A maternidade para as mulheres comuns contemporâneas

Abstract

The objective of this research was to understand the meaning ofmotherhood for contemporary ordinary women. Qualitative research wasconducted using semi-structured interviews to collect data, and content analysis was employed to process the information. Results revealed that being a mother is the most important fact in the lives of these women, but motherhood is only translated into an experience for them if it escapes their calculation. Thus, contemporary ordinary women decide on becoming mothers because they underrate the logic of modern reason, valuing contingency, and they place maternal experiences as something extra-ordinary. The women of this research ultimately explain a loving and transcendent speech about motherhood that contraposes with a social context governed by planning, technique and consumption. Upon envisioning motherhood as a boon, contemporary ordinary women depart it from the scope and the efficacy of modern speech, directed tohomo consumens and, somehow, rehabilitate homo faber. Results aim in the direction of a complex feminine subjectivity that installs maternal experience against the primacy of me, in reverse from consumer society and in the impairment of objectivity as the privileged modern thought, referring the relationship of mother and child for an instance adrift from the main references of modernity. Contemporary ordinary women bet on maternity to be happy and they want to be good mothers.