Negotiating the Third Shift through Body Work: Experiences of Ghanaian Heterosexual Mothers and the Importance of Social Class

Following the second shift, feminist scholars are now focusing on the third shift that working mothers face, which involves the body work associated with the notion of the Western yummy mummy in the media. At the same time, scholars have also pointed out the liberatory potential of the yummy mummy ideal in rejecting motherhood as an asexual state. Studies in the literature are, nevertheless, limited by their preoccupation with the Western ideal of a slender body and the experiences of upper or middle-class women. This preoccupation cannot fully capture the beauty regime that governs the maternal body of women in the Global South where beauty norms are multi-faceted and ever evolving. This study fills the gap by exploring how competing expectations and beauty norms shape the third shift of body work for non-Western mothers across the class spectrum. Using semi-structured interviews with heterosexual mothers of diverse educational and occupational backgrounds in Ghana, the findings show the coexistence of traditional and Westernized beauty ideals, which shape the different levels and forms of engagement with body work. The prescriptive beauty norms in the traditional family, marriage, and the workplace also create varying degrees of pressure for women of different class backgrounds to enact different forms of body work. This study raises questions about the liberatory potential of the yummy mummy ideal and draws attention to the institutional forces that maintain the gender hierarchy in Ghana.