The Social Economy of Single Motherhood: Raising Children in Rural America (review)

If welfare reform of the mid-1990s has done nothing else, it appears to have changed the way single mothers think about public assistance – about what they owe the state, and what the state owes them in return. As one recipient asserts in Margaret K. Nelson's refreshing ethnography, The Social Economy of Single Motherhood: "I think I am an investment opportunity for the state of Vermont." (108) Gone are the days when welfare could be considered a right available to any mother of limited means. Under the "new discourse of worthiness," Nelson observes, welfare has become "contingent and short term. And its justification rests on progress toward self-sufficiency." (104) Although low-wage employment rarely enables single mothers to achieve the financial independence they desire, Nelson's interviews reveal that the cultural ideal of self-reliance – and its new political currency – powerfully shapes their expectations of themselves and others in their situation, whether or not they rely on welfare, and most strikingly, even when they depend on carefully cultivated networks of family and friends for day-to-day support.

Focused on the survival strategies of single mothers in rural America (based on a sample population of custodial mothers in Vermont who are raising at least one child under 18), Nelson's book is an important contribution to the sociological and anthropological literature on single motherhood, the feminization of poverty, and social or moral economies more broadly. Building on the pioneering research of Carol Stack's All Our Kin (1974) and Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein's Making Ends Meet (1997), Nelson demonstrates that rural white women who become single mothers through the death of a spouse, divorce or out-of-wedlock childbirth develop and depend on a "social economy" of shared goods and services that is not unlike the networks of support found among the urban poor. Although the women in Nelson's study do not all live in poverty, and many are able to draw upon the resources of better-off kin, they actively seek friendships involving relations of balanced exchange with other single mothers who are "in the same boat." As Nelson makes clear, the premium placed on a shared life situation in these relationships is as much a matter of finding, in the "affinity of marginality," refuge from the stigma of single motherhood, as it is of bonding with others of a similar class, age and educational background (71).

If single mothers offer one another respite from moral censure, the same cannot be said of their relationships with family members, others in the community or representatives of the state. Because the latter relationships often provide substantial economic assistance – precisely the kind of support that single mothers cannot themselves give or repay – they put single mothers in the morally suspect position of being receivers in social networks that require reciprocity and dependents in a society that values independence. Nelson's analysis of the "cultural work" women perform to extricate themselves from this dilemma is illuminating. Recognizing material imbalances in their relationships, single mothers find ways to account for their own and others' behavior in terms that uphold the norm of reciprocity. Thus, women may recall the times they have resisted asking for help, despite real and pressing needs, and construe the act of not asking as a "gift" given in their relationships (82). Or they may call attention to the satisfaction that others derive from helping them and their children, and consider this pleasure sufficient "repayment" for an act of generosity (85). Through these and other strategies, Nelson argues, single mothers "simultaneously solve practical problems of daily life and the moral problem of conceiving of themselves as worthy citizens." (88, italics in original)

The burdens of single motherhood are, for Nelson, ultimately cultural and social in origin. What single mothers need cannot be reduced to a debate about how much state aid they should receive and for how long. Rather, Nelson contends, two "ideological shifts" and...