This thesis is about lesbian couples in Sweden and their transition to first-time-motherhood. The overarching purpose is to explore how women in lesbian couples understand, explain and reason about their transition to motherhood. The analysis draws on two rounds of interviews: pre-birth with 40 women (both partners in 20 lesbian couples) and post-birth with 23 of these women (about 2–4 years after the first interview took place). The thesis explores how they reached the decision of which one of them would carry their (first) child (Study I), their parental leave plans in relation to dominant meanings of care and equal parenting (Study II), and what meanings of couple (in)equality and motherhood that underpin their reasonings before and after becoming mothers (Study III and Study IV). In all of the studies, the analysis focuses on how the Swedish gender equality discourse is articulated and negotiated in the women’s narratives.

Due to its hegemonic position in Sweden, the gender equality discourse shapes dominant understandings of couple equality and equal parenting. However, the discourse is underpinned by a heteronormative focus on couples and (in)equalities. The thesis analyzes how this dominant discourse limit and enable certain meanings and interpretations for women in lesbian relationships of what ‘goes on’ in their families. For example, the findings indicate that women in lesbian couples can perceive themselves as equal from the onset, simply by being two women. Thus, creating families outside of the heterosexual nuclear family instills a certain optimism in the women’s reasoning and imaginaries. In the thesis, the optimism is theorized in relation to public narratives of couple inequalities constructed around heterosexual couples, and the particular challenges a mother faces in relation to parenting with a father. In the interviews, the women would often draw on cultural scripts about ‘absent fathers’ and ‘ever-present caring mothers’ in which they situate themselves – as well as their partner – in the latter group. As the four studies show, this position is both productive and limiting. Productive in the sense that many women reworked dominant meanings of care, parental leave and couple equality. Limiting in the sense that they explicitly talked about lacking available scripts for their specific family constructions. Lacking scripts, and models, was however only perceived as an obstacle first after they had become parents. In the pre-birth interviews, the scriptless scenarios was often imagined as an advantage. In other words, while be(com)ing two present and caring parents appear to solve the immediate issue of equal parenting – as presented in the Swedish gender equality discourse – it comes with a particular set of challenges on its own. The thesis also illustrates how pre-birth imaginaries may change across the transition to parenthood for lesbian couples.