Conflict surrounding mothers paid work has its roots in historic gendered divisions of moral labour, where women were expected to achieve personal development through caring while men cared for others by pursuing self-interested tasks such as paid work, the fruits of which they shared with the family (Gerson, 2002; Damaske, 2013). The desirability of this as an ideal has its foundations in white middle-class preferences, and even though changes to work and family practices may challenge such divisions as a dominant framework, its moral underpinnings remain as relevant as ever and shape how mothers navigate the two seemingly contradictory domains of paid work and the home. The moral imperative that as a mother you must be self-sacrificing, selfless, and child-centred has strengthened. ‘Intensive mothering’ (Hays, 1996) is now widely accepted as the dominant paradigm to which all mothers are judged, whether they subscribe to the ideology or not (Henderson et al, 2016). This presents a challenge for women engaged in the labour market, and often results in feelings of guilt when they feel they may not be performing to the highest standard in one domain or the other (Guendouzi, 2006; Sutherland, 2010; Zanhour and Sumpter, 2024; Lutz et al, 2023; Williamson et al, 2023).

This chapter draws on data from the first set of interviews, exploring the experiences of 25 working mothers combining paid work and childcare responsibilities. It examines how the mothers felt returning to work after the birth of their children, how they located work in their lives, the decisions they made concerning how to reconcile paid work and mothering demands, and the challenges they faced in doing so.

This chapter examines how the 25 couples divided housework tasks. As discussed in the previous chapter, only by differentiating between childcare and housework tasks can we identify the shared assumptions and conflicting reasoning behind who is responsible for tasks and how they are carried out. It is important to look at housework tasks individually for several reasons. Certain tasks are more demanding with the presence of children: toys create more mess, meals must be ready on time, and clothes may need to be washed more regularly. Housework which childfree couples may be able to put off until the weekend takes on greater immediacy or produces greater workloads, placing added pressure on couples with children who are also juggling paid employment. In completing their household portraits, the couples’ consideration of each task in turn provided ample scope for them to explicitly compare their contributions and articulate the criteria they used. As with childcare, this showed the complexity in how partners conceptualized tasks and how they understood and measured their own and their partner’s contributions, which I return to consider later in the concluding chapter of the book.

Within this chapter, the categorization of work-and-care and breadwinner fathers, which was developed in relation to the fathers’ attitudes to work and childcare, is used to capture how housework was divided. Although the work-and-care fathers were more likely than the breadwinner fathers to ‘share’ certain housework tasks or carry them out themselves, the men’s contributions were shaped more by their attitudes to housework. Generally, the men were more likely to carry out tasks they enjoyed, were skilled in, or held certain standards for.

In countries across the Global North, fatherhood is understood to have moved away from the 1950s’ stereotype of the distant breadwinner father to be replaced by an involved type of fathering in which fathers take an active role, both physically and emotionally, in their child's upbring (Dermott, 2008; Dermott and Miller, 2015; Farstad and Stefansen, 2015; Johansson and Andreasson, 2017; Brooks and Hodkinson, 2020). Fathers’ caregiving is now culturally acceptable, if not required, partly as a response to women's increased role in the labour market which has warranted an increase in father's contributions to everyday childcare and housework tasks. However, as we saw in the previous chapter, just as the moral imperative for women to care has not been displaced by their active engagement in the labour market, nor has the expectation that fathers should care for their family through breadwinning.

This chapter draws on data from the first set of interviews and explores how the working fathers to whom the mothers were partnered navigated their commitment to paid work and the home. All the fathers had worked full-time prior to having children and all but one was still working full-time when they were interviewed. The chapter begins by outlining a typology of fathers that inductively emerged from the data: ‘breadwinner fathers’ and ‘work-and-care fathers’. The two types of fathers differed in the importance they attached to paid work in the construction of their identities, how they understood their fathering role and the value they placed on their partner's paid employment.

This book puts forward a key theoretical argument that we can understand memory politics and power in post-violence societies better by looking at how individual roles and responsibility are attributed regarding the violent past in a country's memoryscape. How roles are attributed and any ambivalences that surround this process is important for how the past is constructed in the memoryscape and – more importantly – is foundational for power today. These memories of a collective past and what role people are remembered to have in it impacts their political legitimacy and agency. In this chapter, some key concepts will be discussed that will illuminate this intersection of the memoryscape, the attribution of roles and power today, in order to allow the following chapters to provide a comparative analysis of post-violence politics of memory in Cambodia, Rwanda, and Indonesia.

First, this chapter will discuss the idea of memoryscape as a socio-spatial construct that structures how societies remember and what politics surround this memory before introducing the concepts of mnemonic role attributions and ambivalences. The memoryscape is understood to be a materially and socially constituted space in which various collective and individual memories coexist, compete, and coalesce to render the past significant in the present. Second, the chapter discusses some of the facets of post-violence politics of memory that will guide empirical investigations of my cases: political discourse and policy, transitional justice, and cultural heritage.

