Margaret K. Nelson

Working Hard and Making Do: Surviving in Small Town America

The economic recovery of the 1990s brought with it a surge of new jobs, but the prospects for most working Americans improved little. Family income rose only slightly and the period witnessed a significant degradation of the quality of work as well as in what people could expect from their waged employment. In this book, Margaret K. Nelson and Joan Smith take a look inside the households of working-class Americans to consider how they are coping with large-scale structural changes in the economy, specifically how the downgrading of jobs has affected survival strategies, gender dynamics, and political attitudes. Drawing on both randomly distributed telephone surveys and in-depth interviews, Nelson and Smith explore the differences in the survival strategies of two groups of working-class households in a rural county: those in which at least one family member has been able to hold on to good work (a year-round, full-time job that carries benefits) and those in which nobody has been able to secure or retain steady employment. They find that households with good jobs are able to effectively use all of their labor power--they rely on two workers; they engage in on-the-side businesses; and they barter with friends and neighbors. In contrast, those living in families without at least one good job find themselves considerably less capable of deploying a complex, multi-faceted survival strategy. The authors further demonstrate that this difference between the two sets of households is accompanied by differences in the gender division of labor within the household and the manner in which individuals make sense of, and respond to, their employment.

Single Mothers and Social Support: The Commitment to, and Retreat from, Reciprocity

Drawing on interviews with thirty-nine single mothers living in a rural area, this paper describes the relationships of support between single mothers and those on whom they rely for assistance in daily living, and explores the extent to which these relationships are based on expectations of reciprocity. After a description of the setting and methods, this article is divided into two sections. The first section argues that single mothers hold most tightly to a narrow norm of balanced reciprocity of material goods and services in their relationships with others in similar situations, but that they stretch that norm as they broaden their support networks outward to those they view as being more fortunate than themselves. In the second section, the work involved in maintaining relationships of dependence and mutuality is analyzed.

Working-Class Women, Middle-Class Women, and Models of Childbirth

This paper suggests that middle-class feminists who have urged a new vision of childbirth are out of touch with the needs of working-class women. This conclusion is derived from a review of the childbirth literature and an analysis of data collected from 322 women who gave birth in a northern New England teaching hospital. The literature on childbirth—whether written from a feminist or non-feminist perspective—ignores the variable of social class. The data demonstrate, however, that working-class and middle-class women have different attitudes towards childbirth during pregnancy, different experiences during childbirth, and different post-partum evaluations of their childbirth experiences. A single set of prescriptions for childbirth may not, therefore, be appropriate for all women.

The challenge of self-sufficiency: Women on welfare redefining independence

Drawing on interviews conducted with fifty-one single mothers in a rural state, this article explores how women who rely on state assistance sustain a belief in their own self-worth. The article first shows that single mothers hold firmly to the value of self-sufficiency. It then shows that they can hold to that value because they believe that their welfare reliance is different from that of other women and because they redefine independence to allow for acts that might normally be understood to challenge that norm. The findings are compared to those in other studies that cover some of the same issues. The discussion draws on three levels of context for interpreting the findings: the current discourse concerning single mothers and, more specifically, welfare recipients; the client stance that develops among those who deal with bureaucracies; and, finally, the interview situation itself.

Providing Family Day Care: An Analysis of Home-Based Work

In this paper I consider family day care as a site in which to explore the personal and social consequences of home-based work. The data are from a questionnaire sent to all registered day care providers in Vermont (N=225) and from interviews with 28 registered and 34 unregistered family day care providers. I describe the motivation for offering family day care. I discuss how the autonomy of family day care providers is constrained. Finally, I look at some additional economic, personal and political consequences of home-based work. Although, from one perspective, family day care might be considered a booming success, I argue that this success rests on the secondary status of women in the labor force and on the unpaid labor of women at home.

Watching Children Describing the Use of Baby Monitors on Epinions.com

Popular culture today characterizes middle-class parents as being consumed with anxiety about their children. Drawing on more than 100 consumer reviews of baby monitors published on Epinions.com, the author examines how parents respond to that anxiety. Although Epinions.com reviewers are not representative of the population at large, they do represent married, well-educated women. The author demonstrates that in their discussions of monitors, parents normalize parental anxiety and that they depict the baby as both fragile (and thus in need of care) and mischievous (and thus in need of control). In addition, the author shows that as parents adapt to the anxieties associated with parenting by monitoring their babies, they gain some forms of freedom while accepting tethering and that they gain the new skills of interpretation through technology. In the conclusion, issues are raised about the links between parental monitoring of babies and increasing surveillance in contemporary society.

Day Care Differences and the Reproduction of Social Class

Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in two day care centers—the Green Mountain Child Care Center in College Town, Vermont, and the Rocky Mountain Christian Day Care in Coalville, Wyoming—the authors demonstrate differences between centers serving different segments of the population. The authors rely on Annette Lareaus (2003) concepts of “concerted cultivation” and the “accomplishment of natural growth” as a way to describe these differences. The authors then reflect on the potential consequences of different styles of child care for the skills, attitudes, and orientations developed by young children.

BETWEEN PAID AND UNPAID WORK Gender Patterns in Supplemental Economic Activities among White, Rural Families

This article explores gender differences in three varieties of economic activities that supplement regular employment and housework: entrepreneurial moonlighting, self-provisioning, and casual exchanges with the members of other households. Drawing on data gathered through a random survey and interviews conducted with a white, rural, working-class population, gender differences were found in the content of these activities, their location, the time devoted to them, the degree to which they were delineated from other activities, and the opportunities they provided for sociability. These differences are shown to have consequences for the internal gendered dynamics of the household and for the reinforcement of some kinds of male privilege.

Whither Fictive Kin? Or, What’s in a Name?:

Drawing on a survey of more than 600 articles that use the term fictive kin, I demonstrate that this term is used predominantly in reference to African Americans and a variety of marginal people and only rarely is used in conjunction with a mainstream White population. After presenting data on the use of the term, I discuss the implications of these findings. I explore as well two rhetorical shifts in language—the introduction of the notion of families of choice and the recent introduction of the concept of voluntary kin.

Making sense of donors and donor siblings: A comparison of the perceptions of donor-conceived offspring in lesbian-parent and heterosexual-parent families ☆ ☆The first two authors contributed equally to this chapter.

Abstract Donor-conceived (DC) offspring raised in lesbian-parent and heterosexual-parent families have different historical chronologies, which are clusters of events that provide frameworks for shaping contemporary views of sperm donors and donor siblings. Using surveys collected by the Donor Sibling Registry (DSR), the largest U.S. web-based registry, we found that DC offspring from different family forms have somewhat different views about meeting both the donor and donor siblings. In general, all offspring are curious about the donor. All offspring want to know what the donor looks like and they believe that even minimal contact will help them understand themselves better. However, when compared to offspring from heterosexual-parent families, offspring from lesbian-parent families are less likely to want to have contact with the donor. For offspring from lesbian-parent families, donor conception is considered a normal and accepted part of family life and the donor is deemed irrelevant to the family’s construction. Especially among those who live with two heterosexual parents (where both parents are often assumed to be genetic relatives), offspring want to know the donor because they believe he holds the key to important information that the legal (or social) father cannot provide. Most DC offspring want to meet donor siblings although the interest is somewhat weaker among the offspring in lesbian-parent families. Offspring regard donor siblings as special relations who will not disrupt the natal family and who might even become part of a new kind of “extended family” network.