Paper short abstract:

The primary purpose of this paper is to develop the cultural model approach of Naomi Quinn, by employing a historical perspective, in order to examine how the current cultural model of motherhood among middle-class women in Iran has been constructed and distributed.

Paper long abstract:

Base on semi-structured interviews with 50 women living in Tehran, I posit that motherhood as a cultural model, borrowing Quinn's term, has become problematic, being structured by the schemas of individuality and gender equality. To illustrate, these women do not consider motherhood a taken-for-granted and essential role for all women, but regarding that as an individual choice. Besides, these women do not think of childrearing just as a female job, believing that fathers must be involved in all childcare practices.

Although these women's expectations are not usually actualized in reality due to social and cultural barriers or men's reluctance, these assumptions indicate a remarkable transformation in Iranian women's subjectivity. I assert that this cultural understanding finds its roots in the process of Iranian modernity.

To demonstrate how this individualistic and equalitarian perspective of motherhood has been emerged and distributed amongst middle-class Iranian women, I incorporate Quinn's theoretical approach with the theory of Epidemiology of Representations by Dan Sperber (1996) and Olivier Morin (2016). I argue that since one and a half-century ago, as a result of political, social, and structural changes, a modern conceptualization of family has been constructed and circulated in Iranian society giving rise to the schemas of democratic family, gender equality, and individualism. I suppose that the current perception of motherhood is widely accepted mainly because it is "relevant" to other modern and late modern distributed notions such as leisurism, consumerism, feminism, women's right, and children's rights, and thus "locally attractive".