Ethical Labour

Why, hopelessly and romantically, do we imagine a natural preserve of feeling, a place to be kept "forever wild"? The answer must be that it is becoming scarce.

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

In This Day and Age

When I joined Joanna and Sophie for breakfast in the wildlife centre café one Sunday morning, I knew from their animated faces that something had happened. Sophie quickly told me that Joanna, a health care assistant and wildlife centre volunteer in her mid-twenties, had just found out that her teenaged sister, Gemma, was pregnant. It was clear that Joanna disapproved of her sister's actions. She seemed most concerned about their mother, whom she felt would be the one to pick up the pieces. Joanna explained as we ate our breakfast that what frustrated her most about Gemma's pregnancy was that it was planned. She told us this with characteristic openness and paid little attention to whether the other diners heard her, but suddenly lowered her voice to a whisper when she added, "She even went off the Pill."

Joanna's disapproval was primarily motivated by concern and care — for her sister, her parents, and her future niece. As she got used to the idea, however, she became excited and happy for her sister and was as supportive as she could be, given that they lived five hundred miles apart. Joanna, like her colleagues and friends, believed that people should plan to have children when they are ready. Her initial reaction to her sister's decision to become a mother whilst she was still legally a child herself reflected her judgement that Gemma lacked the maturity, sense of responsibility, and resources to be a good mother. Because of her youth, Gemma's choice to become a mother was not viewed as an index of her readiness but quite the opposite.

I came across another, stronger reaction of disapproval to an "inappropriate" pregnancy whilst chatting with Margaret, a Spey Bay resident in her sixties who originally comes from Perthshire, in the wildlife centre one afternoon. She spotted Paula, a single mother and waitress in her mid-twenties who lives in Spey Bay with her parents and preschool daughter, in the distance.

"Is Paula pregnant again?" Margaret asked me in a hushed voice. The word "pregnant" was barely audible. I nodded. "Does she have a steady boyfriend?"

"I don't know," I replied, though I was fairly sure she did not.

"In this day and age, ken? Unbelievable," Margaret said, shaking her head.

Not long afterwards, the same subject came up in conversation with Willow, a member of the wildlife centre staff in her mid-twenties. She also asked me if I knew whether Paula was in a relationship but caught herself and added, "That's an awful question to ask, I know."

* * *

People in Spey Bay rarely brought up ideas of inheritance in the sense of either phenotype or property when I talked with them about reproduction, but they did share the sense that future generations will inherit the environments that they create. This is encapsulated, in a practical sense, by their assumption that parental responsibility begins with planning and creating a "stable environment" for children to be born into. This term, which was coined by Erin, who is married with a daughter, describes the ideal conditions in which to become a parent. Her deeply resonant phrase eloquently condenses her aspirations and anxieties for future generations, which were shared by everyone I knew in Spey Bay. The stable environment parents are expected to create for their children includes financial security, being in a happy relationship, emotional maturity, and a willingness to take on the responsibilities and sacrifices of parenthood. This reflects an ethic that children should be planned for and that ideally they will be conceived in a context that is conducive to their physical and emotional well-being and that will also enable their parents to be "good" parents. This resonates with middle-class ideals about good parenting and the assumption that reproductive decision making needs to be balanced against parents' careers.

The idea of the stable environment runs through this book, but it is particularly prominent in this chapter and the next one. In this chapter, I will explore people's ideas about good parenting by focusing on how those who do not have children plan for parenthood by creating a stable environment for their future children. In the next chapter, I will broaden the focus by looking at how conceptions of the environment and the state of the natural world are implicated in people's ideas about parenthood, fertility, and future generations. This chapter will also continue the scene-setting of the introduction, so I will describe the work that goes on in the wildlife centre before discussing the plans for future parenthood of those staff members who did not have children, both of which can be seen as forms of ethical labour. Later in this chapter, I will dwell on the concept of ethical labour to explore the links between profession and parenthood in more depth.

This chapter takes the connection between career aspirations and planning for parenthood seriously by tracing the relationship between the professional and parental ethics of the people with no children who live and work in Spey Bay. As I will discuss further in chapter 3, although people in Spey Bay were supportive of gender equality at work, they did assume that women would be the primary caregivers of children, so their careers would be most affected by parenthood. Charity work is a female-dominated form of labour, and this is reflected in the staff of the wildlife centre in Spey Bay, which is mostly made up of women. Charity work is also popularly seen as a feminine field, in which values of care, altruism, flexibility, and dedication go alongside a blurring of professional and personal boundaries and identities, so this is a fruitful form of work to consider alongside women's aspirations for future motherhood.

Doing a Good Job

Every hour during daylight in the summer months, a wildlife centre staff member stands, dressed in warm clothing branded with the conservation charity's logo, on the small mound by the icehouse with a pair of powerful binoculars and a stopwatch, clipboard, and pencil. After scanning the sea for ten minutes, she records the time, visibility, sea state (on the Beaufort scale), type, and number of birds and boats visible and any dolphin, seal, whale, or porpoise sightings, by number, the amount of time for which they were visible, and their behaviour. This is Shorewatch, the hands-on research that they do at Spey Bay and one of the jobs I did regularly as a volunteer.

Dolphins are much more commonly sighted in the summer, not only because that is...