In 2019, near Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan, five children perished in a house fire while their parents were away at night shift jobs. This widely-reported tragedy brought to light conflicting imperatives and highlighted the precarity of gendered productive and reproductive labor across Kazakhstan. This highly-publicized incident ignited a conflagration of protests by “mothers with many children” (mnogodetnye mamy, kopbala analar), the official designation for low-income women who have four or more children and are eligible for state support. This paper analyzes the mothers’ protests of 2019, and the public and official responses to these protests. It finds that, by centering motherhood and traditional gender norms in their protests, these protestors successfully linked their demands for social benefits back to historic Soviet-era protectionist and paternalist policies, thus legitimizing their demands. However, the article argues that at the same time these gendered labor norms force women, especially marginalized mothers, to engage in precarious forms of labor that neither Western-style NGOs nor limited government support are able to adequately address. The article further concludes that “mothers with many children” labor under precarious conditions and are subject to skepticism and censure, as their actions challenge idealized national scripts of proper womanhood in Kazakhstan. This research contributes to the study of labor, gender, and reproduction in Central Asia and calls for centering the study of gendered labor precarity within Central Asian studies.

2019 年，哈萨克斯坦努尔苏丹附近，五名儿童在父母外出夜班时死于一场房屋火灾。这场广为报道的悲剧暴露了相互冲突的迫切需要，并突显了哈萨克斯坦各地性别化的生产性和再生产性劳动的不稳定。这一广为人知的事件引发了“多子女母亲”（mnogodetnye mamy，kopbala analar）的强烈抗议，这是对有四个或更多孩子并有资格获得国家支持的低收入妇女的官方称呼。本文分析了 2019 年母亲们的抗议活动，以及公众和官方对这些抗议活动的反应。研究发现，通过在抗议中以母性和传统性别规范为中心，这些抗议者成功地将他们对社会福利的要求与历史性的苏联时代的保护主义和家长式政策联系起来，从而使他们的要求合法化。然而，文章认为，与此同时，这些性别化的劳动规范迫使女性，尤其是边缘化的母亲，从事不稳定的劳动形式，而西方式的非政府组织和有限的政府支持都无法充分解决这一问题。文章进一步得出结论，“多子女的母亲”在不稳定的条件下劳动，并受到怀疑和谴责，因为她们的行为挑战了哈萨克斯坦理想的国家正确女性标准。这项研究有助于对中亚的劳动力、性别和生殖的研究，并呼吁将性别劳动力不稳定的研究纳入中亚研究的中心。