Reprinted from Rethinking context: Language as an interactive phenomenon Edited by Alessandro

Duranti and Charles Goodwin © Cambridge University Press 1992 Printed in Great Britain

In conclusion, I have argued that mothering cannot be assumed when judging gender identity across
cultures. While women's social status has been calculated in terms of their roles as sisters and wives,
relatively little ethnography has been given to measuring their status as mothers.

I've already stated that a mothering manner should not be taken for granted. We may find strong
cultural patterning at least in the sphere of linguistic conduct.

When I examine transcripts of children's interactions with others, I see a set of cultural meanings about
the position of mother, and thus about women, being conveyed to children hundreds of times in the
course of their early lives through linguistic forms and the pragmatic practices these forms help to
constitute. I make no claim to understand women's positions in either present WMC American culture
or traditional Samoan society. However, according to contemporary developmental psycholinguistic
research, Samoan moms have a more prestigious standing in relation to their kids than mainstream
American mothers.

On a communicative level, they are accommodated to more frequently and at a far younger age than is
typical in American homes. Furthermore, they educate young children to appreciate the involvement of
caregivers and others to reaching a goal, as opposed to American middle-class moms, who prefer to
socialize their children to disregard or underestimate the mother's part in accomplishing a goal. Finally,
Samoan moms wield power over human labor because they are often the highest status caregivers
present and have the authority to outsource more time-consuming and physically demanding caregiving
responsibilities to younger, lesser status caregivers. Thus, even among caregivers, they are the least
tolerant, and the language record reflects this attitude in a variety of ways.

Samoan women hold a distinguished position in the caregiving hierarchy and in caregiver-child
interactions. Mainstream American women employ some power indicators in their conversational
manner, but not to the level that Samoan mothers do. American moms bargain with their children about
the meaning of their children's ambiguous words; Samoan mothers and other caregivers do not. Even
the smallest newborns are treated as conversational companions by mainstream American moms;
Samoan mothers do not. The list of communicative expressions of mothers' relative position in these
two communities goes on.

We are now in a better position to evaluate Ortner and Whitehead's claim that the function of
mothering " is shockingly underestimated, even omitted, in conceptions of femininity". This is exactly
what we would expect based on language socialization procedures in mainstream American homes in
the United States and much of middle-class Western Europe. "Mother" is underappreciated because she
does not socialize children to recognize her contribution to successes. "Mother" is neglected since she
has become invisible due to her own linguistic conduct.
 To Read: -1. LaG Chapter 3 - Cameron, Deborah. 1997. Performing gender identity: Young menʼs talk
and the construction of heterosexual masculinity.

In the introduction of her article, "Performing Gender Identity: Young Men's Talk and the Construction
of Heterosexual Masculinity," Deborah Cameron states that, "analysis is never done without
preconceptions, we can never be absolutely non-selective in our observations, and where the object of
observation and analysis has to do with gender it is extraordinarily difficult to subdue certain
expectations". This sentence functions as the paper's thesis. Cameron argues in this remark and
throughout her work that preexisting views may skew an author's examination of facts, particularly
when the topic of the study is a "recognizable" problem, such as gender. Gender conventions pervade
society, making it difficult for researchers to remain objective.