.... Story Corner is a literacy program, a way to strengthen parent-child attachments and an important means of communication between mothers and their children. This chapter describes the Story Book Project at Bedford Hills prison, which encourages incarcerated mothers to record good-night stories on tape...

...In November 2006, there was a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the new Juvenile Justice Center in San Francisco, and planners asked the Center for Young Women's Development (CYWD) to provide a speaker on the Incarcerated Young Mothers' Bill of Rights, which had recently become policy for the new facility...

...This chapter provides a new explanation of the rise in female-headed families among the poor. It explains that the economic hardship faced by single mothers is generally perceived as changing little over time, stemming simply from the loss of marriage and burdens of single parenthood. This study...

...This chapter evaluates the crisis created by the transformation of women's work, providing a deeper understanding of why women are having such difficulty combining work and family. It looks closely at mothers, asking first if they are really working harder now than in the 1960s—and if so, why...

...This chapter looks into other habits of labor and love that mothers are asked to perform for their nursery-school children. Throughout, the message is to utilize pleasures the mother is best able to provide with the aim of getting children to perform certain tasks. Making everyday work both...

...This chapter looks at the return of state intervention in the immediate aftermath of the birth and at the rites of categorization undertaken by hospital staff during that period. The directed separation that occurs accords, for the most part, with the intended mother's desire to seal off her new...

... rituals appendage committee surrogacy approvals contracts doctor father intended holding pregnancy motivation surrogate single parents surrogate bonding intended mother Internet forum surrogacy separation support groups trophy pride surrogate's childlessness death symbolic deity...

...This ethnography probes the intimate experience of gestational surrogate motherhood. The book shows how surrogates and intended mothers carefully negotiate their cooperative endeavor. Drawing on anthropological fieldwork among Jewish Israeli women, interspersed with cross-cultural perspectives...

... to a female audience. The conception of this female sphere is clearest in the agenda that the junta de damas established for itself. The members of the women's council saw themselves as mothers to the nation, and, in line with the doctrine of Republican Motherhood that they and other writers espoused...

...This chapter examines the contradictory forces shaping the lives of working mothers or employers of nannies. The findings suggest that working mothers experience what is called blanket accountability or the sense that they are responsible for everything that happens in their children's daily lives...

...This chapter discusses the creation of the so-called shadow mothers and describes a different kind of management strategy for nannies that involves managing both the image of the mother-nanny division of labor and what that division of labor means. Most of the mothers interviewed strongly believed...

...This chapter examines the gendered dimensions of solidarity, carework and activism in multiple contexts along the migrant journey. It links together the highly visible labors of a caravan of mothers of disappeared migrants with the less visible yet no less important labors of local women who...

...This chapter shares some of the stories of families’ frustration and suffering and puts them in the context of national and local studies of the impact of welfare reform. A central goal of welfare reform is to increase employment among low income mothers. Many are unable to obtain employment...

...This chapter addresses future prospects for improving poor mothers’ welfare rights. It argues that to counter the current backlash against welfare mothers, politicians and activists need to offer a bold alternative to the current welfare system that will help build solidarity rather than divisions...

...This book is based on research conducted in home and hospital interviews with one hundred pregnant women and mothers in two U.S. cities. The interviews reveal that women all over the U.S. are subjected to a series of obstetrical interventions so standard that they are difficult to avoid in most...

... of the mother. Analysis of the law and its contradictions with respect to enslaved women provides a way of understanding the structures of power in sexual encounters between master and slave. In the early 1800s, Cherokees did not share the Anglo-American view that racial difference rendered African people...

.... The stories in this chapter illustrate the importance of social roles for women; yet, while social roles can be sources of strength, they can also be sources of stigma when women do not fulfill gendered roles to the standards of conventional society. Their multiple roles as mothers, partners, and friends were...

... it as a human fact that since mothers are “seen” to give birth then they own or claim the offspring as theirs, or the children are assigned to them as a matter of course. It is noted that it is not men's collective activity that “creates society” or “makes culture”, the premise upon which social values...

...This introductory chapter explains the coverage of this book which is about the micropolitics of the so-called shadow mothers, nannies or au pairs. This book's close examination of commodified mother-work challenges assumptions concerning the self-sufficiency of the nuclear family...

...This chapter outlines the logics working mothers use to find and hire the employee who will provide the right care for their child and for their child's developmental stage. It suggests that the use of ethnic logics leads mothers to reduce nannies to a few essentialized characteristics rooted...