Often companies are unfair to women, who resume or seek work after pregnancy, or then attempt to return to the work after a break. This becomes like a proverbial wall, which women need to scale, in order to prove themselves worthy.
Published in Chapter:
Enshrining Motherhood, Entombing the Mother: The Crises of the Urban Indian Professional
Preeti Sharatchandra Shirodkar (Kohinoor Business School, India)
Copyright: © 2021
|Pages: 22
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-7998-6458-5.ch008
Abstract
In India, motherhood is a haloed trope that has ‘enshrined' motherhood leading gradually to an ‘entombing' of the mother – pushing her to decisions and actions, the alternatives of which may not have been realised or explored. The persona thus takes over the person, resulting in a need to assess what is and what needs to be done, to establish a balance between the two. The attempt would be to establish motherhood as just another role of a woman, thus liberating the person from both the ‘enshrining' and the ‘entombment' and offer suggestions based on the experience of Indian urban women professionals that would help them reach fulfilment at the professional and personal fronts. Based on the target audience, which includes not merely women from academia, but the Indian working professionals at large, the tone has been deliberately kept conversational, rather than one that is purely academic. Furthermore, given the paucity of work on the impact of motherhood and mothering on urban professionals in India, this would engage with important questions in the area of women's studies.