manage to find alternative work in a small factory making laundry bags, but that too was closed down just over a year later. By this time many households in Danuta's town were without work (including hers) and after several jobless months, she made the decision to leave Poland and join her elder brother in London. Having borrowed the money for her coach fare from her mother and travelling on a tourist visa, Danuta arrived in London in January 1997. She moved in with her brother, his wife and their baby son in their two-room flat in north London.

Danuta's brother had already been working in London for over a year. Each weekday morning Mondays to Fridays, he prepared and delivered sandwiches to office workers in the city; most afternoons he cleaned private houses and in the evenings and at weekends he worked as a general kitchen help in a restaurant bar in central London. Within days of her arrival Danuta joined her brother's work regime. She took on the domestic cleaning jobs of a friend of his who was pregnant and unable to continue working; the restaurant in which he worked needed some extra help and Danuta got a Saturday evening shift there working in the kitchen; and it was not long before she acquired more cleaning work through her own new network of 'clients'. Very quickly, like her brother, Danuta's days, evenings and weekends became filled with work, having her own 'portfolio' of domestic cleaning jobs along with many bunches of house keys. Within six months she was making enough money to move into her own flat with her (Polish) boyfriend and to send money to her family in Poland.

Since leaving Poland, Danuta has created her own migrant success story. It is one of hard work, self-sufficiency and independence, living within and supported by her diasporic networks in London. Although her undocumented status has meant that for most of this time, even the most ordinary transactions such as getting dental treatment, opening a bank account, installing a telephone in her flat and accessing credit were very difficult, if not impossible. Danuta did not see her family in Poland for several years as she was always fearful that if she left the UK she would not be allowed to return. Now, however, Poland has become a member of the EU and Polish nationals now have the right to live and work in the UK. On the surface there is not much in Danuta's story that has changed. She still works as a cleaner, for the same people and on the same hourly basis but in more subtle ways her work and life are changing. Danuta is no longer fearful of leaving England and not being able to return and in the last year she has visited Poland twice; to see her mother, to have some dental treatment and to renew her passport. She has formalized her working situation by registering herself as self-employed and she is no longer totally dependent on receiving payment for her work in cash. It is a life that is much less on the margins than it used to be. Danuta cannot imagine staying in London on a permanent basis but nor can she imagine returning 'home'.

For more than a decade, Polish women like Danuta have made very good use of the new East-West 'migratory space' that opened up in Europe following the collapse of Communism [START_REF] Morokvasic | Transnational Mobility and Gender: a view from Post-Wall Europe[END_REF]. They have constituted a significant but irregular and undocumented migrant workforce in Europe's informal economy. Job loss and unemployment in Poland have clearly pushed Polish women into finding alternative livelihoods abroad. However, this article argues that their mobility may also be seen as a form of resistance against the profound erosion of women's human rights that has occurred in the post-Communist period (for a discussion of this 'backlash', see, for example, [START_REF] Einhorn | Gender and Citizenship in the Context of Democratisation and Economic Reform in East Central Europe[END_REF][START_REF] Fuszara | Women's Movements in Poland[END_REF]Molyneux, 1995;[START_REF] Watson | The Rise of Masculinism in Eastern Europe[END_REF]World Bank, 2004). Yet without the right to live and work in Europe, Polish migrant women's lives and livelihoods have been circumscribed by their irregular status. They have had to exist outside any framework of democratic citizenship or equal rights. Although often highly educated and well qualified, they have found work primarily in low paid and low skilled jobs, especially as domestic workers, childminders and personal carers, frequently in private households.

In May 2004, however, Poland became a member of the new enlarged European Union. This article considers the significance of EU membership for Polish women's work and mobility abroad and equality at home. As they gain the right to live and work across the EU, many of the difficulties that Polish migrant women have experienced as a consequence of their undocumented and illegal status [START_REF] Lutz | Living in the Twilight Zone; Illegalised Migrant Domestic Workers in Germany', paper presented at 'Domestic Service, a Factor of Social Revival in Europe[END_REF] should ease. Skilled women should be better able to access higher level occupations. But not all Polish migrant women will necessarily benefit greatly from the increased regulation of their work in European labour markets. Rather, an end to discrimination at home in Poland would have the most impact on Polish migrant women's lives. Yet as successive Polish governments have resisted the requirement to comply with EU equality directives and continue to openly disregard the rights of women, it may be quite a while before Poland becomes a place that women neither want nor need to leave.

MIGRATION AS RESISTANCE

The numbers of women who have left Poland since 1989 to work in Western Europe are hard to quantify. Statistical data on flows to and from Poland are inadequate and based on information collected ex ante (based on an officially declared intention to leave and the planned length of stay) and take no account of either circular or irregular migration (IOM, 2004). However, it has been estimated that Polish nationals have made up the largest national group within the undocumented East-West migratory flow in Europe (IOM, 2004) and they have all but taken over both regular and irregular seasonal jobs in agriculture, construction and domestic services in Europe (Morokvasic, 2003: 109). Around 1 million Poles are thought to have sought work outside Poland every year since 1989, travelling from Poland to work in Germany, France, the Netherlands and the UK and even the US (Jordan and Duvell, 2002: 88). More than half of those leaving have been women (Social Agenda, 2003a).

A clear driver of this westward female migratory flow has been the high levels of job loss and unemployment in Poland that have resulted from economic restructuring and transformation to a market economy. Largescale state-run industries such as mining, textiles and clothing have been privatized and rationalized, resulting in the 'deindustrialization' of large swathes of Poland's manufacturing centres and entire local communities left without work. Women's labour market participation rates have dropped dramatically in all of the accession countries but in Poland most of all (Central Statistical Office, 2005: 7). Female economic activity rates have fallen from 52.2 percent in 1994 to 47.9 percent in 2003 (Central Statistical Office, 2005: 1) while unemployment rates in Poland are 20 percent for women and 18 percent for men and are the highest of the accession countries (Central Statistical Office, 2005: 7;Commission of the European Communities, 2003: 5). Women make up the majority of those unemployed for more than 12 months, while younger women between 18 and 34 years make up the majority of unemployed women. In some industrial regions of Poland, such as Lodz, women have made up well over 50 percent of the unemployed (Einhorn, 2000: 106). Many women, especially women over 50, appear to have withdrawn from the labour market altogether (Central Statistical Office, 2005: 2;Women's Rights Centre, 2000: 10).

Although Polish men have been widely and adversely affected by job loss, unemployment and falling living standards, deepening gender discrimination has meant that the impact on women has been disproportionate [START_REF] Gal | The Politics of Gender after Socialism: A Comparative-Historical Essay[END_REF]World Bank, 2004). The widespread closure of state-run industries and public services resulted in women simultaneously losing both their jobs and the services that supported them, while the new private sector offers women relatively few alternative sources of employment. Indeed, the new private sector is distinguished by high levels of gender segregation, wide inequalities in pay between women and men and overt gender discrimination in employment practices (Commission of European Communities, 2003;IHFHR, 2000;World Bank, 2004). Employers routinely set age limitations on job vacancies; some even require pregnancy tests prior to employment (IHFHR, 2000: 322). They are unwilling to employ women in many categories of better paid higher skill level jobs and sexual harassment at work is widespread (UNICEF, 1999: 24).

Following its transformation to a market economy, Poland has changed from a labour market of full employment to one of widespread unemployment. Men, women, children and elderly people have all been affected in different ways, with many households experiencing dramatic falls in their income and living standards as jobs have been lost and the value of wages and state pensions has fallen (UNICEF, 1999: 3-4). While the economy may have grown overall, by 1998 living standards had dropped below 1989 levels, with a 20 percent increase in those living in poverty; 57 percent of whom were women (UNICEF, 1999: 5). Moreover the social crisis that has occurred in Poland has been much underplayed by the various international financial institutions driving the marketization process. Escalating health problems, alcoholism, violence (especially domestic violence), an increase in male suicide rates (especially among teenage boys) and a fall in life expectancy, are all indicators of the very high social costs of economic transformation (UNICEF, 1999).

