Does the Apple Fall Far from the Tree: What Working Mothers Pass On to Their Daughters

In the last three decades, the increasing number of studies examines the impact of maternal employment on daughters’ employment status. However, there is a limited number of qualitative studies which explore women’s perceptions on maternal employment within social milieus. This research attempts to understand the working mothers’ daughters’ attitudes towards paid work in Turkey which goes through a unique development of women’s employment. The research seeks to answer these two questions: 1) How did the working mothers’ daughters experience their mothers’ employment? 2) What do they think about their own work life? Data were collected by in-depth interviews with 21 working mothers and their daughters who were selected by purposive and snowball sampling techniques. Research findings show that the daughters’ experiences and attitudes towards employment differ in accordance with their mothers’ education, occupational status and social capital while all are working or consider to work. At the same time, most of the daughters mention about “lost time with children”. As working mothers’ daughters, they inherit the idea of “the neccessity for women to work” on the one hand; they have the idea of “working mothers who miss the time to spend with children” under the influence of an ideology of motherhood on the other hand.