UC Berkeley

This dissertation is a study of the gendered educational labor of homeschool mothers. Though recent literature has painted homeschooling as an outlier in American education or as an extreme version of neoliberal privatization and opting out, scholars have not adequately taken into account either the long entanglement of the domestic home and public school spheres or the way that homeschooling mothers use the practice as a form of personalized agency.

Using a conceptual framework that insists on the centrality of carework and asserts mothers as experts, this work seeks to explore the dialectical tension of protection and punishment inherent in both the home and schooling. This inquiry begins with a historical theorization of homeschooling that starts in the era of the Cult of True Womanhood, a period in American history when civil and social society lauded the image of feminine domesticity and a separate spheres ideology just at the time when the Common School movement began to rely on a largely female teaching force. Exploring how both the modern school and the modern home were co-constructed as spaces of domestication and education by women’s labor, this history ends with a theorization of the third shift, or educational labor as women’s third job.Using a phenomenological approach to interviewing homeschool mothers in California, I found that, though their homeschooling practice was rooted in their parenting, it is a distinct kind of educational labor separate from domestic labor or outside employment. As such, homeschooling mothers develop a highly-focused educational expertise (in the practice and their children) that frequently precludes them from doing other kinds of (paid) labor. This labor is often unseen and always unpaid, both by their families and the larger economic system. Homeschool mothers give their labor–often joyfully–for the practice, but recognize that they are made economically vulnerable by it, too. Using the framing of love, homeschooling mothers make claims to parental rights by declaring that the state 1 cannot possibly love their children the way they do, and further asserting that love is the essential characteristic for teaching. I find that for these mothers, homeschooling was a way to advocate for themselves, the individual and educational needs of their children, and in critique of a schooling system they found lacking. Homeschooling mothers, many of them former classroom teachers, construct critiques of the system of which they had been a part and tried to change from the inside. The classroom teachers-turned-homeschoolers I spoke with had two important realizations: 1) the teaching profession and being a parent are incompatible and, 2) I don’t want my children in the system I’ve been teaching in. Rather than seeing these mothers as “outsiders,” as the literature often posits them, my research theorizes them as insiders looking in from the outside.

The contemporary homeschooling movement has attracted adherents from both progressive communities and conservative Christian families. Yet in homeschooling they find some degree of common ground, meeting in the Place Behind the Barn, a place that is simultaneously doing and undoing the messy, political work of (re)claiming the domestic and forging a new community.

Recognizing the cataclysms of COVID-19 pandemic schooling, this work ends with and interrogation of the differences between homeschooling and pandemic schooling and finds that the pandemic has issued not a school problem and a labor problem, but a gendered school-labor cataclysm of disaster patriarchy, one which homeschooling research may thoughtfully illuminate.