Not only has the state rolled back its support of women's paid and unpaid work, official discourses have attempted to construct 'modern' gender relations as part of the problem. The idea that women should not be taking up the available jobs has taken a strong hold in conservative Poland. Successive governments have adopted neoconservative and profamily social policies that attempt to reconstruct anew a traditional gender regime in which men are sole family earners and women their dependants. Many childcare and reproductive health services have been withdrawn, access to contraception can be restricted and legal abortion is rarely attainable even within the very narrow scope that the law permits (IHFHR, 2000). This erosion of women's human rights resulted in Poland becoming a focus of international criticism. The UN expressed concerns about gender inequality and gender discrimination in the job market, Poland's lack of progress in tackling the growing problems of trafficking and domestic violence, the failure of the state to provide adequate advisory and support services to women, as well as the degree of influence that the Catholic Church appeared to have on government policies in particular in relation to abortion (IHFHR, 2000: 321). The EU has also added its voice to these international concerns. In preparing for accession and harmonization with European law, Poland appeared to make little effort to align itself with the requirements of the nine EU equal opportunity directives currently in place, nor with EU gender mainstreaming policies (Commission of the European Communities, 2003: 3).

It is hard to know exactly whether and how this political climate might act as a 'push' factor in women's decision to leave but their stories and narratives do seem to indicate that the vast mobilization of Polish women across Europe cannot be understood in terms of job loss and unemployment alone. Polish migrants talk of wanting to be part of a different, new and forward-looking society, 'modern' and 'global' and on the leading edge of cultural diversity [START_REF] Kolankiewicz | The Challenge of Recent Polish-UK Migration for Diasporic Citizenship[END_REF]. Partly this is about social mobility and the aspiration to participate as consumers in the new global capitalism. But through their mobility, Polish women have been able to construct alternative livelihoods and worker identities and avoid becoming the gendered subjects of official conservative discourse. Mobility has enabled many women to remain economic actors; unmarried women to cohabit with their partners without censure; lesbian women (and gay men) to form same-sex relationships without discrimination [START_REF] Lutz | Living in the Twilight Zone; Illegalised Migrant Domestic Workers in Germany', paper presented at 'Domestic Service, a Factor of Social Revival in Europe[END_REF]; and married women (living in a society where divorce is all but impossible) to achieve a socially legitimate form of marital separation. Economic transformation in Poland has been the spur to mobility, but in a climate hostile to their autonomous aspirations and desires, Polish women have used migration as a form of resistance and escape.

POLISH WOMEN: A NEW PARADIGM OF TRANSNATIONAL MOBILITY AND WORK

There is now a great deal of research on women's East-West migration and accounts of Polish women in Europe appear in a number of studies on migrant workers in Europe (see, for example, [START_REF] Jordan | Irregular Migration; The Dilemmas of Transnational Mobility[END_REF][START_REF] Kofman | Gender and International Migration in Europe[END_REF][START_REF] Morokvasic | Transnational Mobility and Gender: a view from Post-Wall Europe[END_REF]. Globalization has shifted the character of international migration, away from long-term settlement towards increasingly short-term, pendular 'shuttle' mobility and with transnational lives sustained by new information technologies, diasporic communities and cheap travel. Polish women have very much been at the forefront of this new paradigm of cross-border mobility and work [START_REF] Morokvasic | Transnational Mobility and Gender: a view from Post-Wall Europe[END_REF]Wallace and Stola, 2001). Many support children and families still living in Poland, and act more like long-distance 'commuters' than migrants or settlers, travelling for relatively short periods, back and forth across national borders, between home and work.

Although, Polish labour migration in Europe has become progressively more organized since 1989, women have mostly relied on their own social capital and their capacity to access both the resources and the networks that will help them through the different stages of the migratory process. Travel into Western Europe is usually conducted legally, using one of a number of means of legal entry including tourist visas, student visas, au pair schemes, seasonal worker schemes and business visas (see, for example, [START_REF] Crawley | Managing Migration: Current Entry Routes into the UK Labour Market', paper presented to the Athens workshop 'Managing Migration for the Benefit of Europe[END_REF][START_REF] Favell | Markets against Politics: Migration, EU Enlargement and the Idea of Europe[END_REF][START_REF] Jordan | Irregular Migration; The Dilemmas of Transnational Mobility[END_REF]. Families and friends both in Poland and abroad assist with both the money and knowhow for travel (including, crucially, information for dealing with customs and immigration at the point of entry) and over time this knowledge has become much more 'expert' and extensive. On arrival, these networks have assisted with accommodation and finding work. Postcard advertisements placed in local shop windows or leaflets distributed to households in residential neighbourhoods have been one way of finding work, along with local agencies that recruit and supply cleaners and care workers to private households and residential homes. Most women, however, have relied on each other to find work and usually do so very quickly, even arriving to join an existing work rotation system [START_REF] Morokvasic | Transnational Mobility and Gender: a view from Post-Wall Europe[END_REF].

There has been a great deal of heterogeneity in how Polish women conduct their transnational lives. Polish women's cross-border mobility between Poland and Germany has been highly distinctive because geographical proximity and extensive and historical diasporic networks have supported frequent travel back and forth, even on a daily basis. Morokvasic suggests that in Germany at least, Polish women are a 'quasimigrant' group and better regarded as 'transnational commuters' or 'pendulaires'. They do not necessarily regard themselves as migrants, because they 'don't think of themselves as having left'; they speak of their 'travels' rather than migration and they are not at all concerned with assimilation or settlement but rather with maintaining their Polish links and identity (Morokvasic, 2003: 111-14). This is especially true for women with children who coordinate their productive and reproductive work over transnational borders (Morokvasic, 2003: 112) living out a new kind of stretched and borderless motherhood. By contrast, younger women without family dependants, and especially those who have travelled further from home (such as to the UK where very frequent travel is less sustainable), have remained outside Poland for longer periods of time. They too have no intention of long-term settlement but the longer they are away, the greater the gap between their current lifestyle and that available to them at home [START_REF] Brown | Being a Migrant the Polish Way[END_REF].

Typically Polish women have found work in private households as cleaners, childminders, au pairs and carers of the elderly, and in preparing food, washing up and serving meals and drinks in the numerous bars and restaurants of Europe's 24/7 capital cities. Helma [START_REF] Lutz | Living in the Twilight Zone; Illegalised Migrant Domestic Workers in Germany', paper presented at 'Domestic Service, a Factor of Social Revival in Europe[END_REF] has suggested that Polish women in Europe have occupied a kind of 'twilight zone' with regard to both their illicit residence and undeclared work. This status has arisen not so much from illegal entry but from overstaying the duration of their visa and working without a work permit. Without rights to employment and residency, Polish women have not benefited from the many rights that accompany citizenship, such as the use of welfare and health services, education and training, regularized work and employment benefits or protection from discrimination, harassment and exploitation in work. Yet as white women they are more easily absorbed into existing national ethnic hierarchies and are usually less fearful than other undocumented migrant groups of detection. Working in private households can be very isolating but it has offered some 'cover' for undocumented status.

What is most striking about Polish migrants' experience is not their undocumented status however, but their self-sufficient 'worker accounts' (Jordan and Duvell, 2002: 103). They work long hours for low pay often with no contract, making no claims on state welfare services while being 'inconspicuously useful' in a wide range of jobs (Jordan and Duvell, 2002: 112-13). It is a life in which they do not necessarily need to move outside their diasporic networks. The connection to their country of residence can be restricted to the houses they clean, the children they look after and the meals they serve. Language skills need only be honed to cope with their 'temporary' transnational life.

REGULATION IN THE 'NEW' EUROPE

Polish women may have displayed little interest in permanent settlement outside Poland but nevertheless there is a limit to what they can achieve through their mobility while they remain outside a framework of citizenship and rights. Mobility has empowered Polish women to the extent that they have been able to construct and sustain commuter and worker identities, in the face of strong official efforts to construct women as dependent. Yet as [START_REF] Erel | Skilled Migrant Women and Citizenship[END_REF] has suggested, to be empowered by migration women need their skills to be recognized, to speak the language of their country of residence and for their social networks to extend beyond their migrant group. All of which has been difficult for Polish women -their work made illegal by immigration policies that are out of step with the logic and ethos of globalization and transnationalism.

