emotionally layered accounts: homeschoolers' justifications for maternal deviance

Drawing on six years of field research with homeschooling mothers, I show four ways they were accused of maternal deviance for keeping their children out of conventional schools, and I uncover the four justifications they used in response. On the surface, critics objected to the behavior of homeschooling; however, their specific accusations—and the accounts they engendered—revealed that it was mothers' (alleged) emotions that were at issue. I conclude by discussing how attention to emotions enhances our theoretical understanding of accounts, as well as how these data begin to map out the emotional complexities in the social construction of good mothering.