Mothering By Degrees

"In Mothering by Degrees, I show how single mothers who pursue college degrees in early 21st century America must navigate a difficult course as they attempt to reconcile their identities as single mothers, college students, and, in many cases, employees. As they combine these multiple and often competing roles and responsibilities, they must also negotiate a balance between cultural ideals of motherhood and their own definitions of what it means to be a "good" mother, particularly as those ideals and definitions are shaped within context of post-welfare reform America and the post-secondary institutions they attend. By comparing the experiences of nearly 100 single mother college students attending three postsecondary education institutions in the United States, I illustrate how these women navigate the various obstacles they encounter, especially obstacles related to financial concerns, child care, time constraints, and the "chilly" climate of higher education. In addition, I demonstrate that the women regard postsecondary education not only as a means of escaping poverty but also as an extension of their mothering work, something they do to help ensure the long-term health and well-being of their children. Thus, this project provides a situated, comparative account of the experiences of single mothers who are college students in order to foster a better understanding of the complex ideologies and social structures that influence the life choices and education experiences of members of this important but understudied student population. Finally, the project discusses policies and programs that can help provide better support to single mother and may diminish the challenges they face as they endeavor to complete their education"--

In Mothering by Degrees, Jillian Duquaine-Watson shows how single mothers pursuing college degrees must navigate a difficult course as they attempt to reconcile their identities as single moms, college students, and in many cases, employees. They also negotiate a balance between what they think a good mother should be, and what society is telling them, and how that affects their choices to go to college, and whether to stay in college or not. The first book length study to focus on the lives and experiences of single mothers who are college students, Mothering by Degrees points out how these women are influenced by dominant American ideologies of motherhood, and the institutional parameters of the schools they attend, and argues for increased attention to the specific ways in which the choices, challenges, and opportunities available to mothers are shaped within their specific environments, as well as the ways in which mothers help shape those environments...

An insatiable need for sex and love. Periods of overeating or starving. A pattern of unstable and painful relationships. Does this sound painfully familiar? Trauma counselor Kelly McDaniel has seen these traits over and over in clients who feel trapped in cycles of harmful behaviors-and are unable to stop. Many of us find ourselves stuck in unhealthy habits simply because we don't see a better way. With Mother Hunger, McDaniel helps women break the cycle of destructive behavior by taking a fresh look at childhood trauma and its lasting impact. In doing so, she destigmatizes the shame that comes with being under-mothered and misdiagnosed. McDaniel offers a healing path with powerful tools that include therapeutic interventions and lifestyle changes in service to healthy relationships. The constant search for mother love can be a lifelong emotional burden, but healing begins with knowing and naming what we are missing. McDaniel is the first clinician to identify Mother Hunger, which demystifies the search for love and provides the compass that each woman needs to end the struggle with achy, lonely emptiness, and come home to herself.

In Perfect Motherhood, Rima D. Apple shows how the growing belief that mothers need to be savvy about the latest scientific directives has shifted the role of expert away from the mother and toward the professional establishment.

This book is an ethnographically-informed interview study of the ways in which middle-class mothers from three Israeli social-cultural groups – immigrants from the former Soviet Union, Palestinian Israelis and Jewish native-born Israelis – share and differ in their understandings of a ‘proper’ education for their children and of their role in ensuring this. The book highlights the importance of education in contemporary society, and argues that mothers' modes of engagement in their children's education are formed at the junction of class, culture and social positioning. It examines how cultural models such as intensive mothering, parental anxiety, individualism, and ‘concerted cultivation’ play out in the lives of these mothers and their children, shaping different ways of participating in the middle class. The book will be of interest to anthropologists and sociologists studying mothering, education, parenting, gender, class and culture, to readers curious about daily life in Israel, and to professionals working with families in a multicultural context.

This volume investigates the dissonance between the supposed advantage held by educated women and their continued lack of economic and political power. Niemi explains the developments of the so-called "female advantage" and "boy crisis" in American higher education, setting them alongside socioeconomic and racial developments in women’s and men’s lives throughout the last 40 years. Exploring the relationship between higher education credentials and their utility in creating political, economic, and social success, Degrees of Difference identifies ways in which gender and academic achievement contribute to women’s and men’s power to shape their lives. This important book brings new light to the issues of power, gender identities, and the role of American higher education in creating gender equity.

