Media Release:

Women rely on mothers, sisters and female friends for pregnancy info but celebrity baby-bump also plays a role

Mothers, sisters and female friends and relatives are still the most important examples and sources of information available to women about how to "do" pregnancy and motherhood, according to recently completed doctoral research by the University of Melbourne's Dr Meredith Nash.

Dr Nash, who has recently returned from Los Angeles where she was making a documentary for Canadian TV on Hollywood celebrity pregnancies, has been conducting The Baby Bump Project for the last three years for a PhD in Gender Studies. She has found that although Hollywood celebrities and their 'post-baby' bodies are still hot topics in gossip magazines, women look to the 'real' people in their lives, such as sisters, mothers and best friends, to learn about the realities of pregnancy, birth and mothering.

Her research which involved more than 200 interviews with 40 women through each stage of pregnancy and post-birth and found that images of celebrity motherhood resemble less and less the experiences of most pregnant Australian women.

"There is a lot of information out there for women, but it is heavily value laden, and in the end much of it is about controlling your body, and weight in particular, possibly because that is one of the few things about pregnancy that women are able to control.

Dr Nash says "The picture of pregnant body image that emerged from this research is one of ambivalence, contradiction and uncertainty".

In a surprising twist, Dr Nash has found that the much-lauded system of community mothers' groups, were not popular across the board.

"Many of the women I interviewed, particularly younger mothers, found community mothers' groups they were assigned to unhelpful. The women found the groups were made up of women with whom they had no natural affinity, and who were competitive over their babies' development, their mothering and post-baby bodies."

"The 'yummy-mummy' has become a central character in the post-feminist world as a figure that emphasises women's liberation through a 'sexy' pregnant body" says Dr Nash, "but it is pretty wild out there.

"Although there is a lot of choice, there is also a lot of conflicting and confusing information in the maternity industry. Unlike the glamorous, commercialised images of motherhood, the reality is that pregnancy is a site of struggle for many women as they 'do pregnancy' within a complex web of biomedical and cultural surveillance, and it can be a competitive pressure cooker for them.

"It's no wonder a lot of women are a bit screwed up about their sense of identity after becoming mothers."

Dr Nash says the image of Angelina Jolie looking stunning on the red carpet just weeks after giving birth to twins, or Nicole Kidman in skinny white jeans only a few days after her daughter's birth really raise the bar for women's expectations of how their bodies should respond and appear after childbirth.

"There is a lot of pressure to not only be a good mother but to also look sexy and thin, and maintain the role of glamorous modern woman."

The expectation that pregnant women look 'fit' and 'slender' as in periods of non-pregnancy has also played a key role in the popularity of tightly-fitting, 'bump'-exposing clothing that is becoming widely available in Melbourne maternity wear shops.

During the course of her research Dr Nash interviewed many Australian maternity-wear designers and found that especially among the high-end brands, clothes were only available up to size 10-12.

"Some of the designers made it pretty clear that they didn't really want customers buying their clothes if they were too fat."

In trying to uphold such unachievable standards of beauty, anxieties about 'fat' and bodily bigness were significant for the majority of women in Dr Nash's study, many of whom were extremely anxious about 'losing' their pre-pregnancy bodies forever.

"Very often the lived experience of pregnancy, of negotiating a constantly changing pregnant body, did stand in the way of achieving the ideals of contemporary femininity," she explains.

"The idea of a 'yummy mummy' or having a 'sexy' pregnant body is not liberating for women. In fact, it completely dismisses the struggles that many new mother's face as they try to juggle a work/life balance, conflicts around maternity leave and cultural and medical prescriptions about how to 'do' pregnancy 'right'."

Dr. Nash is currently writing a book based on her research about yummy mummies, pregnant body image and celebrity. Look for her article on post-baby plastic surgery in the 8 February edition of Sunday Life magazine in Sydney and Melbourne.

Media Release courtesy of the University of Melbourne.

Mum Zone Release Date: 3rd February 2009

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