Listening to Women's Voices

Throughout this book, I will focus on the stories of four women – Junko, Chihiro, Asako, and Miyuki. Their narratives illustrate the themes that figure prominently in the accounts of the larger group of participants – their parenting goals and self-evaluation, their struggles to create a life that somehow reflects their childhood dreams and aspirations, their experiences as wives, and their participation in the contexts of school and work. Becoming familiar with the “whole story” of at least a few individuals makes it easier to see how their lifetimes of experiences and relationships are interrelated and also to gain a deeper sense of how the institutional features of work and schooling set the stage for their parenting efforts. In this chapter, I introduce the four women. I then describe the communities in which they were living and characterize the societal and political conditions affecting their lives during the data collection period.

I supplement the narratives of these four focal mothers with material from 12 other mothers in our interview study. These 16 women were in turn selected from a larger sample of 116 women to whom we had already administered a parenting survey. In selecting 16 women for a series of in-depth interviews, the research team's goal was to include some women who were confident in their parenting and others who were less confident.