Montenegro is a stepmother
Bavimo se penzionerima, nezaposlenima, prosvjetarima, medicinskim radnicima, zaposlenim u policiji, vojsci, bavimo se poštenim preduzetnicima od kojih živi ova zemlja a koja prema njima, za razliku od tajkuna, ima maćehinski odnos.
We deal with pensioners, the unemployed, educators, medical workers, employees in the police, the army, we deal with honest entrepreneurs from whom this country lives, and towards whom, unlike towards tycoons,
the country has a stepmotherly relation.
Conceptualisation COUNTRY IS A STEPMOTHER emphasises the hard contrast between mother and stepmother (Tomović-Šundić & Gvozdenović, 2019:6). Such discourse spreads the mother-stepmother confrontation, guided by so called “nuclear family ideology”. This view suggests that the biological, intact family with two biological parents and their children is the “ideal” family type (Coontz 1992), which further propose that stepfamilies are viewed more negatively. This ideology is in addition followed by both, the incomplete institutionalisation hypothesis (Cherlin 1978) – which argues that stepfamilies have not been recognized as an institution; and the social stigma hypothesis (Ganong, Coleman & Mapes 1990) – that argues that stepfamilies are seen as deviant groups. This is further manifested in the negative stereotypes given to stepfamilies, surrounding it with myths that make it difficult for stepmother to succeed in her new role. It is no surprise, then, that in everyday speech we have such a metaphor that takes the stepmother’s figure as an archetypal representation that symbolises the threat to the self-consciousness and its development (Tomović-Šundić & Gvozdenović, 2019:6). Such discourse patterns, as we can see from the extracted examples, refers to family scenarios as the original domains, in which stepmothers treat children unequally, making a woman role in this context morally wrong
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