Abstract
The institution of motherhood, as theorised by Adrienne Rich in Of Woman Born (1976), is a male defined and controlled institution that has remained a powerful oppressive force in women's lives as they navigate becoming mothers for the first time (O'Reilly, 2020). However, in tandem with the institution of motherhood, new mothers also live out what Rich articulates as motherhood as experience, which allows for a feminist exploration of what becoming a mother means for women.
This research is an analysis of thirty interviews with ten first-time mothers in Aotearoa New Zealand. Each participant was interviewed three times over the course of their pregnancy, birth, and postpartum period. Throughout this weeks-long period of interviewing each new mother, as I too was pregnant and gave birth to my second daughter, participants shared with me their interactions with their medical care providers, detailed recountings of what it felt like to give birth, and introduced me to their babies. The result was an intimately feminist data set rich with the complex experiences of becoming a mother and what these experiences mean for mothers navigating early motherhood in contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand. It was through listening to these mothers' stories that I drew out three overarching experiences of becoming a mother: the constructed experience of becoming a mother; the structural experience of becoming a mother; and the embodied experience of becoming a mother.
In order to analyse these three distinct, but intersecting, experiences of becoming a mother, I ground this research in matricentric feminism (O'Reilly, 2020; 2021). The experiences of becoming a mother are explored in the three analysis chapters of the thesis. In exploring The Constructed Experience of Becoming a Mother, I demonstrate how participants navigated and experienced the ideology of normative motherhood as first-time mothers. In The Structural Experience of Becoming a Mother section, I outline two key apparatus of the structural institution of motherhood (the medical and welfare system), and how participants navigated these systems during the perinatal period. In the final section of this thesis, The Embodied Experience of Becoming a Mother, I share participants' stories of the felt experiences of becoming a mother for the first time.
This thesis provides a robust contribution to the growing field of matricentric feminism. The research contributes to the field of matricentric feminism through the way in which I employ the seven dictates of matricentric feminism through the centring of mothers' voices as crucial forms of academic knowledge, and assert that mothers, motherhood, mothering, and the maternal are worthy of legitimate and rigorous scholarly enquiry (O'Reilly, 2021). Finally, the research offers a novel contribution to matricentric feminism, which contests, counters, and challenges the oppressive institution of motherhood (O'Reilly, 2021) by exploring the experience of becoming a mother for the first time in contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand.