Understanding the Complexity of Attitudes of Low-Income Single Mothers Toward Work and Family in the Age of Welfare Reform

This article explores the ideas of low-income single mothers on certain aspects of welfare reform, namely the Marriage Promotion Act, which uses funds for the formation and maintenance of two parent families. Drawing on research with former and current welfare recipients, the author explores how the mothers felt about certain welfare reform policies while trying to understand their current work and family arrangements. Two main ideas behind welfare reform were to encourage paid work and two parent families. While the mothers acknowledged that having access to a second wage earner would help themselves and their children realize a life less complicated by monetary issues, they expressed anger and frustration at being encouraged to marry. Welfare reform dictates that families receiving assistance take personal responsibility for their low-income lives and that paid work is essential to moving a family out of poverty. The stories from the mothers interviewed for this study suggest that while they valued work and wanted to work, to combine work with being a “good mother” was difficult to accomplish. Ultimately, what these mothers suggest through their experiences is the contradiction of welfare reform—paid work does not necessarily provide independence and marriage to another wage earner also undermines independence.

Welfare Indignities: Homeless Women,Domestic Violence,and Welfare Reform in San Francisco

Using data collected during a 4 year ethnography, this paper examines how the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) has impacted homeless women in San Francisco who are also victims of domestic violence. Specifically this paper looks at how the behavior of abusive men prevents homeless women from successfully navigating the new welfare-to-work requirements and maintaining stable employment. Findings indicate that despite the discourse touting the success of welfare reform, the 1996 PRWORA has further disenfranchised an already devastated population systematically forcing them further onto the margins of society.

Technology Domestication in the Asian Homestead: Comparing the Experiences of Middle Class Families in China and South Korea

Using technology domestication theory as the analytical framework, this paper discusses the findings of ethnographic interviews with middle class families in China and South Korea, comparing how they incorporate information and communication technologies (ICTs) into their lives. It analyses how family priorities, cultural values and social pressures influence the ways in which ICT use is woven into their lives, in the process invigorating traditional forms and networks of communication like guanxi for the Chinese and Cheong for the Koreans. It also pays special attention to supervision of ICT use and considers how the societal valorisation of academic excellence influences parental strategies in this regard.

The Priscilla Project: Facilitating Equality and the Self-empowerment of At-risk Women in Healthcare Encounters

Women and minorities have consistently experienced marginalization and inequality in the United States, with low-income, immigrant and refugee women experiencing the most severe forms. This paper explores how we can restructure one area in which disparities exist, the primary healthcare system, to provide respectful, compassionate, accessible and adequate care to refugee and low-income women who are medically at-risk during pregnancy. This will be done by reviewing the Priscilla Project, an inner-city program that serves at-risk pregnant women in Buffalo, NY, including the history and persistence of disparities in healthcare, activities and impact of the program, and the uniquely contextualized program paradigm.

Female Status and Infant and Child Homicide Victimization in Rural and Urban Counties in the U.S.

Studies consistently show that female labor force participation is a correlate of infant and child homicide victimization. Research and theory supports the notion that as women’s economic status improves, children are safer. Yet few existing studies make use of feminist perspectives to explain child homicide. Further, homicide studies have focused heavily on urban areas leaving a lacuna of understanding in the literature regarding rural areas. This study explores the connection between absolute and relative female economic status and infant and child homicide victimization in both rural and urban U.S. counties. Results show that absolute female economic status is positively associated with infant and child homicide in urban areas, but not in rural areas. I argue that in rural areas, stronger collective sentiment and less differentiation diminishes the effect of women’s status on child homicide. While rural areas are characterized by harsh economic realities, these realities are nevertheless shared among men and women, decentering the link between child victimization and women status.

Invisible Mothers: Parenting by Homeless Women Separated from Their Children

Though surveys repeatedly demonstrate that most women who are homeless alone have minor children living apart from them, there is little information on the circumstances of their separations or whether and how they remain involved with their children. Analysis of data from in-depth interviews with mothers, relatives caring for their children, and shelter and child welfare staff highlights a tension between perspectives and aspirations of mothers and the agendas and social processes through which institutional systems manage the family life of women marginalized by homelessness and disability. Though women’s agency is evident in their efforts to maintain parenting roles, without facilitating resources and supportive structures, agency is often reduced to unpalatable choices among constraining alternatives. We consider how service systems might mitigate barriers to mothering as well as broader changes needed to genuinely support women’s aspirations for themselves and their families.