As new nationals of an enlarged EU, Polish women's fortunes, both inside and outside Poland, could change. Poland has the highest levels of female educational attainment in Europe (Eurostat, 2005) and there is a 'startling' number of skilled workers among Polish migrants (Jordan and Duvell, 2002: 133), but the opportunities to gain formal recognition of their skills and qualifications and to secure access to well-paid skilled work in the formal economy depend on how Europe's new transnational migration strategy will be implemented in practice. It is immigration policies, rather than employment policies that are key in shaping the job status of migrants (Kofman et al., 2000: 114). The status of Polish migrant women in the 'new' Europe is currently caught in an 'old' Europe, somewhat divided between adopting more market-driven 'open door' policies and maintaining Fortress Europe.

The fall of the Berlin Wall and war in Yugoslavia were unanticipated events in Europe that triggered vast levels of mass cross-border mobilization for which Western Europe was totally unprepared. Since that time, the EU has attempted to pursue a managed approach to the integration of Central and Eastern Europe into an enlarged Europe [START_REF] Jordan | Irregular Migration; The Dilemmas of Transnational Mobility[END_REF]. In 1993, the 'Copenhagen Summit' agreed the economic and political criteria under which Central and Eastern European countries could bid for EU membership and in 1994 both Hungary and Poland made their first bid to join the EU under the 'Copenhagen Criteria' (Dustmann et al., 2003: 10). In 2002, the EU finally agreed that Poland along with seven other countries would join the EU in 2004 followed by Bulgaria and Romania joining in 2007. Membership of the EU will eventually give Polish nationals, along with the citizens of the other accession countries, the right to study, reside and work in the other EU member states.

However, the extension of the EU in May 2004 to include eight new member states, of which Poland with a population of nearly 39 million is the largest, exposed a deep schism in Europe's official response to migration and cross-border controls. Across the EU, there has been a distinctive shift towards a more transnational approach to migration policies [START_REF] Sassen | Guests and Aliens[END_REF] along with an official recognition of some of the benefits of labour migration (Social Agenda, 2003a). An ageing and shrinking working population across the EU has meant that immigration is now the main source of population growth and necessary to meet current and future labour supply needs (Social Agenda, 2003a). There is also an official recognition that policy approaches that have attempted to control migration have not been particularly effective. Increased restrictions are often counterproductive, leading to more breaches of migration laws and more clandestine activity [START_REF] Favell | Markets against Politics: Migration, EU Enlargement and the Idea of Europe[END_REF]Jordan and Duvell, 2002: 3). The size of the informal economy in Europe is now estimated to be between 7 percent and 16 percent of EU GDP or around 10-28 million jobs and brings with it many problems associated with unregulated work (Social Agenda, 2003b). Since October 2003, as part of the updated European Employment Strategy, all EU member states have been required to adopt new policy approaches for regularizing the informal economy and in particular with undocumented work, much of which is undertaken by migrant labour.

This official shift towards a more 'open door' approach in EU policy has been in conflict, however, with the concerns of individual member states who fear that an increase in migrants from the new member states in Central and Eastern Europe will significantly add to existing levels of immigration. Rather than moving to a more liberal approach, France, for example, has introduced many new measures to control migration, while the Netherlands has moved from the liberal open door policy it held throughout most of the 1990s to one of greater protectionism. Claiming the need to protect public infrastructures and the welfare rights of existing citizens, most EU member states, including Italy, Austria, Finland, France, Germany and the Netherlands, have imposed transitional arrangements that will in some cases restrict the employment and welfare rights of nationals from the new member countries for up to seven years after enlargement, until 2011. Germany in particular is experiencing historically unprecedented high levels of unemployment and, in conjunction with populist fears that geographical proximity and large historic diasporic Polish communities within Germany will continue to support extensive migratory flows across its borders with Poland, is unlikely to adopt a more liberal stance on Polish migration. Poland is now itself a migrant-receiving country and the perceived porosity of Poland's border with the rest of Eastern Europe fuels German concerns that they will receive new flows from countries such as the Ukraine via Poland's eastern 'back door' (see, for example, [START_REF] Kindler | international conference on 'Migration and Domestic Work in Global Perspective[END_REF] on how Ukrainian migrants have all but taken over undocumented domestic work in Poland).

Exceptionally, the UK, Ireland and Sweden, who all anticipated low levels of new migration following enlargement [START_REF] Dustmann | The Impact of EU Enlargement on Migration Flows[END_REF] adopted an open door policy on nationals from the new EU member states from the first day of enlargement. They had an interest in regularizing the status of both existing undocumented migrants, as well as new inflows from the accession countries, in order to improve the selective recruitment of skilled migrants (Jordan and Duvell, 2002: 79) -and especially for those sectors and labour markets in which women predominate, such as health and social care where an ageing population is resulting in a very significant demand for health and social care workers (Hutton and Giddens, 2001). Since May 2004, Polish teachers have been permitted to teach in any EU country and in both Sweden and the UK new schemes have been introduced to assist in the recruitment of registered nurses and doctors from Poland. However, immigration policies based on labour market demand are selective [START_REF] Favell | Markets against Politics: Migration, EU Enlargement and the Idea of Europe[END_REF] and as yet 'old' Europe does not extend to all citizens from the newly included EU states of Central Europe, the right to study, reside and live in any EU member state. Such a borderless EU labour market is still some way off.

RIGHTS AT HOME

Regularized status is of great benefit to qualified women who want full-time and permanent work and who have perhaps worked previously in unskilled jobs. These new rights are of less help to those women without highly marketable skills, or to those without bilingual skills, or to the many Polish migrant women who have to take their family and care responsibilities in Poland into account and who want flexible and shortterm work. Although work in the informal economy has offered none of the protection or benefits of the regularized work, it has given Polish women a degree of flexibility that is not available in the formal labour market. The right to work across the EU is an important benchmark but one of which relatively few Polish women can take advantage.

On 1 May 2004, the position of Polish migrants living and working in the UK was regularized. It is regarded as a successful paradigm of labour market extension and regularization. All Polish nationals working in the UK illegally were granted an amnesty and acquired the right to live and work in the UK provided they registered as employees under the Workers' Registration Scheme (WRS). All those working legally but under restricted employment schemes, such as those employed as au pairs or seasonal agricultural workers, or on a working student's visa, acquired the right to move to different jobs in different sectors and remain permanently. Although the majority of Polish migrants are still travelling to Germany to work, since May 2004 the numbers of Polish nationals entering the UK and Ireland has increased beyond all expectations, with around half a million entering the UK, and a further 200,000 entering Ireland. Post-2004, Polish nationals in the UK continue to maintain very strong links and interests in Poland and this is made easier by the ability to make frequent return visits often as much as 10 times a year [START_REF] Garapich | Class and Ethnicity of Global City Migrants[END_REF]. It is also easier for migrants from Central and East European to find work, change jobs and in some cases, to move into higher level occupations; although many still remain in low paid, insecure work, working below their skill levels [START_REF] Anderson | Fair Enough? Central and East European Migrants in Low-Wage Employment in the UK[END_REF]. But whereas women appeared once to make up the majority of Polish nationals entering the UK, since 2004 this gender distribution seems to have changed. Men made up 57 percent of those registered on the WRS, while the Labour Force Survey suggests that more Polish men than women are entering the UK post-2004(Labour Force Survey, 2005, cited in Drinkwater, 2006). It is most likely, however, that Polish women are still undercounted and many continue to occupy secondary and contingent labour markets where there are fewer benefits to be gained from regularized work, and less incentive to register. It is hard to believe that improvements at home are finally stemming the flow.

