seven - ‘Last-minute mothers’: the construction of age and midlife motherhood in Denmark and Israel

Summary

This chapter examines the question of how age, gender and personal status intersect, as well as the ways in which they are ‘done’ by analysing the discursive construction of midlife mothers in Denmark and Israel. Drawing on a textual analysis of online web columns and magazine articles interviewing midlife women, we explore women's vulnerability and resilience to ageist stigmas. In this chapter we are particularly interested in how midlife mothers negotiate ageist stigmatisation and normative timelines in general and thus pave the way for alternative knowledge of ageing, age and family life. By incorporating a critical feminist approach, we argue that in both case studies, age relations and age-based hierarchies come about. We have found that both Danish and Israeli mothers increasingly seem to perceive their age as ‘ageing capital’ (Simpson, 2013) and integrate it with the good mother ideal and the regulatory ideal of intensive mothering (Hays, 1996).

Introduction

During the last decade there has been an increase in the number of women giving birth after the age of 40 in various European and Anglo-American societies. This chapter explores how age is linked to public morality and heteronormativity by analysing textual accounts of ‘older mothers’ in Denmark and Israel. We perceive the discourse of midlife motherhood as a site through which age, ageing and gender moralities are negotiated and performed, and we argue that they also convey new–old understandings of age, ageing and motherhood.

Comparing Denmark and Israel allows us to make connections with the gendering of age and the national, pro-natal and agestratified social and moral order in both countries. In both countries, biopolitics seems to follow pro-natal ideologies in which the figure of the good mother plays a central role (for example, Berkovitz, 1997; Lahad and Hvidtfeldt, 2016). As will be further elaborated, while in Denmark this ideology is strongly connected to the social welfare state, in Israel it is historically connected to Israeli Zionist eugenics and concerns the physical survival of the Jewish people. Within this context, we contend that this comparison highlights the similarities about the global discourse of intensive mothering (Hays, 1996) and the ways in which it interconnects with what Nikolas Rose (1998, 1999a) terms the neoliberal entrepreneurial self, which takes control of its fate and future happiness (Ahmed, 2010).