Becoming and Being a Creative and Entrepreneurial Mum in Finland

Abstract

This chapter explores the pathways of mothers with young children into cultural and creative industries (CCIs). These women can be described as mumpreneurs, meaning that they combine running a business enterprise with looking after their children. Typically unstable, insecure, and unpredictable, CCIs also offer scope for great self-engagement and personal satisfaction. At the same time, the current culture of intensive mothering has made motherhood more challenging than in the past. Mumpreneurship may be a way to ‘have it all’ for the women interviewed for this study. However, critical researchers have suggested that this individual ‘choice’ locks women into marginalised roles in the neoliberal economy and makes them scale back their dreams. This chapter focuses on the experiences of mothers in Finland. The ways that they balance motherhood and creative entrepreneurship are interpreted in the context of CCI work cultures and Finnish social and labour market policy. The chapter suggests that the Finnish childcare system, the culture of women’s work, and the scarcity of waged work in CCIs together explain why Finnish mumpreneurs talk about their situation in rather positive terms.