Integrating Home and Wage Workplace: Women’s Daily Lives in a Canadian Suburb

A continuing growth in women’s wage labor participation suggests that taken-for-granted understandings of suburban life need to be reexamined. This chapter portrays women’s everyday lives as social and economic restructuring reframes the conditions under which mothering work takes place. Although previous literature has emphasized the spatial and social constraints facing women, this chapter focuses on women’s active construction of their lives within such constraints. The use of ethnographic methods and an interpretative analysis reveal how agency, space, and structure intertwine in the constitution of mothering practices, and reveal the central significance of women’s control of the domestic workplace to the integration of home, community, and the wage workplace.