Leaving marriage, intensifying motherhood: constructing conditional maternal legitimacy on Xiaohongshu

This article examines how divorced single mothers in China construct maternal legitimacy through multimodal posts on Xiaohongshu. Drawing on multimodal critical discourse analysis of 200 publicly available posts, it identifies four interconnected moves: legitimizing divorce by reallocating responsibility for marital breakdown; demonstrating maternal worth through work and care; reconstructing a stable mother–child home; and narrating recovery through resilience and self-management. These representations challenge divorce as evidence of female and maternal failure, yet their counter-stigmatizing work remains conditional. Mothers are positioned as the principal providers of care, income, domestic security, and emotional continuity, while fathers and other sources of responsibility are comparatively backgrounded. The article argues that divorce stigma is contested not by rejecting dominant maternal norms, but by relocating female respectability from marital continuity to intensified maternal responsibility. It develops the concepts of conditional maternal legitimacy and mother-centered autonomy to capture this tension.