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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
From Professionals To Professional Mothers?: How College-Educated, Married Mothers Experience Unemployment In The Us, Aliya Hamid Rao
From Professionals To Professional Mothers?: How College-Educated, Married Mothers Experience Unemployment In The Us, Aliya Hamid Rao
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Unemployment influences life experiences and outcomes, but how it does so may be shaped by gender and parenthood. Because research on unemployment focuses on men’s experiences of unemployment, it presents as universal a process that may be gendered. This article asks: how do college-educated, heterosexual, married mothers experience involuntary unemployment? Drawing on in-depth interviews with unemployed mothers in the US, their husbands, and follow-up interviews, this article finds that the experience of job loss is tempered for mothers as they derive a culturally valued identity from motherhood which also anchors their lives. Husbands’ support emphasises that employment is one of …
Stand By Your Man: Wives' Emotion Work During Men's Unemployment, Aliya Hamid Rao
Stand By Your Man: Wives' Emotion Work During Men's Unemployment, Aliya Hamid Rao
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Recent research on unemployment has not sufficiently acknowledged how unemployment reverberates within families, particularly emotionally. This article uses data from more than 50 in‐depth interviews to illuminate the emotional demands that men's unemployment makes beyond the unemployed individual. It shows that wives of unemployed men do two types of emotion work—self‐focused and other‐focused—and both are aimed toward facilitating husbands' success in the emotionally arduous white‐collar job‐search process. This article extends research on emotion work by suggesting that participants perceive wives' emotion work as a resource with potential economic benefits in the form of unemployed men's reemployment. The findings furthermore suggest …