eikhof and Warhurst, 2013; Gill, 2002; Rowan, 2010; Zafra, 2017). The relationship between maternity and work within the local audiovisual sector is notoriously absent, both from industry and from academic literature in Colombia. However, recent studies about this relationship in the broader context of work have made evident the existence of a tacit work regime applied to mothers and future mothers. According to these studies, women, instead of fighting against the unfavourable environment or proposing solutions to it, accept it, adapt to it and sometimes promote it (Olarte and Peña, 2010; Romero, 2018). Besides, pregnancy and motherhood are seen as an additional disadvantage for working mothers with no privileged background (Cárdenas et al., 2010). Olarte and Peña (2010) study the ‘motherhood penalty’, which is the term used to describe the phenomenon of mothers earning less than child-free women for performing the same job. The authors establish that, on average, mothers in Colombia make 9.4% less than childless women, and when they are mothers to children under five, this gap widens to 18.4%. The authors explain this ‘penalty’ by the fact that economically disadvantaged mothers tend to accept low-quality work, specifically when child support depends exclusively on them. Romero (2018) established that having a formal job that allows a paid maternity leave is the best way to protect mothers from leaving their jobs. However, when the leave is extended (more than four months, following Colombian regulations), mothers’ chances of starting new posts decrease, and their chances of leaving the formal market increase. Cárdenas et al. (2010) focus their work on women in the highest position of their companies to study their success stories. This study, carried out in Latin America, found that most participants consider that they have never been discriminated against because of their gender; therefore, they base their success on narratives of effort, sacrifice and meritocracy. Participants revealed that climbing to higher positions of power is their main driver and that in doing so, family (85% of female participants are mothers) and relationships come second; therefore, they do not see motherhood as an obstacle to their objectives. However, they acknowledge that, as far as family is concerned, they would never have achieved their goals if it were not for their domestic help. The absence of studies on the relationship between motherhood and work in the audiovisual industries in Latin America contrasts with the growing literature on the topic from global North countries. Early works identify three common factors that affect the path of women in the audiovisual industries, which eventually cause the abandonment of women’s careers: informal practices, social networks and gendered stratification of work (Banks and

82  Castano-Echeverri and Correa-González Milestone, 2011; Gill, 2002; McRobbie, 2002; O’ Brien, 2014). Also, there is a prevailing assumption that mothers are primarily responsible for everything related to childcare, which is a common difficulty for women who wish to maintain a career in the screen industries (Dent, 2017; Wing-Fai et al., 2015; Wreyford, 2018). Mothers experience these disadvantages within a culture of silence, not only because of the acceptance of the prevailing inequalities in the sector but also because colleagues and bosses consider that ‘whinging’ is something undesirable since it could be understood as a lack of commitment and passion for work (Eikhof and Warhurst, 2013; Wing-Fai et al., 2015). Cultural and creative workers state that they have to commit and sacrifice themselves completely to achieve some success (Dent, 2017). Besides, resilience is promoted in opposition to criticism and the desire to change structural inequalities (Berridge, 2019; Gill, 2014; O’ Brien, 2015; Wing-Fai et al., 2015). Informal practices and network dependence (Blair, 2003; CastanoEcheverri, 2017) to enter the sector, as well as to maintain an active profile in it, are self-defeating for mothers (Banks, 2017; Conor et al., 2015; Dent, 2017; Percival, 2019; Wreyford, 2015). The demands for great flexibility and mobility make maternity and work difficult and create additional barriers to establishing a work-life balance (Wing-Fai et al., 2015; Wreyford, 2013). On top of that, there is outstanding evidence about the barriers of entry to the CCI faced by those who are not young, rich and white men (Oakley and O’ Brien, 2016), which contrasts the narratives about passion, meritocracy and talent that reinforce and promote ingrained barriers of class and work inequality (Atkinson, 2010; Eikhof and Warhurst, 2013; Friedman et al., 2017; Randle, 2015).

Composition and employment patterns Data for this study were collected between August 2018 and March 2019 through online surveys and semi-structured interviews. The initial sample consisted of 330 participants; 127 were female and 203 male. Eligibility criteria required individuals to be working or have worked in the Colombian screen industries. Participants were recruited through purposive snowball sampling: a mixture of our contacts and then further recommendations. Participants came from several audiovisual subsectors: film, advertising, commercial television, public television, corporate video and animation. A minority of participants (61) indicated having parental responsibilities; 22 were female and 39 male. For this chapter, we primarily used the data obtained from this group of participants. However, we also take into account demographic data from childless informants for presenting general findings and analysis about the overall audiovisual sector. Similarly, we include responses from those who provide significant insights into the perceptions of the relationship between parenthood and audiovisual production cultures.

Negotiating motherhood 83 We surveyed our participants about their starting age, position and income in the audiovisual sector, as well as their current situation. Thus, we found that when women get their first paid job, their earnings are significantly higher than their male counterparts’. Much of this trend can be explained by the fact that women are more highly educated than men and wait until they graduate to start their careers. Nonetheless, as women’s careers progress and they become more experienced, they tend to earn less than men. Whereas for men, although it takes longer to increase their income during the early stages of their careers, it not only tends to increase over time but is also significantly higher than that of women when they occupy senior or managerial positions. The contrast between women’s and men’s earnings is particularly significant as our participants performed very similar types of jobs within the screen industry. The most common roles carried out by female participants are in management, production, direction, realisation, project writing, screenwriting, promotion, art, talent and education. Jobs performed by males are similar to those of females but with a higher representation in technical positions such as camera operator, lighting technician and post-production. Although our survey shows that women have substantial representation in the overall audiovisual workforce, the numbers decrease as their age increases. From Figure 6.1 it can be seen that female representation within the screen industries is significant for women in their twenties, a moment that coincides with the start of their careers. However, their representation

Gender Representation by Age Groups 25.0% 20.0% 15.0% 10.0% 5.0% 0.0%