In 2006, two years after EU enlargement, the economic and social situation in Poland remains unchanged. Unemployment levels are high at around 20 percent (40 percent for those under 18), only half the working age population is economically active, while 18 percent of Poles are living below the official poverty line. Unemployment and poverty are particularly acute in rural areas, which account for over a third of the Polish population. Polish manufacturing industries are unable to compete with other global producers (especially China). Meantime, Poland itself has become a receiving country for migrant workers from other Central and Eastern European countries, who are now the preferred labour supply for low waged jobs in the informal sector. The EU is supporting significant business and infrastructure development in Poland, and cities such as Warsaw and Krakow are vibrant and cosmopolitan places where a new European modernity is much in evidence. But underneath lies a vast pool of surplus of labour that continues to look to Europe for alternative sources of income and work and labour market gender discrimination is still unchecked.

In 2001, the Government Plenipotentiary for the Equal Status of Women and Men was set up in response to the EU requirement that Poland develop a national institutional framework for gender equality in Poland; in compliance with the European Council's strategy on equal treatment and gender mainstreaming and including the goal of achieving 60 percent female employment by 2010. The EU funded the creation of a new national database of gender disaggregated statistics so that the Plenipotentiary could monitor the effectiveness of gender mainstreaming polices and in 2005 the Plenipotentiary launched an information campaign informing women of their new rights under EU directives. In this short period, many leading Polish feminist academics and activists contributed their expertise to the work of the Plenipotentiary, and there was a hope that EU gender equality strategies could finally make a difference in Poland. However, both official and public support for the Plenipotentiary over this period was at best lukewarm and following a general election in November 2005, an ultra-conservative, pro-family and 'avowedly Catholic' (The Economist, 2006) government coalition came into power. Part of its populist appeal was based on an anti-EU stance and one of its first acts was to disband the Plenipotentiary for the Equal Status of Women and Men. The hope that Europe might provide a framework for combating labour market discrimination and gender inequality in Poland still seems a long way off.

Coincidentally as I was finishing this article, I received an email from Kasia, a friend in Warsaw. She wrote: 'the political situation is horrible, a giant backlash, conservatism, xenophobia, homophobia, you name it. I am thinking about emigration again.' CONCLUSION This article has discussed how faced with job loss, unemployment and gender discrimination, many Polish women opted to leave Poland to find work in Europe. Since the 1990s, Polish women have seized the new opportunity for mobility in very large numbers, travelling to work in the informal economies of Europe as cleaners, nannies, childminders and carers. In doing so, many Polish women have forged new patterns of transnational work and family organization, appearing more like 'commuters' than migrants as they travel back and forth to work, across national borders on a regular basis. In many respects, Polish women have been very successful in maintaining worker identities through this mobility but nevertheless, without work permits or rights of residency, their status has been undocumented, and without employment rights or recognition of their qualifications, their work has been precarious and unskilled.

The accession of Poland to the EU has the potential to regularize Polish migrant women's work and to help them access work that is commensurate to their skills and qualifications. But continuing migration controls in Europe are highly selective and will continue to restrict Polish women's employment rights in Europe, for some years to come. And anyway, relatively few Polish women have an interest in longer term settlement outside Poland. So far, however, membership of the EU has failed to make an impact on gender discrimination in Poland, which is widespread and routine and it may be a long while yet before Poland becomes a place to which Danuta will want to return. What she and most Polish women need from the EU is a legal framework of gender equality and rights in Poland that will enable them to stay at home.

NOTE

My thanks to Helma Lutz for her helpful comments on this article.

1.

This biography is taken from work in progress on migrant women's narratives. This is a fictional name adopted to preserve anonymity.

European Journal of Women's Studies 14(1)


Gracia Maroto-Navarro

Esther Castaño-López

María Del Mar

García-Calvente Escuela

Andaluza De

GRANADA Salud Pública

Keywords:

This article explores the maternal experiences of a heterogeneous group of 26 mothers from Granada (Andalusia, Spain). The aim is to analyse the needs and demands that these women express with regard to childrearing, using a qualitative methodology. The authors conducted in-depth interviews and analysed the discourses of the mothers following the hermeneutical method. The variables used for sample selection and the themes that emerged during the interviews revealed that the discourses of the mothers revolve around three dimensions: indifference, demands and resignation regarding support for childrearing. The lack of paternal involvement in childrearing appears as a transversal dimension. This article shows that the material conditions of existence marked the differences in the responses of the women regarding support for childrearing, while the sexual division of labour and gender inequalities unified their discourses.

INTRODUCTION

Criticism of the scientific, hegemonic and patriarchal discourse that, without regard to the great differences among women, naturalizes us, homogenizes our experiences and reduces us to a single facet -reproduction -represents a central axis of contemporary feminist theory [START_REF] Haraway | Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature[END_REF][START_REF] Schiebinger | Has Feminism Changed Science?[END_REF]. Thanks to the work of other authors, we know that motherhood is a subjective experience, one that is relational, social and cultural, and that, because of these characteristics, there is great diversity in the way that women conceive of and understand their mothering experiences [START_REF] Badinter | ¿Existe el amor maternal? Historia del amor maternal: siglos XVII al XX[END_REF][START_REF] Diquinzio | The Impossibility of Motherhood: Feminism, Individualism, and the Problem of Mothering[END_REF][START_REF] Scheper-Hughes | La muerte sin llanto: violencia y vida cotidiana en Brasil[END_REF][START_REF] Stack | All Our Kin[END_REF]. In this article, we examine the maternal experience of women from Granada, Spain. The qualitative study of mothers' needs and demands regarding support for childrearing has enabled us to analyse the existing diversity in great detail.

The transition to motherhood [START_REF] Bailey | Bridging Home and Work in the Transition to Motherhood: A Discursive Study[END_REF] and women's childrearing expectations [START_REF] Lundgren | Swedish Women's Experience of Childbirth 2 Years after Birth[END_REF] are studied in many countries. In Spain, however, there is a scarcity of this kind of research, which is striking for two reasons; first, the specificity of the Mediterranean region in terms of caring for children and second, the social, economic and political changes that have occurred in Spain in recent decades. Solidarity within families has been and continues to be one of the pillars of our welfare state [START_REF] Blossfeld | Careers of Couples in Contemporary Societies: From Male Breadwinners to Dual Earner Families[END_REF][START_REF] Esping-Andersen | Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism[END_REF], 1999). This solidarity has a female face and is manifested in the informal care (García-Calvente and Mateo-Rodríguez, 2004) that women provide within their kinship networks. Nonetheless, it would be inappropriate to define this childcare solidarity as a characteristic exclusive to Spanish women, since the social profit at the expense of the invisible work performed by women [START_REF] Durán | Costes invisibles de la enfermedad[END_REF] is a feature of the international economic system [START_REF] Waring | If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics[END_REF].

In Andalusia, the traditional nuclear family (father-provider and mothercaregiver) is the most common family model [START_REF] Requena | Pautas contemporáneas de evolución de los hogares en España[END_REF], although its decline has begun and it is now giving way to new forms of family organization, such as two-income couples. In recent decades, women have entered the educational system at all levels and are now accessing the most qualified sectors of the labour market. 1 However, the conquest by women of the public domain has not been accompanied by policies in support of childrearing or by men's participation in the domestic sphere. This lack of interest in children and domestic life contributes to women remaining in the private domain, brings about second shifts [START_REF] Hochschild | The Second Shift[END_REF] and makes balancing family and job difficult.

On the other hand, the fact that working mothers are not exclusively devoted to childrearing has meant that for the first time in Spain the care of children is considered a social problem worthy of political consideration and also that a law on the equality of women and men is currently being developed. But in general the measures put into place up to the present are not reversing the situation, in that childrearing responsibilities remain in the hands of women and the obligatory nature of this responsibility is not questioned [START_REF] Esteban | Cuidado y salud: costes en la salud de las mujeres y beneficios sociales[END_REF]. The public authorities give women the tasks of such care in the form of a moral duty backed by the exaltation of the natural female ability for childrearing [START_REF] Comas | Mujeres, familia y estado del bienestar[END_REF].

