Conclusions

Abstract

This final chapter ties together three themes that have been discussed in earlier chapters, these themes being a particular model of women’s wellbeing; a particular representation of domesticity, family life, and gender relations; and particular constructions of a woman’s sense of self. It also addresses the question of the larger relevance of this ethnographic study: How does this book inform contemporary debates on women, work, and family? Thus, when American women reevaluate domesticity and conclude that there may be more to the satisfactions of family life and motherhood than earlier feminists were willing to acknowledge, they are perhaps exploring an aspect of contemporary American society’s underbelly—the countertrend to the feminist movement of the 1970s. And the present book, with its focus on a society in which the association between women, domesticity, and motherhood is highly elaborated, provides them a glimpse of a world in which this countertrend is the “dominant ideal.”