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Single Mother by Choice: A Story of Politics and Parenting in Twenty-first Century Middle America

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Volume 57

Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives



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Single Mother by Choice

A Story of Politics and Parenting in Twenty-first Century Middle America

Linda L. Layne

268 pages, 34 illus., bibliog., index

ISBN  978-1-83695-497-2 $135.00/£104.00 / Hb / Not Yet Published (May 2026)

eISBN 978-1-83695-498-9 eBook Not Yet Published


View CartYour country: - edit Recommend to your LibraryAvailable in GOBI®

Reviews

“This is an excellent book; it is a sophisticated and timely ethnography of a new form of 21st century household.” • Mark P. Whitaker, University of Kentucky

“This book has a very creative approach to understanding new alternatives to family formation, especially in the face of the right-wing backlash against women’s push to achieve gender equality in family and intimate life.” • Cynthia Daniels, Rutgers University

Description

Single motherhood, a new family form, demonstrates an accomplishment of paradoxical synergies between 2nd wave feminism and neoliberalism. Single Mother by Choice chronicles the journey of Ann, a 41-year-old woman throughout her intensive mothering of three donor-conceived children from infancy to tween years. The Christian Right’s embrace of neoliberalism provided a permission structure for this and other emerging families, while simultaneously influencing progressive parents with trickle down neoliberal values that weaken the moral architecture of childhood and the nation. This fine-grained analysis of one family’s life illuminates the complexities of twenty-first century, middle-class American motherhood, whether single or not.

Linda L. Layne is the author of Home and Homeland: The Dialogics of Tribal and National Identities in Jordan (1994, Princeton University Press) and Motherhood Lost: A Feminist Account of Pregnancy Loss in America (2003, Routledge) and co-producer of a television series on pregnancy loss. She has edited or co-edited numerous volumes on motherhood, parenting and consumer culture. She now studies heterosexual single mothers by choice, lesbian moms and gay dads.

Subject: Anthropology (General)Gender Studies and SexualitySociology
Area: North America


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