The public support made available for motherhood and fatherhood is very limited. It consists of 16 weeks' paid maternity leave from work, an average leave of two days for fathers when their child is born and €100 per child per month only for mothers who also have a paid job. These measures are of some assistance to 'working' mothers, still a minority sector in Spain, but they do not benefit fathers or mothers who are unemployed, single, undocumented immigrants or who work in the underground economy. Worth highlighting is the non-existence of paternity leave, the absence of support during the post-partum period [START_REF] Maroto-Navarro | El reto de la maternidad en España: dificultades sociales y sanitarias[END_REF], the shortage of government-run nurseries, etc. Thus, no policies cover the needs of a large sector of the population that is, in general, quite vulnerable.

Some authors speak of the eclipse of the father figure as the head of the family [START_REF] Flaquer | La estrella menguante del padre[END_REF] and of the existence of new paternal models that are more involved in domestic tasks and childrearing [START_REF] Henwood | The "Good Father": Reading Men's Accounts of Paternal Involvement during the Transition to First-Time Fatherhood[END_REF], although it becomes apparent that the change in roles is established more in theory than in day-to-day practice (Edley and Wertherell, 1998). Despite certain changes in their discourses and the social desirability of such changes, Spanish men have not become part of the labour force in the domestic sphere: 50 percent do nothing at home except eat and rest, while only 3 percent participate in domestic chores on an equal basis with their partners [START_REF] Bonino | Los varones hacia la paridad en lo doméstico. Discursos sociales y prácticas masculinas[END_REF].

THE STUDY

Our aim was to analyse, through in-depth interviews, the demands for childrearing support that 26 mothers from Granada (Andalusia, Spain) expressed in their discourses.

Sample selection was not random, due to the need to use a relatively heterogeneous group of women. Seeking out women with differences in education (no education, secondary education and university education), employment situation (unemployed, in precarious employment, manual labourers and professionals), age upon becoming a mother (adolescentearly, intermediate, late), number of children (one or more than one) and age of offspring (from 0 to four years of age) contributed to achieving the heterogeneity sought.

Various mediators (paediatricians, nurses and directors of women's associations) acted as key informants and facilitated access to the participants. The first contact with the mothers was by telephone, although some initial contacts were in person. We explained the aim of the study, the type of collaboration we hoped for and the conditions in which the interviews would have to take place.

In July 2003, we performed the interviews at the time, date and place that the participants preferred. We took special care to ensure that the interviews were conducted in a space that allowed the women to be relaxed. After obtaining the informed consent of all of them, the interview was tape-recorded. The confidentiality of the data was guaranteed.

During the interviews we explored the mothering experiences of the participants, their feelings and expectations as well as their needs and demands. The opening statement was: 'We would like to learn about your experiences as a mother and how you are experiencing childrearing.' The particularity of each woman's discourse conditioned the direction taken by each interview. The transcription was made by a person expert in the subject matter. The personal data that identified the participants had been previously replaced with pseudonyms.

With the support of the computer program N-Vivo, we followed the hermeneutical method proposed by [START_REF] Diekelmann | The NLN Criteria for Appraisal of Baccalaureate Programs: A Critical Hermeneutic Analysis[END_REF]. After the general reading of the texts, we gathered the interpretative information for each interview and we identified interconnected themes. In accordance with the current inaugurated by Heidegger, we attempted to capture the sense of the contextually mediated discourses, seeking out the meanings that things have for the people involved. We found that the emerging themes bore a close relationship to some of the variables used for the sample selection (education, employment situation, age upon becoming a mother). Therefore, these variables as well as the emerging themes contributed to the classification of the discourses along three dimensions: indifference, demandingness and resignation regarding support for childrearing. Figure 1 shows the selection variables, the emerging themes and the three dimensions that resulted.

We also found a transversal dimension: the lack of paternal involvement in childrearing. The results presented in the following sections are structured around these four dimensions.

Dimensions b

Indifference Demandingness Resignation

a The variables regarding number of children and age of children, also used as sample selection criteria, did not determine the maternal discourses.

b Each one of these dimensions corresponds to a level of education, an employment situation and a different age upon becoming a mother, as well as different responses to the emerging themes. Throughout the presentation of results, we discuss the relationship between variables, themes and dimensions.

Variables a

Education

FIGURE 1 Selection Variables and Emerging Themes that Classify the Motherhood Discourses along Three Dimensions

After performing the analyses, we were able to confirm that for respondents belonging to low income groups, certain normative needs [START_REF] Ballester | Las necesidades sociales. Teorías y conceptos básicos[END_REF] 2 for childrearing are not covered. However, from their discourses it was impossible to detect any demand not related to economic assistance. According to [START_REF] Baudrillard | La génesis ideológica de las necesidades[END_REF] needs are subjective and in order for needs to be transformed into demands, they must first be self-perceived. These participants do not perceive themselves as in need in the realm of childrearing and in consequence they do not make demands.

Thus the discourse of the mothers who subsist without complaining and who let themselves be controlled by the adversities of destiny is classified as indifferent. The story of Laura illustrates this question. At the age of 25, she has three children, aged two, four and seven. She is currently unemployed and is a single mother because her partner threw her out of the house while she was pregnant with her last child. Her mother has passed away, her father is an alcoholic and she lives on government assistance and the help that her sisters sometimes provide. Although she is aware of her defenceless situation, she does not have tools with which to remedy it:

Interviewer: How does a mother alone with three children get by? How does she manage? Laura:

I've got used to it . . .

Interviewer:

But how do you . . . , Laura:

Well, by getting used to it, because, otherwise, what can I do?

These words represent a group of women who have not had the opportunity to reflect on their needs and who, in consequence, do not generate specific demands when faced with situations that for other mothers would be a constant source of discontent. They adapt to the circumstances without creating conflicts. Vanesa is an unemployed cleaner and a single parent. She lives with her family and, for the time being, she has the peace of mind of having her mother close by. When she speaks about needs for motherhood, she does so in the third person:

Vanesa:

There are a lot of mothers who have no resources and there should be more help for them, in the form of money or something . . . There are lots of things they might be in need of. Thank heavens right now I don't need anything because I have . . . my boyfriend works and we've got everything we need.

Although Rocío has a job and an intact family, her life story is hard. She was a single mother of a child who died. Her current husband is unemployed and her daughters ask for things that are 'for the higher classes'. However, she appears impassive, even when she admits that she counts on the help provided by her four-year-old daughter:

Rocío:

You know what? When that's all you've got and you've never known anything else, you adapt. On the other hand, my boss has two helpers that take care of her children because she can't manage, she gets completely hysterical. But that's what she's known since she was little because her parents had a nanny, but since I'm not used to that and I can't afford it, well . . . I need the help that I have: that of my older daughter who, although she's only four, is very willing to help.

We find that to the extent that women are unaware of their social rights, of how public policies work and of the type of services that they could receive, they do not generate demands with regard to support for childrearing. Their only manifestations are related to money, generally in the form of social benefits. The case of Juana is representative. When she got pregnant, unintentionally, she moved in with her boyfriend, who lives with his mother. He works as a lorry driver and spends a lot of time away from home. She has no contact with her parents because when she was a child they abandoned her, leaving her to be raised by her grandparents. She believes she is undeserving of assistance and her discourse is defeatist: These statements lead us to question the effectiveness of government assistance policies that are exclusively economic, since we think that in the long term they will not solve the problems faced by mothers. In accordance with the Beijing Declaration, we believe that the final objective must be to empower women at all levels so that they can finally take control of their lives.

Juana: Well,
Without the means to design their futures, they have often been overcome by the events that occur, such as their pregnancies. They are enlisted into motherhood 'accidentally' (Vanesa): unplanned pregnancies at a very young age. No defined maternal ideal appears in their discourses and they did not undergo a preparatory period for the change that was going to take place in their lives. Trapped in their surroundings, far from experiencing the situation in a conflictive way, they simply assume it:

Interviewer: Do you like being a mother? Laura:

Huh! Well, now that I've got them, yes. But . . . it's nice maybe when you've got a partner, when you've got help, but now, like this . . .

