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competitive edge’ (1992: 35). Competitiveness and cooperativity within women’s talk are
the focus of Eckert’s discussion. Her analysis points to a competitive element within all-
female conversations, embedded within the dimensions of historical tradition. Women
compete within a social market where the commodity is their own social value, a product
that can be discursively claimed within their everyday interactions.
Socialized gender roles:‘The good mother’.
Weedon has pointed out that the dominant social identity traditionally offered to
women centers around domesticity and motherhood, she suggests women,
‘have a range of possibilities. In theory almost every walk of life is open to us, but
all possibilities which we share with men involve accepting, negotiating or
rejecting what is constantly being offered to us as our primary role - that of wife
and mother. '1987: 3)
However, while today’s women may have access to a 'range of possibilities’ of being,
they are, like all social actors, 'surrounded by the fixed barriers to perception' (Goffman,
1957: 231) that social roles demand. As Holmes (1997: 202) suggests 'each person's
subjectivity is constructed and gendered within the social economic and political
discourse to which they are exposed’. This subjectivity is sustained within our
conversations and speakers are ‘constantly doing gender'. West and Zimmerman
(1991:14) claim that 'Gender, in contrast [to sex-category], is the activity of managing
conduct in light of normative conceptions of attitudes and activities appropriate for one's
sex categories'. In terms of a gender hierarchy, 'images of women are linked to images of
Convention