Suchergebnisse

Using longitudinal ethnographic data on low-income rural and urban mostly single mothers, I explore the romance-seeking behaviors of women whose intimate relationships are characterized by multiple-partner fertility (MPF). MPF involves mothers and/or their love interests having biological children with other partners, frequently in nonmarital, transient unions. Romance comprises mothers' feelings and social interactions related to being chosen, erotic love, and adulation of the other. Findings indicate most mothers selectively engaged in one of four types of romance-seeking behaviors: casual, illusionist, pragmatic, or strategic. Mothers' romantic actions are associated with their desires to have loving experiences outside the challenges of daily life in poverty and its corollary uncertainty. Moreover, mothers involved in the most complex forms of MPF openly compete with other women for "first wife" status in a stratified partnering system called rostering—a term coined by respondents in the ethnographies reported here. Implications of these findings for future research are discussed.

The authors examine an emergent association between low-income Mexican mothers' control of housing and power relations in their romantic unions. Guided by valued resource theory, and mothers' lived racial, ethnic, and gender experiences of navigating access to housing and sustaining intimate unions, the authors used secondary longitudinal ethnographic data on 29 low-income mothers of Mexican descent as exemplar cases to explore (1) mothers' housing dependencies as they transitioned from their natal homes to coresidential housing with romantic partners, (2) the factors that differentially shaped mothers' housing options, and (3) how mothers' control of housing procurement influenced their intimate relationship power. The findings suggest that mothers followed one of five housing dependency pathways, with 25 percent securing housing independently. Most traversed complex and transient levels of dependence on their partners for housing with immigrants and native-born Mexican Americans evincing nuanced differences in their relationship power depending on their housing situations. In most cases, regardless of their national origin (Mexico or the U.S.), mothers' control of housing procurement directly corresponded to increased relationship power. The importance of considering the impact of race/ethnicity on housing and women's power in Latino families in future research is also discussed.

Abstract
Since Stack's (1974) landmark ethnography of kin support in a close-knit group of poor black mothers in the Midwest, there has been ample research on social support among low-income black families. While this body of work has largely painted a picture of the cohesive and supportive nature of families in black communities, recent research has highlighted the limited nature of kin support, especially the support available to low-income black mothers. Much of this work, however, has focused primarily on urban black mothers and paid less attention to the conditions that poor rural black mothers face when seeking and giving family support. Using longitudinal ethnographic data from a sample of 16 low-income black mothers in the rural South, we draw on social exchange, negotiated-order, and social capital perspectives to scrutinize the nature and costs of kin support in family networks marked by limited resources, instability, and chronic need. Our findings reveal the centrality of problematic resources and unpredictable family networks as conditions that diminish mothers' autonomy and compromise important "side bets" as mothers seek out, manage, and repay support. Implications of this study for theories of social support and social capital are also discussed.

A common assertion in the family science literature is that low‐income single mothers are increasingly retreating from marriage but still vaunt it as their ultimate relationship goal. To explain this paradox, scholars frequently cite inadequacies in men's marriageability, financial instability, and conflictual romantic relationships as primary forces in mothers' decisions not to marry. We propose an alternative reasoning for this paradox using symbolic interactionist theory and perspectives on poverty and uncertainty. Specifically, we highlight the contradictions between what women say about their desires to marry and what they actually do when the opportunity presents itself. We use exemplar cases from a longitudinal ethnographic study of low‐income rural mothers to demonstrate our reasoning. Implications for future research and theory development are discussed.

This article provides a brief overview of how African American women are situated in and around the thesis of the Moynihan Report. The authors take the lens of uncertainty and apply it to a post-Moynihan discussion of African American women and marriage. They discuss uncertainty in the temporal organization of poor women's lives and in the new terrains of gender relationships and how both influence African American women's thoughts and behaviors in their romantic relationships and marriages. They argue that much is to be learned from by focusing the lens in this way. It allows us to look at the contemporary romantic relationship and marriage behaviors of African American women in context and in ways that do not label them as having pathological behaviors that place them out of sync with broader societal trends. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright The American Academy of Political and Social Science.]

This article provides a brief overview of how African American women are situated in and around the thesis of the Moynihan Report. The authors take the lens of uncertainty and apply it to a post-Moynihan discussion of African American women and marriage. They discuss uncertainty in the temporal organization of poor women's lives and in the new terrains of gender relationships and how both influence African American women's thoughts and behaviors in their romantic relationships and marriages. They argue that much is to be learned from by focusing the lens in this way. It allows us to look at the contemporary romantic relationship and marriage behaviors of African American women in context and in ways that do not label them as having pathological behaviors that place them out of sync with broader societal trends.

A common conceptualization of family structure used in studies of low-income African Americans is a dichotomized construct that contrasts one- parent, female-headed households with two-parent family units. The consistent use of this conceptualization has impeded the exploration of the impact that dynamic dimensions of family structure have on family functioning. This paper outlines several fundamental dimensions of family structure that should be considered in studies of economically disadvantaged African American families. Using data from two qualitative community-based studies of African American families, we delineate four key dimensions of family structure—extended family networks; the socioeconomic structure of extended family networks; the pace of change in family structure; and the age structure of family members.

This paper introduces kinscripts, a framework for exploring how families as multigeneration collectives, and individuals embedded within them, negotiate the life course. Kinscripts comprises three closely -woven, culturally-defined family domains: kin-work, kin-time, and kin-scription. Kin-work is the tasks that families need to accomplish to survive over time. Kin-time directs the temporal scheduling of family transitions. Kin-scription is the active recruitment and conscription of family members to take on kin-work. The kin-scripts framework emerged from ethnographic studies of multigeneration low-income black families in the United States. We argue, however, that the framework is relevant to the study of the life course of mainstream families as well.