In addition, in some cases, the value attached to children is contradictory. Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1997) speaks of an economy of emotions with which mothers control and limit their affective relationships with their offspring in order to survive emotionally in disadvantaged environments. Rocío, after the death of her first son, tried to avoid becoming too attached to her daughters and for Manuela children are interchangeable. She has six children, a conflictive relationship with her husband (who has spent time in prison) and a sexist education that leads her to value boys and girls in a different way:

Manuela:
I had wanted to get pregnant again because my girls had already left and got married . . . I said to myself 'if it's a girl, at least when I'm a little old lady she'll take care of me' . . . but when they told me it was a boy I wasn't so happy anymore, . . . it's not the same as having a daughter, well, a boy isn't going to clean your bum . . . When I gave birth, the lady next to me had a little girl and I said: 'I'll trade my little boy for your little girl' but she didn't want to.

Lastly, before becoming mothers many of them had been in charge of taking care of other children in their wider family. That is why, despite their lack of skill in formulating demands, there is something in which they are empowered: they are expert caregivers, in contradiction with the studies associating a low level of education with an increased need for childrearing information [START_REF] Moran | What Do Women Want to Know after Childbirth?[END_REF]. Also, some are 'rich' in terms of family solidarity, in that they can count on their mothers.

DEMANDINGNESS REGARDING SUPPORT FOR CHILDREARING

Other women, with greater economic and educational resources, have manifested a multitude of demands regarding support for mothering. Demandingness is the word that best defines their discourses, but why are they demanding? For one thing, they are familiar with the 'market' of public services and are very selective clients who want to choose, from among multiple options, the alternative that is best for them at any given time. Second, dissatisfaction increases as people satisfy their physical needs, because it is then that wishes of a psychological origin -which can never be satisfied -tend to appear [START_REF] Galbraith | La sociedad opulenta[END_REF].

These mothers find there is insufficient social awareness regarding children. Therefore, they demand that public life [START_REF] Murillo | El mito de la vida privada[END_REF]) also be designed with children and their caregivers in mind:

Elena: Children are also clients and they have rights . . . rarely are there play parks, changing tables . . . It's a real feat to change a baby's nappy in a public toilet! These things make the difference between life being easy or it being a real nuisance.

Most of them have paid help for childrearing. Nonetheless, they are not satisfied because they do not want to hire just anyone, in an 'under the table' arrangement, to take care of their children. They demand specialized, high quality personnel and for this reason they propose that childminding services be professionalized. Andrea is 34 and has a long-awaited baby. She has convinced herself that she is capable of reconciling childrearing with her job as a librarian. She does not want to have to rely on her family because she believes that it is the parents who should be in charge of childrearing. She is worried about where to leave her little girl:

Andrea:

It would be nice if they would tell you how to find people who can help, professionals or people who are trustworthy . . . so that if you bring someone in to raise your children, at least you know who it is, you have references.

At the same time, these are women who do not want to be mothers at any expense. They have postponed motherhood until they consider it to be the right time. This wait heightens their expectations and the transition to motherhood begins even before they become pregnant. Being a mother thus becomes a mental state and they reflect, in advance, on what type of mother they want to be, what they want their relationship to be like with their partner, their professional life and their social life. According to [START_REF] Beck-Gernsheim | The Normal Chaos of Love[END_REF], they seek perfection and well-being at all levels; therefore, for the sake of the baby (and for their own sake) they are capable of foregoing the experience:

Eva:

I love children but . . . I didn't know if I was going to have any or not. I thought that if my family, economic and personal situation, you know, everything, was favourable, then I would have a child and if not, well, then I wouldn't have one.

These women's capacity to control their pregnancies reveals their autonomy and highlights the active role they play in deciding the path that their lives will take. They have made a great investment in their professional careers, reflecting carefully on each decision and, when they decide to become mothers, they follow a similar procedure. However, their expectations are so high that their maternal ideal becomes unattainable. Adriana, a chemist aged 34, has a three-year-old child. She has the support of her mother and also has paid help. She is happy although she misses her freedom:

Adriana: The concept I had of motherhood was very bucolic . . . I saw my sister with her adorable children and I thought 'what a lovely thing'. It was all very romantic, very idealized . . . What happens is that when you've got your own you've got so many worries that they cause a lot of concern and you end up saying 'this is not so romantic after all'.

Furthermore, the stress experienced by these women increases because they feel they are unable to deal with the daily battles related to maternity. They feel the need to be instructed in the more practical aspects of childrearing. Eva, a 40-year-old engineer and a single mother of a baby, believes that the social welfare and health care services can respond to specific questions, but she would like to be able to cope well with childrearing on her own:

Eva:

Things that people can understand, not things that a scientist would say . . . All of that is in the books, but information campaigns with basic stuff are needed. Sometimes people tell you 'it's intuitive'. Alright, but you might be doing it wrong for three months before the 'intuition' comes . . .

In this respect maternal education becomes a way to increase the mother's personal autonomy and not depend on professionals all the time. Knowing what to do at any given moment and making decisions without hesitation are these women's highest aspirations, as they want to control motherhood just like they control the rest of their lives. Mónica is 33 years old, a teacher and the mother of a baby. She has numerous questions, looks for all kinds of information and wants to receive useful advice:

Mónica:

If my head hurts I know that I can take an aspirin, but when she cries I don't really know if something hurts, if she has wind, if she's hungry, if she hasn't eaten enough or if she's just crying for the sake of it.

They have decision-making capacity over their lives but they are not empowered in the area of childrearing, because, unlike the other respondents, they were not socialized in settings where the presence of children is high:

Andrea:
It would be good if they taught you something because we are living in a society with fewer and fewer children. It's not like before, when there were children everywhere, there was the neighbour's little one and all your relatives . . . They also have difficulties balancing family life, profession and their personal time. Luisa, an adoptive mother and a veterinarian, is 42 and has paid help. She has difficulty balancing her love for her child and her love for her job:

Luisa:

If you work and you like your work, you don't want to set it aside.

They want to spend more time with their families and maintain their individuality, their previous life. In other words, they want to be mothers without renouncing being women. The case of Elena illustrates this need. She is a social worker, aged 35, who has two children, aged one and three. Her pregnancies were very much planned. Reading and asking experts she developed many, very high expectations. She imagined herself as the ideal mother but her expectations have not been fully met:

Elena: I imagined myself being 90 percent mother but I wasn't really in touch with reality. I think that I hadn't foreseen that my work would continue to make the same demands of me, and then there's the relationship with my partner and my desire to keep doing my things, my friends . . . The fact that I would have my own needs, I didn't imagine that.

Lastly, we propose that the discontent of these women is not only rooted in a subjective source of dissatisfaction but rather is caused by the blurring of roles. Thanks to their social status and the rapid democratization of Spain, these respondents were socialized in unisex settings until they reached motherhood. In this sense, they vindicate making reproductive work visible. These are the only women in our study with this type of demand because it is only they who seem to have become aware of the sexism existing in our society:

Adriana: Sometimes I feel that I need to make a statement, that when people talk to you about how marvellous it all is, about how great being a mother is, you know, you also need to say 'Yes, but listen, what about everything I have to put up with?' That part also has to be kept in mind, because it is very hard.

RESIGNATION REGARDING SUPPORT FOR CHILDREARING

We find that mothers who show resignation when talking about support for childrearing have an intermediate profile, between the indifference expressed by some and the demands of others. They are manual labourers with a secondary education who had their babies between the ages of 24 and 31, after marrying. They wanted to become pregnant and their pregnancies were not postponed. In other words, they planned motherhood but did not calculate each and every step:

Rosa: How did we decide to have a child? I'm not really sure . . . It's not like we said 'let's have a baby'. My husband was more into the idea than I . . . Well, for love, because when you really love someone you say 'Oh, a child with the person I love'.

