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.
Ain't no trust Levine, Judith A
2013., 20130615, 2013, 2013-06-15
eBook
Ain’t No Trust explores issues of trust and distrust among low-income women in the U.S.—at work, around childcare, in their relationships, and with caseworkers—and presents richly detailed evidence ...from in-depth interviews about our welfare system and why it’s failing the very people it is designed to help. By comparing low-income mothers’ experiences before and after welfare reform, Judith A. Levine probes women’s struggles to gain or keep jobs while they simultaneously care for their children, often as single mothers. By offering a new way to understand how structural factors impact the daily experiences of poor women, Ain’t No Trust highlights the pervasiveness of distrust in their lives, uncovering its hidden sources and documenting its most corrosive and paralyzing effects. Levine’s critique and conclusions hold powerful implications for scholars and policymakers alike.
Single Mother Juffer, Jane
2006, 2006-04-01, 20060101
eBook
Long perceived as the ultimate symbol of social breakdown and sexual irresponsibility, the single mother is now, in the context of welfare-to-work policies, often hailed as the new spokesperson for ...hard work and self-sufficiency. A dozen years after Dan Quayle denounced the television character Murphy Brown for making the decision to become a single mother “just another lifestyle choice,” President George W. Bush applauded single mothers for “heroic work,” and positive on-screen representations of single mothers abound, from The Gilmore Girls to Sex and the City to American Idol .
Single Mother describes the recent cultural valorization of this figure that—in the midst of demographic changes in the U.S.—has emerged as the unlikely heroic and seductive voice of the new American family. Drawing on her own life as a single mother, interviews with dozens of other single mothers, cultural representations, and policies on welfare, immigration, childcare, and child custody, Juffer analyzes this contingent acceptance of single mothers. Finally, critiquing the relentless emphasis on self-sufficiency to the exclusion of community, Juffer shows the remarkable organizing skills of these new mothers of invention. At a moment when one-third of all babies are born to single moms, Single Mother is a fascinating and necessary examination of these new “domestic intellectuals.”
Backlash against Welfare Mothersis a forceful examination of how and why a state-level revolt against welfare, begun in the late 1940s, was transformed into a national-level assault that destroyed a ...critical part of the nation's safety net, with tragic consequences for American society. With a wealth of original research, Ellen Reese puts recent debates about the contemporary welfare backlash into historical perspective. She provides a closer look at these early antiwelfare campaigns, showing why they were more successful in some states than others and how opponents of welfare sometimes targeted Puerto Ricans and Chicanos as well as blacks for cutbacks. Her research reveals both the continuities and changes in American welfare opposition from the late 1940s to the present. Reese brings new evidence to light that reveals how large farmers and racist politicians, concerned about the supply of cheap labor, appealed to white voters' racial resentments and stereotypes about unwed mothers, blacks, and immigrants in the 1950s. She then examines congressional failure to replace the current welfare system with a more popular alternative in the 1960s and 1970s, which paved the way for national assaults on welfare. Taking a fresh look at recent debates on welfare reform, she explores how and why politicians competing for the white vote and right-wing think tanks promoting business interests appeased the Christian right and manufactured consent for cutbacks through a powerful, racially coded discourse. Finally, through firsthand testimonies, Reese vividly portrays the tragic consequences of current welfare policies and calls for a bold new agenda for working families.
This title was first published in 2000. This is a study which compares and contrasts how lone mothers' relationships to paid work and care-giving are constructed across 20 countries, and with what ...outcomes for lone mothers' levels of economic well-being. In doing so, the book explores from an international perspective, the implications of the re-orientation of lone mothers' citizenship within the UK policy field from that of care-giver to paid worker. The volume engages with feminist comparative social policy literature concerned with specifying a construction of citizenship appropriate to capturing international variations in women's social rights. By incorporating social rights attached to paid work and care, as well as those which enable lone mothers to move between sequential periods of paid work and care-giving across the child-rearing cycle, the study makes a significant contribution to the literature.
Desde una perspectiva critico-discursiva y utilizando la narrativa como unidad de analisis, en este articulo nos proponemos dar luz a algunas estrategias linguisticas con las que un colectivo ...discriminado socialmente, como es el caso de las madres solteras mexicanas, negocia su identidad, protege su imagen y resiste a discursos dominantes. Las estrategias en las que nos concentramos son la pronominalizacion del yo; el uso del tu sin pronombre con sentido colectivo; y la utilizacion del genero marcado de los pronombres nosotras y una. A traves de diferentes extractos narrativos, elicitados en entrevistas semidirigidas a seis madres solteras, mostramos las funciones que estos elementos linguisticos cumplen. Hemos encontrado que la pronominalizacion tiene una funcion agentiva que es parte de un trabajo de imagen (Brown y Levinson 1987); la segunda persona singular sin pronombre es una estrategia protectora de imagen, mientras que la utilizacion del genero marcado posee una funcion diferenciadora. Nuestro analisis demuestra que es imprescindible tomar en cuenta la situacion comunicativa completa en que surgen las narrativas para poder dar significado al uso de tales estrategias linguisticas.
Desde la Administración pública es posible identificar problemáticas que pueden ser abordadas para garantizar los derechos de poblaciones vulnerables. Por tal motivo, esta investigación busca ...identificar los elementos que inciden en la creación de una polÃtica pública de empleo para las madres solteras y mujeres cabeza de hogar en el municipio de Chinú (Córdoba) durante el perÃodo 2020-2023. Los resultados de la investigación mostrarán que el 68% de la población femenina analizada no tiene empleo de ningún tipo y que el 62% ha intentado realizar algún emprendimiento. De la misma forma, se analizará si la Administración municipal de Chinú ha emprendido acciones suficientes para mejorar esta problemática, lo que afecta la calidad de vida de las familias. El trabajo concluirá con la identificación de los elementos que inciden en la creación de una polÃtica pública local de empleo para la población mencionada y propuestas sobre cómo superarlos.
With the passage of the 1996 welfare reform, not only welfare, but poverty and inequality have disappeared from the political discourse. The decline in the welfare rolls has been hailed as a success. ...This book challenges that assumption. It argues that while many single mothers left welfare, they have joined the working poor, and fail to make a decent living. The book examines the persistent demonization of poor single-mother families; the impact of the low-wage market on perpetuating poverty and inequality; and the role of the welfare bureaucracy in defining deserving and undeserving poor. It argues that the emphasis on family values - marriage promotion, sex education and abstinence - is misguided and diverts attention from the economic hardships low-income families face. The book proposes an alternative approach to reducing poverty and inequality that centers on a children's allowance as basic income support coupled with jobs and universal child care.