“I Can Provide for My Children”: Korean Immigrant Women’s Changing Perspectives on Work Outside the Home

Whether immigrant women’s introduction to paid labor empowers them with greater autonomy or exacerbates their oppression has been debated variously in the scholarship on gender and migration. In this paper, the author examines Korean immigrant women’s perspectives on work outside the home after migration. Based on in-depth interview data, the paper emphasizes Korean women’s own interpretations of work and motherhood, and highlights the ways in which they define and redefine work in relation to other aspects of their post-migration experiences. The analysis finds that income producing work is not empowering in and of itself, but contingent upon other post-migration challenges such as economic downward mobility and women’s changed roles as working mothers. Furthermore, women’s perception of work fluctuates over time. The findings suggest that paid work should not be simply interpreted as an empowering change, but the linkage between work and other aspects of immigrant women’s post-migration realities needs to be more closely examined.

Aging,Femininity, and the Body: What Appearance Changes Mean to Women with Age

In this article, I analyze interviews with a diverse group of 30 women aged 46–71 to understand how they experience signs of aging, such as weight gain, gray hair, and facial hair, in everyday life. I find that some women’s responses are in line with normative femininity and appearance norms. Others, however, focus on different gendered meanings of the body that are connected to care-taking, work, ageist treatment, and past abuse. I argue that feminists should apply the theoretical concept of femininity more broadly than appearance and attraction issues to gain a deeper understanding of the multiple meanings of living in an aging female body in a gendered society. In the conclusion, I discuss the implications of this study for public health policies as well as future research on gender and the body.

Traces of the Second Demographic Transition in Four Selected Countries in Central and Eastern Europe: Union Formation as a Demographic Manifestation

Using data from the first round of the national Gender and Generations Surveys of Russia, Romania, and Bulgaria, and from a similar survey of Hungary, which were all collected in recent years, we study rates of entry into marital and non-marital unions. We have used elements from the narrative of the Second Demographic Transition (SDT) as a vehicle to give our analysis of the data from the four countries some coherence, and find what can be traces of the SDT in these countries. The details vary by country; in particular, latter-day developments in union formation patterns did not start at the same time in all the countries, but in our assessment it began everywhere before communism fell, that is, before the societal transition to a market economy got underway in 1990.

Symbolic Appropriation of the Internet: Modernity, Peasant Bodies, and the Image of Familial Intimacy in China’s Nongjiale Tourism Online Advertisements

The peasantry is probably the last social category that researchers of technology and society readily associate with the use of high technologies such as the Internet. But in China recently, tens of thousands of peasant entrepreneurs, engaged in a unique form of rural tourism popularly called nongjiale (delights in farm guesthouses), have adopted the Internet as a medium for advertising their farm guesthouses. This paper is an anthropological study of how Chinese peasant entrepreneurs’ adoption of the Internet is engrained in the broader material and symbolic orders of contemporary Chinese society. By exploring the way in which the Chinese peasants are idiosyncratically involved with the Internet, it also questions whether STS (Science, Technology, and Society) concepts such as users and non-users, developed essentially within Euro-American contexts, are adequate to explain the symbolic appropriations of high-tech in pursuit of modernity in China today.

Knowledge, Embodiment, Skill and Risk: Anthropological Perspectives on Women’s Everyday Technologies in Rural Northern China

Knowledge organisation, embodiment of knowledge and knowledge representation are important issues for an anthropology of technology, which seeks to explore the ways in which people find and shape everyday solutions to social and technical challenges. This article discusses the impact of skill and of risk prevention on women’s decision-making, as well as on the domestication and appropriation of new technologies. Particular attention is paid to non-synchronicity as a retarding factor and to the obsolescence of skills as a critical moment in the transformation of socio-technical systems in twentieth century rural northern China as elsewhere.