After becoming mothers some continued working while others gave up their jobs in order to devote themselves exclusively to childrearing. Regardless of their current job situations, they are essentially housewives. They have internalized reproductive work as a female responsibility that they cannot delegate and at which they cannot fail. Thus, their status as women depends on motherhood, while their other personal facets are forgotten: Paula, a 38-year-old doorwoman, has a baby and a seven-year-old and continues to work because she receives help from her mother and sister:

Paula: You're working all the time and you finish cleaning one area and you already have to start in another . . . there's more laundry, more ironing, more . . . cleanliness. When they're little you want things to be cleaner . . . you want everything disinfected just in case the dummy falls or for when they're crawling . . .

For the mothers who work outside the home, their job is a source of income rather than an opportunity for personal and professional development. They would like to stop working in order to devote themselves exclusively to childrearing, but doing so would not be economically feasible. The second shift causes them a great deal of stress and thus they ask other women in their family for help with the children. Rosa is 31 and her son is four. She works as a waitress and her mother takes care of her little boy while she is at work, because she cannot afford paid help:

Rosa:

Maybe I wouldn't mind working if I could do it while my boy was at the nursery, if I could take him there and fetch him and then go home and spend time with him and be able to take care of the house at my own pace.

On the other hand, the women who are able to manage the family economy with just their husbands' salaries prefer to stop working and devote themselves to their children:

Susana:

Working when you have children . . . it's impossible. There are nurseries: you go, you pay, you drop off your little ones and you leave, but I think 'Am I going to earn a day's wages and then go leave it at the nursery?' No, I'd rather raise my child myself, I enjoy it and I'm at home, and we eat with what my husband brings in.

Leaving their jobs is not a difficult choice, since for them it is just a way to earn money. However, spending all day at home taking care of the children becomes a monotonous job. So they vindicate the possibility of disconnecting once in a while from their home, children and spouse, to gather strength and be able to face their daily obligations with renewed energy. Julia is a 34-year-old unemployed fieldworker with a seven-yearold daughter and four-year-old twins: Some situations create feelings of discontent and frustration for them but they do not envision themselves leaving it all behind and starting over. They do not have tools with which to make that kind of change and they feel trapped. For this reason we believe their discourses express resignation. Susana is 32 years old and has two children. She was a nursing assistant but left her job to take care of her children. She tries to be a model wife and mother, in addition to being concerned about tidiness and hygiene. When she feels overwhelmed, she is tempted to leave it all behind, but in the end she chooses the status quo:

Susana:

There are times when you feel frustrated, powerless, angry . . . it makes you want to go to the door and say, 'You can all get stuffed.' Those are the times they overwhelm you, when it seems that they all depend on you and you can't manage everything. My strategy is to slam the door or throw the brush or whatever is at hand and walk out the door, because if I stay I may start shouting at all of them and say things I'd prefer not to say.

They are expert caregivers who, just like the 'indifferent' mothers, do not generate demands with regard to childcare. But is their knowledge enough to attain satisfaction? The well-being of these women has its locus in the private sphere [START_REF] Murillo | El mito de la vida privada[END_REF], in the optimal functioning of childrearing and home management. Remunerated work interferes with their attainment of this objective, however, those who are exclusively devoted to childrearing are also dissatisfied. Both employed and unemployed women would like to see changes in their lives but do not demand them because, in a display of their capacity for resignation, they do not want to generate conflict. To change everything that oppresses them, to experience a more satisfactory mothering situation and to have more self-confidence, we believe these women also need to be empowered.

LACK OF PATERNAL INVOLVEMENT IN CHILDREARING

We decided to discuss the relationships that these women have with their partners in a separate section because, although their discourses and experiences reveal many differences, they all have something in common: they are the principal caregivers of their children. Their material conditions of existence, the paths their lives have taken and their lifestyles mean that these women have very different experiences and needs with regard to mothering, but the fact that they are women in a patriarchal society with gender relations rooted in the idea that the mother is the caregiver and the father the provider means that they are all automatically responsible for childrearing. Both the 'indifferent' mothers and the 'resigned' mothers have partners who are absent from everything related to childrearing. In the case of the 'resigned' women, this situation arises from a tacit agreement, from the traditional division of family responsibilities:

Silvia: My husband takes it very seriously, but that's because it's his duty . . . He has to go out and work and bring home the bacon.

On the other hand, the 'indifferent' women are in charge of childrearing but do not have partners who always take responsibility for providing:

Manuela: All men know is how to make babies.

In the case of the 'demanding' category, both mum and dad are providers and caregivers, although the father assumes a role of assistant in childrearing, never that of co-caregiver or main caregiver. Thus, in all three cases, the well-being of the children depends on the mothers: Elena: The men are under less stress because they can relax knowing that if they start to feel snowed under, you will take care of everything. But I don't have that knowledge. I am more responsible than he is and I think this is a general tendency, from what I can see in other women.

IN CONCLUSION

Throughout the text we have tried to present different ways of experiencing mothering. As the results suggest, and following [START_REF] Galbraith | La sociedad opulenta[END_REF], the demands made by mothers are related to their self-perception and the satisfaction of their normative and subjective needs. The 'indifferent' mothers are the least demanding because they do not have their basic needs met and because they focus all their efforts on getting by with the little they have. Summing up, we can state that indifference is closely linked to survival, that demandingness is linked to perfection and that resignation has to do with reducing conflicts.

For [START_REF] Bourdieu | La distinción: criterios y bases sociales del gusto[END_REF], the root of these differences is class inequalities because the sophistication of the demands depends on the woman's level of knowledge regarding the market of goods and services that society offers. We have also confirmed the power that socialization in the traditional female roles has in explaining differences between mothers: proximity to children and the extent to which unisex settings are frequented have been determinant factors in the maternal discourses. The 'demanding' mothers, who are not empowered in the area of childrearing, feel overwhelmed by this task. For this reason, they demand that institutions fulfil a more educational function, which in other cases family members provided. The other mothers, educated by the women in their surroundings, feel at ease in the area of childrearing. In all cases, the sexual division of labour and gender inequalities makes the discourses similar. The lack of paternal involvement is the common denominator in all the maternal experiences analysed. All of this leads us to presume that while social class divides women, gender brings them together.

Family support, specifically female solidarity, is a frequent subject, although the diversity of experiences has been almost as broad as the sample. Given the complexity of the debate surrounding this subject and the fact that it is not the main purpose of our research, we will address this matter in greater depth in future work.

However, we do believe it is worthwhile to highlight the lack of government attention to the least privileged mothers and the fact that the target population of government assistance for childrearing is comprised of a privileged minority (the mothers that complain the most and make the most demands). This situation, besides being unfair, seems to us to be a clear symptom that in Spain, childrearing, even today, remains a question reserved for the private sphere, and that the state legislates in such a way that most mothers (the 'resigned' and the 'indifferent') continue to be unavoidably devoted to this task.

The initial aim of our work was to examine mothers' needs and demands regarding childrearing support. As the study progressed, we became increasingly aware of the enormous differences in childrearing experiences, and our results thus contribute mainly to bearing witness to the diversity of mothering. These results will be very useful for future studies, especially in the design of tools capable of capturing the mothers' ultimate needs.

Lastly, we would reiterate that while the respondents were a heterogeneous set of women, it should be recognized that such a sample is not representative. The claims made about mothering within the article are specific to this particular group of mothers.

NOTES

This research was supported by the Health Department of the Regional Government of Andalusia and by the Spanish Network for Research on Health and Gender (Carlos III Health Institute) (G03/042). It was carried out with the collaboration of two health centres (in the northern and southern areas of Granada), one women's association and a community social services centre (Andalusia, Spain). The authors are particularly grateful for the participation of all the mothers who made this study possible.

1.

Despite recent changes, many Spanish women have always worked outside the home in agriculture, industry, domestic service, handicrafts, etc. [START_REF] Babiano | ¿Invisibles? mujeres, trabajo y sindicalismo en España, 1939-2000[END_REF]). 2.