Inspired by those who mothered before and through the COVID-19 pandemic, this is a book about, for, and with those who live different embodiments of academic mothering—mothers, othermothers, academic mothers, and mothering academics. In this book, mothering is defined broadly, encompassing those who are biologically or legally mothers with children; those who are “not-mother” but who nonetheless understand and practice mothering; those who do identify as mothers but not as women; and all those who take on mothering roles in academia and beyond. Through poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction, image and text, the authors in this edited book creatively explore academic mothering through their unique lived experiences, illuminating three ideas that comprise the three sections of this book: mothering as practice, mothering in precarity, and mothering as relational. Through considering—and in many cases, writing about and through—their own mothering practices, this diverse collection of authors critique the systemic failures of academia in the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond, fabulating new possibilities that envision a future in which mothering is valued and supported in (and by) higher education.

Laboring Positions aims to disrupt the dominant discourse on academic women’s mothering experiences. Black women’s maternity is assumed, and yet is also silenced within the disembodied, patriarchal, racist, antifamily, and increasingly neoliberal work environment of academia. This volume acknowledges the salience of the institutional challenges facing contemporary caregiving academics; yet it is centrally concerned with expanding the academic mothering conversation by speaking against the private/public spheres approach. Laboring Positions does so by privileging the hybridity between Black women’s mothering experiences and their working lives within and beyond the academy. The collection also intentionally blurs essentialist boundaries of mother and “other”, which dictates and generates alternate border zones of knowledge production concerning Black academic women’s working lives. In doing so, the diverse perspectives captured herein offer us cogent starting points from which to interrogate the interlocking cultural, political, and economic hierarchies of the academy. The editorial goal of Laboring Positions is to offer a polyvocal collection embodying themes that privilege and arouse Black mothering as central in the narratives, research, and models of existence and resistance for Black women’s survival within the academy. The contributors utilize a wide variety of methods and perspectives including Black feminist theory, intersectional feminism, Womanist research ethics, hip-hop feminism, African-centered epistemologies, literary analysis, autoethnography, policy analysis, memoir, qualitative research, survival strategies and frameworks, and situated testimony that are all collectively bound by Black women’s intellectual lives, activist impulses, and experiences of mothering or being mothered. The critical embodied perspectives herein serve as evidence that Black women exist beyond the institutional and ideological boundaries that have attempted to define their journeys. Laboring Positions’ chapters speak to each other and some conversations are louder than others; yet together they offer us a complexly nuanced portrait of the emergent literature on race, gender, mothering, and work.

From the author of How Should a Person Be? (“one of the most talked-about books of the year”—Time Magazine) and the New York Times Bestseller Women in Clothes comes a daring novel about whether to have children. In Motherhood, Sheila Heti asks what is gained and what is lost when a woman becomes a mother, treating the most consequential decision of early adulthood with the candor, originality, and humor that have won Heti international acclaim and made How Should A Person Be? required reading for a generation. In her late thirties, when her friends are asking when they will become mothers, the narrator of Heti’s intimate and urgent novel considers whether she will do so at all. In a narrative spanning several years, casting among the influence of her peers, partner, and her duties to her forbearers, she struggles to make a wise and moral choice. After seeking guidance from philosophy, her body, mysticism, and chance, she discovers her answer much closer to home. Motherhood is a courageous, keenly felt, and starkly original novel that will surely spark lively conversations about womanhood, parenthood, and about how—and for whom—to live.

A lively and provocative look at the modern culture of motherhood and at the social, economic, and political forces that shaped current ideas about parenting What is wrong with this picture? That's the question Judith Warner asks in this national bestseller after taking a good, hard look at the world of modern parenting--at anxious women at work and at home and in bed with unhappy husbands. When Warner had her first child, she was living in Paris, where parents routinely left their children home, with state-subsidized nannies, to join friends in the evening for dinner or to go on dates with their husbands. When she returned to the States, she was stunned by the cultural differences she found toward how people think about effective parenting--in particular, assumptions about motherhood. None of the mothers she met seemed happy; instead, they worried about the possibility of not having the perfect child, panicking as each developmental benchmark approached. Combining close readings of mainstream magazines, TV shows, and pop culture with a thorough command of dominant ideas in recent psychological, social, and economic theory, Perfect Madness addresses our cultural assumptions, and examines the forces that have shaped them. Working in the tradition of classics like Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique and Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism, and with an awareness of a readership that turned recent hits like The Bitch in the House and Allison Pearson's I Don't Know How She Does It into bestsellers, Warner offers a context in which to understand parenting culture and the way we live, as well as ways of imagining alternatives--actual concrete changes--that might better our lives.