Waallah, the woman she should go direct to Paradise: Perceptions of motherhood in Qatar
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abstract
Recent scholarship on motherhood has tried to trouble the idea that mothering is a set of instinctive natural behaviors that all women are born knowing, positing it rather as a set of fundamentally cultural practices, enacted within social and political contexts and intimately related to thinking about citizenship, responsibility, and human development. In this article, the authors draw from a yearlong study of motherhood in the Arabian Gulf nation of Qatar to support those efforts. Approximately, 280 women completed a survey regarding their perceptions of motherhood and follow-up in-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with 30 participants. A large number of respondents indicated that they employed domestic helpers to help with their children. Although domestic help was common, most of the intimate tasks involved in raising children, such as bathing, toileting, and putting children to bed were carried out by the mothers themselves. As many participants had large families (about half of the women surveyed had at least four children living with them), mothers often expressed a strong sense of being overwhelmed, but at the same time, welcoming their responsibilities as God-given. The authors suggest that as the nation of Qatar reconstructs itself, notions of families are also being reconstructed; however, women are being disproportionately being charged with the responsibility to create the perfect family.