The concept of normative needs is an attempt to objectify the basic needs of human beings. They are needs agreed upon by theorists and are closely related to human rights [START_REF] Ballester | Las necesidades sociales. Teorías y conceptos básicos[END_REF].

  You have to prepare the meals, you have to take care of the house, you have to be with the children, it's mad, you're running around all the time . . . You can't stop moving all day long . . . And the worst part is that you're hard at work all day and it's as if you weren't doing anything . . . I'd like to have an hour or two for myself and then go back to the house.

Julia:

European Journal of Women's Studies 14(1)


COLLATING INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCES INTO COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS: UNDERSTANDING CARIBBEAN MOTHERHOOD

Caribbean Mothers: Identity and Experience in the UK has arrived at a time of intense political and social scrutiny on parenting, 'race', nationality and childhood. Families are frequently reminded of their role in producing responsible, well-behaved citizens with threat of criminal prosecution and financial sanctions if they fail to do so. Politicians champion the rights of 'decent, hardworking families' as a salve for justifying the introduction of potentially controversial new policy. This politicization of parenting runs parallel with heated debates on Britishness, the success or failure of multiculturalism and prophesies of minority ethnic communities segregating themselves from the mainstream, white society. Into this brew, stir the 2005 London bombings, igniting a fear that even those who appear 'integrated' may harbour ill-intent after all.

Reynolds stakes her ground clearly in her opening line: 'In the UK today, Caribbean mothers are much maligned and misunderstood' (p. 1). This signals that the book will not be a detached assessment. The author acknowledges her own subjectivity, being 'especially concerned with thinking reflexively about how my status, as a Caribbean woman and not a mother, would influence my interviews with the mothers ' (p. 6). Yet it is that very subjectivity that makes the book attractive to me, as a Caribbean woman and a mother. I have come across studies of black people in the UK that make me feel uncomfortably voyeuristic. It is rare that I sit on the top deck of a bus reading an academic book and nodding vigorously in agreement.

The book explores motherhood through the experiences of 40 mothers aged 19 to 81 years old in five cities across England. More than half the women are 'second generation', born in the UK, 14 are first generation and four, the youngest group, are 'third generation'. The information was gained through individual in-depth interviews lasting around three hours. The book is heavy on quotes (a bonus for me) that ensure that the black women's voices do not become subsumed by the theoretical considerations. We come to understand their views of work, community, education, fathers and 'Caribbeanness' itself.

But this is more than a book about individual or collective experience. It presents a robust challenge to a mothering discourse that has frequently omitted black perspectives. Reynolds points to a number of opposing stances taken by black and by white mothers on issues such as education, childbearing and employment. While white mothers worry about choice in children's schools, she contends, black mothers focus on exclusions and underachievement. Similarly, white feminists' criticism of the family as a site of oppression is sometimes countered by black feminists' experience of the family as support and protection against racism. Mothering, she argues, cannot be explored in isolation from factors such as race, class and gender. But where on that intersection do you find a 'good' Caribbean mother, and what exactly does she do?

The book endeavours to unpick the construct of Caribbean mother in many ways, not least by exploring the notion of 'Caribbean' itself. Through interviewing mothers of diverse national backgrounds and income brackets, of varying ages and marital statuses, Reynolds aims to highlight the diversity of the Caribbean mothering experience, challenging the pervasive stereotypes of lone 'babymothers' and ball-breaking 'superwomen'. I was particularly absorbed in the chapter on 'Paid Work, Mothering and Identity'. Not least, because I am bang in the middle of the working lone-mother demographic! And topically, the interim report of the Equalities Review convened in 2004 to explore the causes of persistent discrimination in the UK has found that mothers, whether lone or partnered, still face severe inequalities in the workplace -a formal acknowledgement that 'motherism' is rife.

The women interviewed acknowledged the centrality of employment to their lives, forming a continuous line of paid black female labour that may have been catalysed by slavery. Reynolds points out that a large number of Caribbean women migrated to Britain in the postwar period to work in public services -many were mothers or became mothers within a few years of emigration to the UK. 'I have always worked and will continue to do so because my mother worked, my grandmother worked and my foremothers before that, so I don't see why I should be any different', claims one 28-year-old second generation lone mother (p. 100). 'Going out to work is part and parcel of being a good mother' agrees a second generation lone mother, aged 39 (p. 101). But there is some dissent: 'I don't know where it says that black women are automatically expected to keep working all the time. It just seems to be the done thing for black women to work until we drop dead' (p. 102). Given mainstream societal disapproval, ingrained gender and race inequalities in the workplace, the constant juggling of work, home and family needs, the struggle to organize appropriate childcare and the perceived tension it causes between black women and black men -why indeed?

The answer is that there is a strong tradition of work often because, from slavery onwards, there has been little choice. Most of the women interviewed, regardless of whether there is a resident partner, need the income to provide for their children. One lone mother talks about the exhaustion of 'putting in 36 hours a week, every week', but is very clear that 'handouts from the state' are not an acceptable alternative (p. 107). Reynolds also asserts that for many Caribbean mothers, employment has a role beyond income generation. As well as an integral function of their motherhood, it can be an opportunity to 'give back to the community'.

Caribbean mothers' high level of economic activity is also explored in relation to the role of black men. Reynolds firmly reinserts black fathers into the parenting discourse because 'generally speaking the analysis of black masculine identities is restricted to the specific realms of urban youth culture, sport, music, crime and entertainment' (p. 141). It is a potentially tricky path. The high number of lone mothers interviewed, and the admission that some fathers are not fulfilling their financial responsibilities towards their children could easily reinforce the absent black father stereotype. Reynolds attempts to negate this by scattering references throughout the book to black fathers' contribution to childrearing. Furthermore, the mothers' own activities are mediated by their recognition of racism. Many work, for instance, because of the high unemployment rate for Caribbean men. Lone mothers often do not see the Child Support Agency as an appropriate route to increase household income, believing that it is yet another institution eager to label black men as criminals. These, again, are issues unlikely to face most white mothers -or to be considered by policy-makers.

The most thought-provoking commentary unpicks Caribbean identity. For at least the last 300 years, economic forces have driven Caribbean peoples from country to country, be it through forced labour, indentured labour or homeland poverty. Even now, many women, often mothers themselves, come from overseas to carry out domestic work and childcare for affluent families in the UK. The majority of women interviewed were born in the UK, but had varying views about how far they considered themselves 'British' or how they were viewed as 'British' by mainstream, white society. 'I'm Black British, this is my home no matter what those racists say', argues one mother, '. . . but we have our own style, our own way of being British that I suppose is different to white people's Britishness' (p. 52).

So how do mothers promote a sense of belonging in their children for a country that can't agree whether it wants them? There is, of course, the strength of 'the community' -be it faith, educational or familial. Mothers also harnessed the power of heritage -be it 'Caribbean' or 'African'. Reynolds suggests that there can be an idealized, almost mythical element to these identities. Certainly, the heritage is mediated through a British context. The concept of 'Caribbean' rarely exists in the Caribbean itself, where people affiliate with their island of descent. Likewise, 'traditional' cultural values such as respect and good manners are likely to be viewed positively by any number of non-Caribbean communities. Reynolds also points to Paul Gilroy's commentary on a 'heavily mythologised Africanity', a product of contemporary black America rather than contemporary Africa (p. 90).

The book's interest lies in the collation of individual experiences into collective consciousness. However, there were times when I wanted Reynolds to adopt a more challenging perspective. The justifications given for 'beating' children, whether for 'cultural' or any other reason, were far from convincing. However, the commonalities Reynolds found between mothers are reassuring, because it validates my own mothering practice. I, too, have the 'African' statues and the 'Caribbean' counting book! I, like the mothers interviewed, acknowledge the impact of racism on our children and develop strategies to counter it. We are all aware of the extra surveillance that our children may encounter and encourage them to modify their behaviour accordingly. We all want our children to 'belong' and summon up 'heritage' to help them find something to belong to. We all want equality, but it looks like we have some waiting to do.

Patrice Lawrence National Children's Bureau, London

European Journal of Women's Studies 14(1)