This article considers a culturally marginalised yet consequential gendered discourse that positions women as “wife” alongside their role as mother in working women's talk about divisions of care on Britain's largest parenting site, Mumsnet. Unlike most previous research on Mumsnet that has focused on the construction and partial resistance of normative ideas of motherhood, this paper suggests that the increasingly politicised site is a space where a discourse of wifehood is drawn upon to account to some degree for experiences of domestic inequality. Using a critical discursive psychological approach to data from 14 online discussion threads posted on Mumsnet, the paper identifies two dominant, complementary constructions through which posters frame divisions of care. These are the position of the “facilitating wife”, enabling their male partners’ careers by taking on the bulk of domestic responsibility to the detriment of their own professional achievement and mental wellbeing; and the construction of partners as “feckless manchildren”, as an attempt to manage dissonances with their positioning as “wife” and related overburdening. I conclude that the relationships women form in the Mumsnet space allow them to articulate dissonant views and feelings about their co-existing domestic roles of wife and mother and associated divisions of care.

本文考虑了在英国最大的育儿网站 Mumsnet 上关于职业女性关于照顾分工的讨论中，将女性定位为“妻子”以及她们作为母亲的角色的一种文化边缘化但随之而来的性别话语。与之前大多数关注母性规范观念的建构和部分抵制的 Mumsnet 研究不同，本文认为，日益政治化的网站是一个空间，在这个空间中，妻子的话语被用来在某种程度上解释家庭不平等的经历. 该论文使用批判性话语心理学方法对 Mumsnet 上发布的 14 个在线讨论线程的数据进行分析，确定了两种主要的、互补的结构，海报通过这些结构构建护理划分。这些是“辅妾”的地位，承担大部分家庭责任，损害自己的职业成就和心理健康，从而促进男性伴侣的职业生涯；以及将合作伙伴构建为“无能的男孩”，以试图管理与他们作为“妻子”的定位和相关负担过重的不协调。我的结论是，女性在 Mumsnet 空间中形成的关系使她们能够就妻子和母亲的共存家庭角色以及相关的照顾分工表达不和谐的观点和感受。