Discourses and practices of good motherhood are continuously produced at international, national, and local levels. As women bear the onus for practicing good motherhood, these discourses charge women with caring for themselves and their children in specific ways. However, in Central Malawi, the achievement of good motherhood is inhibited by a variety of social and economic barriers including extreme poverty and marked gender inequalities. In this context good motherhood discourses have the potential to produce expectations that are unattainable for mothers in difficult socioeconomic environments. In light of these challenges, this dissertation examines how women in Malawi understand and practice good motherhood. This dissertation presents the findings of a qualitative study of motherhood in Central Malawi conducted from January to October 2013. My study explores the ways that women in one location in Central Malawi defined and understood good motherhood and then examines how these local ideas intersected with constructions of good motherhood touted by public health programs, in particular those promoted at pediatric health clinics called "Under-Five Clinics." I show that the specific vulnerabilities mothers faced in their daily lives-poverty, food insecurity, and domestic abuse, for example-challenged the ways women were able to enact the specific mothering practices advised by the Under-Five Clinics as well as by their own communities. To deal with these challenges I suggest that women employed the concept of "trying," producing a rhetoric of trying to be a good mother in spite of a scarcity of resources, regardless of actual success. By shifting the metric of good motherhood away from successful outcomes, "trying" allowed women to maintain the appearance of being a good mother within their community despite dealing with severe socioeconomic barriers. I argue that in this way emphasizing "trying" may constitute a means through which women are able to actively reframe good motherhood to incorporate and respond to socioeconomic environments that are at odds with ideal expectations of good motherhood. By examining women's own definitions of motherhood and their responses to public health programming that attempts to define good motherhood, this study provides a critical look at the impacts of public health agendas in local contexts, and especially how these programs affect the women who are often the program's targets. In particular, I suggest that the current Under-Five Clinics' use of discourses of responsibility and blame, which hold women solely accountable for the health and well-being of their children, are ineffective public health strategies that ignore both the extensive social aspects of good motherhood present in Central Malawi and the scarce resources available to women to enact good motherhood practices.
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