‘Drinking stories’ from a playgroup

Abstract

The narratives and comments presented in this article are drawn from material gathered while conducting fieldwork for a larger ethnographic project on mothers, motherhood and playgroups in Australia. In this article I focus on the way in which the mothers of one playgroup ‘used’ alcohol. The material presented shows a group of middle-class women engaged in a collective and individual struggle to come to terms with their new role as mothers. Their utterances reveal the ways in which they conceived of their identities as women prior to motherhood - positive views of themselves in the world that (national) cultural/societal expectations relating to motherhood unexpectedly threatened to undermine. Alcohol, an important symbolic constituent in their identities as young (childless) women, was important again in establishing and communicating their agency in relation to their performance of their roles as mothers, an agency that allowed them to construct positive identities as women and mothers.