Karen Christopher

Extensive Mothering: Employed Mothers’ Constructions of the Good Mother

Social scientists have provided rich descriptions of the ascendant cultural ideologies surrounding motherhood and paid work. In this article, I use in-depth interviews with a diverse sample of 40 employed mothers to explore how they navigate the “intensive mother” and “ideal worker” ideologies and construct their own accounts of good mothering. Married mothers in this sample construct scripts of “extensive mothering,” in which they delegate substantial amounts of the day-to-day child care to others, and reframe good mothering as being “in charge” of and ultimately responsible for their children’s well-being. Single mothers describe extensive mothering in different ways, and their narratives suggest less accountability to the “intensive mothering” model. Mothers in this sample also justify employment in novel ways: They emphasize the benefits of employment for themselves—not only their children—and they reject the long work hours imposed by an ideal worker model. The article ends with the implications of extensive mothering for the motherhood and employment literatures and for gender equality.

The gender gap in poverty in modern nations: Single motherhood, the market, and the state

In this article we examine gender gaps in poverty in the United States and seven other Western nations, asking how single motherhood, market earnings, and welfare states affect gender inequality in poverty. Our analyses speak to the theoretical literature emphasizing the gendered logic and effects of welfare states and labor markets. We find that single-mother families have higher poverty rates than other families in all nations except Sweden, though the degree of their poverty varies. Regarding welfare states, we find that the tax and transfer systems in Sweden and the Netherlands most effectively reduce gender inequality in poverty. Gender inequality in market earnings is worst in the Netherlands and Australia, though among full-time workers, Australia has the lowest gender gap. We conclude by discussing the policy issues raised by our findings.

Welfare as We [Don't] Know It: A Review and Feminist Critique of Welfare Reform Research in the United States

Reform of the United States welfare system in 1996 drastically changed welfare receipt for low-income lone mothers. This paper explores the effects of these changes on lone mothers by summarizing empirical work on caseload reduction, labor force participation, income, poverty, material hardship, and family formation. While it appears that the economic status of many lone mothers improved during the economic expansion in the late 1990s, many lone mothers continued to experience poverty and material hardship. Building on the work of feminist scholars from both the US and other countries, this paper goes on to critique mainstream research on welfare reform. It identifies a particularly feminist approach to welfare reform research, stresses its advantages over mainstream research, and speculates about why there is comparatively less feminist research to date. The paper concludes by calling for more structural analyses of poverty and of lone motherhood itself.

Explaining the Recent Employment Gap between Black and White Women

Abstract This paper examines the reversal in the black / white employment gap in weeks worked per year from 1975 to 1990 among women, focusing on the 1990 gap in which white women work more weeks per year than black women. Regression decompositions reveal that black womens lower levels of education and their steeper returns to education explain a sizeable portion of their 1990 employoment gap with white women. In addition, black womens greater likelihood of being never married with children explains over half of their employment gap with white women in 1990. The spatial-mismatch hypothesis receives limited support, and state welfare payment levels do not explain the black / white employment gap among women in 1990. I conclude with public policy implications of this research.