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225© 2000 by Human Sciences Press, Inc. Reprinted from Qualitative Sociology Vol. 23, No. 3, pp. 291-317. 10 Single Mothers and Social Support The Commitment to,and Retreat from,Reciprocity Margaret K.Nelson For more than 25 years, Carol Stack’s All Our Kin (1974) has shaped ideas about how survival strategies of poor, single mothers are based on relationships of exchange. A central theme in that analysis is that the give-and-take in these relationships can be understood within the anthropological perspective of the gift: Giving carries with it the obligation to reciprocate, an obligation enforced by “kin and community sanctions ” (p. 14). The idea that social networks operate on the basis of reciprocity is now a well-worn, if often underexamined, assumption.1 The distinctiveness of the population, community, and even the time of stable welfare2 in which Stack undertook her research raises questions about the extent to which similar relationships of mutual support would be found in areas where single mothers are white, live in the small villages and towns of a rural state, and have access to relationships with those who have greater resources than their own. Although single mothers living exclusively in rural areas are less frequently the target of scholarly investigation than are those in urban communities (for exceptions, see Schein, 1995; and Wijnberg & Reding, 1999), relationships of mutual support in the countryside are frequently romanticized. The “fictive kin” of Stack’s research stands next to the barn raising as, if not a scholarly icon, a cultural one. A substantial body of quantitative research offers more skepticism about the degree to which those in need can rely on others for support in getting by. Using a somewhat narrow definition of support networks—living in an extended family situation , receiving at least half of her income from someone other than her husband, or getting unpaid child care—Hogan, Hao, and Parish (1990, p. 810) found that although the majority of single mothers participate in a support network, “substantial proportions of single mothers fall outside such informal support systems.” In a later study, limited to intergenerational support, Hogan, Eggebeen, and Clogg (1993, pp. 1444–1445) found that while unmarried mothers more often receive support from their parents than do their married peers, less than half of the single mothers receive significant amounts of this support and that “parents in poverty are significantly less likely than persons with higher incomes to be involved in either the giving or receiving of support.” Roschelle (1997) similarly offers a contemporary challenge to research which claims that social support is prevalent and can mitigate against the deleterious effects of poverty (see, e.g., Stack, 1974; Allen, 1979; McAdoo, 1980) 226 Margaret Nelson when she asserts that the “informal social support networks typically found in minority communities are not as pervasive as they were in the past” (p. xi). Most of the quantitative studies cannot explore the issue of reciprocity. Roschelle, for example, acknowledges that her data do not allow a determination of whether “the individuals giving help to respondents are the same individuals who are also receiving that help.” By focusing exclusively on intergenerational exchange, however , Hogan, Eggebeen, and Clogg (1993, p. 1455) do examine reciprocity, and they report mixed results: “Nearly half of all persons receiving intergenerational support also give support. The others do not.” However, even those quantitative studies that do examine exchanges between partners in a relationship (and thus explore reciprocity to a limited extent) neither assess the quantity of goods given or received (but simply record presence or absence of giving or receiving) nor consider whether their definitions of reciprocity are shared by the actors. Indeed, there is good substantive and theoretical reason to believe that individuals might view themselves as being in reciprocal relationships even when the available quantitative data suggest that they are net recipients. First, quantitative data cannot get at the subtlety of exchange relationships. As theorists have noted (Malinowski, 1926; Mauss, 1954; Gouldner, 1960; Levi-Strauss, 1969; Sahlins, 1972; Homans, 1974), gratitude, dependence, loyalty, and deference might serve as items of reciprocation , and these are notoriously difficult to measure. Second, the time span in most studies is quite limited. They may draw on reports of items given and received within the recent past; thus they are more likely to measure what Sahlins (1972, pp. 195– 196) defines as balanced reciprocity, where “relations between people are disrupted by a failure to reciprocate within limited time and equivalence leeways” rather than what he...

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