Negotiating ideals: Catholicism, intensive mothering ideology and gender norms in contemporary Poland

In this article, we explore two partially overlapping set of ideas on appropriate mothering that shape the experiences of contemporary Polish mothers. One is rooted in Catholicism, while the other aligns with the ideology of intensive mothering. In the first part of the article, we reconstruct the gendered concept of the ‘good mother’ foregrounded by these ideologies. In the second part, based on analysis of in-depth interviews with 46 mothers and observational data from a club for Catholic mothers with young children, we examine how the coexistence of various ideological constructions of motherhood in contemporary Polish society shapes mothering as an everyday practice and enables mothers to negotiate the cultural demands associated with these constructions. We analyse how Catholic ideals of motherhood and the ideology of intensive mothering become entangled yet are sometimes reflectively separated in maternal practices. This dynamic, we argue, both reinforces gender-traditional norms and creates space for the resignification of various gendered maternal obligations.