Motherhood amidst reprimands and advice: Parenting and class in Rio de Janeiro

The article explores how the moralization of women mothers in contemporary Brazil reinforces structural inequalities. The analysis focuses on two forms of communication: reprimands and advice directed from experts toward mothers or circulated between mothers of young children in two different social contexts in the city of Rio de Janeiro. Based upon an ethnography carried out in a complex of favelas, the first case study examines how poor and racialized women are reprimanded by public daycare professionals. Based on participant observation in a WhatsApp group of middle-class parents, the second case study focuses on the advice distributed by parental experts that circulated among these parents in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. Through the comparison of reprimands and advice, we suggest that speech acts reveal how expert discourses perform modalities of moralization that not only shape motherhood experiences but also differentiate them according to attributes of class, race, and territory.