A moving, cross-national account of working mothers' daily lives-and the revolution in public policy and culture needed to improve them
The work-family conflict that mothers experience today is a ...national crisis. Women struggle to balance breadwinning with the bulk of parenting, and stress is constant. Social policies don't help. Of all Western industrialized countries, the United States ranks dead last for supportive work-family policies: No federal paid parental leave. The highest gender wage gap. No minimum standard for vacation and sick days. The highest maternal and child poverty rates. Can American women look to European policies for solutions?Making Motherhood Workdraws on interviews that sociologist Caitlyn Collins conducted over five years with 135 middle-class working mothers in Sweden, Germany, Italy, and the United States. She explores how women navigate work and family given the different policy supports available in each country.
Taking readers into women's homes, neighborhoods, and workplaces, Collins shows that mothers' desires and expectations depend heavily on context. In Sweden-renowned for its gender-equal policies-mothers assume they will receive support from their partners, employers, and the government. In the former East Germany, with its history of mandated employment, mothers don't feel conflicted about working, but some curtail their work hours and ambitions. Mothers in western Germany and Italy, where maternalist values are strong, are stigmatized for pursuing careers. Meanwhile, American working mothers stand apart for their guilt and worry. Policies alone, Collins discovers, cannot solve women's struggles. Easing them will require a deeper understanding of cultural beliefs about gender equality, employment, and motherhood. With women held to unrealistic standards in all four countries, the best solutions demand that we redefine motherhood, work, and family.
Making Motherhood Workvividly demonstrates that women need not accept their work-family conflict as inevitable.
Promises I can keep Edin, Kathryn; Kefalas, Maria
2011., 20110901, 2011, 2011-10-04
eBook
Millie Acevedo bore her first child before the age of 16 and dropped out of high school to care for her newborn. Now 27, she is the unmarried mother of three and is raising her kids in one of ...Philadelphia's poorest neighborhoods. Would she and her children be better off if she had waited to have them and had married their father first? Why do so many poor American youth like Millie continue to have children before they can afford to take care of them? Over a span of five years, sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas talked in-depth with 162 low-income single moms like Millie to learn how they think about marriage and family. Promises I Can Keep offers an intimate look at what marriage and motherhood mean to these women and provides the most extensive on-the-ground study to date of why they put children before marriage despite the daunting challenges they know lie ahead.
Birthing a Motheris the first ethnography to probe the intimate experience of gestational surrogate motherhood. In this beautifully written and insightful book, Elly Teman shows how surrogates and ...intended mothers carefully negotiate their cooperative endeavor. Drawing on anthropological fieldwork among Jewish Israeli women, interspersed with cross-cultural perspectives of surrogacy in the global context, Teman traces the processes by which surrogates relinquish any maternal claim to the baby even as intended mothers accomplish a complicated transition to motherhood. Teman's groundbreaking analysis reveals that as surrogates psychologically and emotionally disengage from the fetus they carry, they develop a profound and lasting bond with the intended mother.
This article proposes a reflection on the educational skills of residential institutions that welcome mothers with their children following the assessment of their vulnerability in terms of parental ...functioning. The reflections conducted will be supported by testimonies collected in various training contexts addressed to educators of the mother/child communities and in some group meetings held with mothers whose children have been entrusted to foster families. How can the residential community that welcomes them constitute itself as a "symbolic parent" to repair those ancient wounds that have made them incomplete daughters and now "fragile" mothers? These are the questions we are going to answer.
