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p a r t i i Keyword: Spaces When Carmel Sullivan-Boss’s marriage fell apart after seventeen years, she lost her husband, her hopes for their happy future with a young son, and her house. Forced to relocate to Los Angeles to look for work, she found herself overcome with fear that she wouldn’t be able to take care of her seven-year-old son. “It wasn’t just about money,” she writes. “It was the loneliness. It was not understanding my place in the world anymore, not knowing where I belonged. For the first time in my adult life, I felt utterly powerless and alone” (32). In the midst of these “postdivorce blues,” Sullivan-Boss had an idea: she could live with another single mother. She looked for a house big enough for two families and when she found one, she posted a notice: “Single mom seeks same to pool resources and share a house with a garden . Let’s work together to create a safe environment for our children” (32). She received eighteen responses, and while meeting with the women, she realized that she could match them up with each other in addition to finding her own roommate. She then thought: if eighteen single mothers responded to her poster in her neighborhood, how many others were there in Los Angeles? California? The United States? And she devised the perfect way to connect them—through www.co-abode.org, a Web site that matches up single moms who want to share housing and resources. Now, the group has more than 16,000 members across the country, many of whom recount how joining households has transformed their lives. The mother’s home is the place she will spend the vast majority of her time; it is the place that will both provide her children comfort and security and at times seem like an island removed from the rest of the world. It is a concrete place, with a roof that leaks and paint that chips, and it is a place of immaterial feelings—of love and frustration and exhaustion. The recognition of this intertwining, of the physical and the emotional, is what led Sullivan-Boss to challenge one of the primary structures that un- dergirds the nuclear family: the private dwelling built for a couple and their children. Creating an actual space where single mothers help each other take care of themselves and their children goes beyond the “care of the self” described in the last chapter, for it recognizes that in fact single mothers can’t fully care for themselves on their own, and that this is a spatial problematic. Sharing a space means that everyday tasks such as grocery shopping, meal preparation, cleaning, and child care can much more easily be shared than they could if friends and family are dropping by. A communal house produces the conditions of reciprocity and community that, as I argue throughout this book, are necessary if single mothering is to be sustained as a truly alternative practice to the nuclear family. Co-abode does not completely escape the pressure to prove one’s selfsuf ficiency that so dominates discourse on single mothering. The group makes no mention of governmental support, for example. It is fitting that Sullivan-Boss has a chapter describing co-abode.org in the quintessential self-help book Chicken Soup for the Single Parent’s Soul (published in 2005, it seems to be the latest in the best-selling series of “Chicken Soup for the fill-in-the-blank”).1 Yet Sullivan-Boss also goes some distance toward redefining autonomy and creating a material space for communal child raising. By working with the materials at hand—a poster and a Web site—she becomes a domestic intellectual, providing solutions for others in her class. Domestic intellectuals challenge the division between public and private spheres that has worked so powerfully to isolate the home since the Industrial Revolution in the United States. Although many women of color never had the luxury of staying at home to care for their children, the social and material construction of a space set apart from the turmoil of the public world of work and leisure continues to have material effects in the lives of all men and women. Domestic intellectuals, working in the tradition of feminists, recognize the ongoing power of public/private while at the same time redefining it, connecting the home to other sites. They retain the materiality...

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