Abstract
In January 2018, Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s third female Prime Minister, made history when she announced that she and her partner, Clarke Gayford, were expecting their first child. This child would make Ardern the second woman in history to give birth while being the government’s elected head, and news coverage on both a national and global scale exploded. News media narratives are an accessible, popular medium where dominant cultural values and ideologies are portrayed to populations on a mass scale. Media narratives full of ideologies that perpetuate widely held cultural beliefs around work and motherhood, hidden behind the facade of Ardern’s superstar image, were disseminated to the masses. This research is a mixed-methods study, consisting of a narrative analysis of news articles related to Ardern’s motherhood image over a 24 month period (August 2017 - July 2019), and a survey of over 249 New Zealand women. The narrative analysis identified two primary narratives employed in news media articles about Ardern: the Wonder Woman narrative, the sub-narrative of Catalyst for Change, and the Part-Time PM narratives. Key findings suggest that both the newspaper narratives and survey responses articulate western notions of the ‘ideal’ mother. However, survey results show that participants' understanding of and interactions with media narratives of motherhood are complex and varied. This complexity was evident through participants expressing frustration with the media’s representation of motherhood and them pushing back against the narratives in the data, despite their descriptions of the ‘ideal’ mother being consistent with dominant ideals of motherhood.