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topic within their interactions. Their discourse reflects the conflict they experience in
choosing between their own individual needs and their families needs. However, as Dee
points out, the ’guilt’ women feel, in failing to fulfil social expectations in terms of their
domestic responsibilities is deeply ingrained within our culture, and therefore difficult to
resist. Despite their efforts to resist this subject-position, it becomes the dominant
discourse within the teachers’ discussions of their domestic lives.
The teachers’ collective ’moaning’ sessions appear to be an attempt to both achieve
solidarity in the face of the social ideal and resist the constrictions it places on working
mothers. The women use cooperative speech strategies, such as matching personal
accounts and giving supportive feedback to show approval of actions ‘carried’ out by
other mothers. However, the data involving the school- yard mothers shows that offering
matching accounts of domestic achievement can also be used as a competitive speech
strategy that allows the speaker to claim social capital. The social capital that is accrued
from a successful claim to ‘good mothering’ is a valuable commodity within the social
marketplace.
It is important to note that discourse analysis is a methodology that relies upon
structural and thematic examination of small data-sets, therefore there is a need to be
cautious when generalizing findings to larger populations. It has also been suggested
(Wilson, 2002) that critical discourse analysis is always in danger of focusing on those
segments of talk that support the ideological viewpoint of the analyst - we find what we
are looking for! However as Wilson notes,
‘the real issue for a critical stance is not simply to reveal what one specific
Convention