Phka Sla Krom Angkar is a Cambodian classical dance performance and a judicial reparation awarded in the context of the hybrid Khmer Rouge tribunal's case 002/02 that included the crime of forced marriage. I had the privilege of visiting the premiere of the play in January 2017 in Phnom Penh's Chaktomuk Theatre seeing an impressive retelling through dance of various stories about forced marriage narrated through the performance. One story was particularly striking to me:

[The spirit of the soldier fades further and further, until finally disappearing. Chivi regretted what she said and shouts after him.]

‘It was not comfortable during that time. It was all about hardship and the dead. I am also a victim of that regime, too. I saw the hardship and saw how Pol Pot arrested and burnt. … It was the consequence and I am a victim.’ This quote is drawn from an interview that I conducted with a former cadre of the Khmer Rouge during the research for my previous book, The Complexity of Evil: Perpetration and Genocide (Williams, 2021b) that dealt with motivations for people to participate in genocide. The 55-year-old man clearly acknowledges that he is a former Khmer Rouge, part of the regime that was responsible for the deaths of around two million people during their rule from 1975 to 1979 in Cambodia. He spoke about his involvement in the mass displacement of people from the capital Phnom Penh and his time at the S-21 security centre, the Khmer Rouge's highest and most lethal torture and interrogation prison. And yet, at the same time, he clearly also claims victimhood.

It is certainly not wholly unusual for perpetrators to make claims to victimhood (Williams and Jessee, 2024); but what is more remarkable is how other people in society react to these claims: in Cambodia this claim can go unchallenged and is even echoed by many of those non-Khmer Rouge victimized by the regime. For example, one woman in the country's northwest told me that ‘there's no anger towards them because we were all villagers. They were just being brainwashed so they followed those people. And now they passed away because they are victims just like me’.

This book has put forward the idea that the core concept in remembering the past is how roles are attributed, most prominently regarding who is remembered as a perpetrator, victim, and hero, as well as ambivalences associated with this process. To empirically substantiate these ideas, I have analysed the politics of memory in the memoryscapes of Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge genocide from 1975 to 1979, Rwanda after the genocide against the Tutsi of 1994, and Indonesia after the genocide against communists in 1965– 1966. I will not reiterate the empirical findings from each chapter, but point readers to the individual chapters as well as the brief summaries provided at the beginning of the previous, comparative chapter.

From the comparison of these cases, I have distilled nine key arguments regarding the politics of memory, beginning with the core approach of this book:

• First, the attribution of roles is the cornerstone of how the memory of past violence affects current political dynamics, strengthening political power, and affording legitimacy to those who are favourably remembered and delegitimizing those remembered as culpable.

• Second, I have argued that this political effect is determined not just by the actual attribution of the roles themselves as perpetrator, victim, and hero, but also in terms of how political actors emphasize specific roles more than others, or which types of crimes or timeframes are foregrounded, thus highlighting the importance of some parts of the past over others.

This quote is instructive for our understanding of how the violent past is remembered in Indonesia and the role that silences have in defining the roles of perpetrator, victim, and hero. While silence is a trope frequently attributed to the 1965/1966 genocide in Indonesia, it really serves to augment the voice that can speak: the official narrative that attributes communists as threatening and the role of hero to the violent actors that put down the threat. And yet the silence is also not monolithic, as the quote argues and I shall show in this chapter. Not only is there quite some voice that continues the discourse of threat construction by the government and other organizations, but there are also spaces in which survivors can articulate their memories of victimhood and utter condemnation of the military as well as Islamic and nationalist organizations for their violence.

Having explored the post-violence memoryscapes of Cambodia, Rwanda, and Indonesia, this final chapter seeks to distil the key insights learned from each and juxtapose them across the cases. Having studied each of these in-depth, it is my hope that a comparison of similarities and differences between the cases will allow us to learn something that could be more broadly applicable. In this vein, the chapter will demonstrate analytically how the two theoretical concepts of mnemonic role attributions and ambivalence impact and are influenced by the politics of memory in post-violence societies and tease out some core insights into this relationship.

In bringing together the three cases for such a structured comparison, I delineate insights on how political actors use the memory of past violence and the roles that are attributed within it to stabilize or augment their political power in post-violence societies. This chapter will show what we can analytically see when we apply the idea of mnemonic role attributions, how it is useful in understanding post-violence politics of memory and whether there may be some patterns to how political actors use them.

In essence, mnemonic role attributions are categorizations of actors, their roles, their responsibility, and their suffering as they are remembered regarding a certain period of time and thus allow us to see what meanings are ascribed to the past violence by engaging not in in-depth analysis of narratives, but seeing who is blamed for the violence, who is deemed to have fallen prey to it, whose actions are seen as heroic, and so on.