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To be or not to be a mother?

This article is based on a recently completed study of fertility decision-making in Victoria, Australia. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 100 women, it explores how dominant discourses of mothering influence women in their life decisions about children. While much research indicates that all women negotiate dominant ideals of good mothering, our findings suggest that such stereotypes need to be further broken down, since women with and without children respond to different aspects of such ideals. For women who have children, images of the ‘good mother’ are less prevalent than pragmatic concerns about how to manage mothering. Women without children, in contrast, understand mothering as all-encompassing and potentially overwhelming. These findings suggest that Australian women share ideals and assumptions about mothering with their counterparts in the United Kingdom and the United States, but they also point to an increasing gap between how mothering is viewed and how it is practised.