Breastfeeding the educational system: analyzing women’s unpaid labor and voluntary mother participation in schools within the context of neoliberal economic policies

Abstract

This study intends to examine the role of mothers in the school system in the context of the neoliberal transformation process with regard to the special labor of women in the forms of domestic labor, care labor and voluntary work. In this respect, the presence of mothers in the school system is analyzed in terms of the labor processes and the special characteristics of this unpaid labor in interaction with the ways in which their patriarchally defined motherhood role is utilized to penetrate in the power positions in the school system. The issue is conceptualized around the notions of power and empowerment and around the related strategies implemented by mothers in the school. The research aims to unveil the ways in which the mothers’ practices and attitudes in the school field reproduce the class and gender inequalities. In this respect, the differentiations in the mothers’ attitudes in their participation process and the tensions created by their praxis are analyzed. The research identifies and illustrates certain characteristics of the activities and relationships in the school environment to signal the reproduction of gender inequality and the exclusion generating from the class differences. Finally, with reference to the findings, an alternative way of maternal participation in order to elicit empowerment for and solidarity of women regarding the intermitting class differences is discussed and expanded. The field data and the analysis point out that with the neoliberal policies which retract public funding from education and leave the schools on their own fate with the discourse of ‘parental participation’, mothers started to take part in the ‘running’ of the schools. With this penetration, they started to locate themselves in the power positions such as Parent Teacher Associations (PTA) in the school system. The way to PTA passes from the functioning and social capital gaining in the position of Classroom Motherhood (CM) which represents the mothers who allocate their unpaid labor to substitute the duties of the state in the schools. However, these power positions and the power struggles unveil the class difference of the mothers as actresses in the school system. Because middle-class mothers have relatively more economic and cultural capital, they can easily occupy the power positions in the school, whereas working class mothers deprived of economic and cultural capital, they have no voice in the school system. The maternal participation is patriarchally designed in the neoliberal system in essence and the power is gained in a sphere where patriarchal rules are valid, thus this kind of environment results in ‘power-gaining’ of the middle class mothers and this represents a contrast with the feminist empowerment discourse as the power gained by the middle class mothers keep the working class women in deprivation. The analysis of the data led to the development of certain conceptions such as ‘network blockage strategy’, ‘dispossession of social capital’, ‘catalyzing capital’ and ‘breastocracy’ to unveil the power relations and to shed light to possibilities of genuine women’s empowerment.