“Limiting Birth”: Birth Control in Colonial Korea (1910–1945)

This article examines birth control as practice and discourse in 1920s and 1930s Korea under Japanese colonial rule and explores links with family planning and reproductive practices in post-1945 South Korea. The control of women’s reproduction held critical implications for meanings of domesticity, marriage, sexual relations, and new womanhood. While a woman-centered position did emerge regarding birth control, the parameters of the discourse, concerns of gynecology, and the material culture of birth control ultimately tied the bodies and health of women to their biological and social roles as mothers.

Job Concessions,Role Conflict and Work Satisfaction in Gender-Typical and -Atypical Occupation: The Case of Israel

Studies in the last decades show that perception of role conflict has changed in advanced societies so that (1) multiple roles may be beneficial rather than conflictual and (2) men, too, are subject to incompatible role demands. This study examines whether the same shift may be observed in a less developed society (Israel), and how perceptions of role combination and work satisfaction influence the work concessions made by women and men who work in occupations that are typical or atypical for their gender. The main assumption is that multiple roles lead to role conflict only if individuals fail to make concessions that allow them to regulate time and energy in both spheres. The findings show that women still make more concessions than men; work satisfactions strengthens the perception that combining family and work is possible; and only for women, the perception that combining family and work is possible reduces the number of concessions they make.

Gender Pedagogy in Swedish Pre-Schools: An Overview

Sweden is often hailed as a pioneering country regarding gender equity, but it still has gender equity issues to deal with, and gender stereotyping is sometimes mentioned as one of them. Since the 1990s, Sweden has seen the emergence of many gender pedagogy projects, not least in pre-schools. With gender equity projects among adults yielding limited results, the focus has shifted to children to see if gender stereotypes can be countered in childhood. This article aims to provide an overview of the gender pedagogy projects that have been carried out in Swedish pre-schools. The article covers background, methods and insights gained.

Gendered Careers in Post-Soviet Society: Views on Professional Qualifications in Surgery and Pediatrics

This study examines the medical profession in post-Soviet society, where women have been in the majority of the physicians for almost seven decades. It examines pediatricians’ and surgeons’ definitions of the professional skills and qualities needed for “good” work. Lithuania is used as a case study. Thirty-six semi-structured interviews were conducted in 2005 with male and female surgeons and pediatricians in Lithuania. The results show that the gender composition of the specialty—surgery being a male-dominated and pediatrics a female-dominated specialty—tended to influence the way that physicians perceived the qualities needed for good work. For surgeons, male-gendered qualities were prerequisites for being a good surgeon: physical strength and being in control. Female surgeons added a female-gendered quality—empathy and compassion—that made them good surgeons. A good pediatrician had a holistic and empathic approach and an ability to communicate, which were seen as female-gendered skills. Male pediatricians experienced otherness in this specialty but did not, as women surgeons did, offer a counter discourse in order to legitimate themselves as being as skilled as women.

Change and Stability in Parent–Child Contact in Five Western Countries

Although much is known about changes in the conjugal family, little is known about trends in contact between parents and adult (independently living) children. Using unique survey data, we study changes in contact with the mother and the father in five western countries over a 15-year period (Austria, West Germany, Great Britain, the United States, and Italy). We describe changes and we examine the role of compositional changes in the trend. We find no evidence for a decline in intergenerational contact, in contrast to notions of individualism. In two countries, there has been an increase in contact with the mother and in three countries no net trend is observed. Contact with the father has not changed. Other forms of contact (e.g., telephone contact) have increased. Some compositional changes have had a downward pressure on the trend, leading to a decline in contact (i.e., rising education, declining church attendance), but these pressures have been compensated by counteracting compositional changes (declining sibsize) and by behavioral changes.

Introduction: Gender and Reproductive Technologies in East Asia

This special issue of EASTS examines reproductive technoscience, gender, and the formation of East Asian modernities across the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. We begin our introduction with a brief overview of social science scholarship to date on reproductive topics. We then turn to emergent trends: going to and coming from beyond the West, complicating the issues, and intensive localizing and comparative research. Next, we discuss themes that cut across considerations of gender, reproductive technologies, and related issues in East Asia: issues of imperialisms and colonialisms as roots and contexts, postcolonial and nationalist forms of embeddedness, feminist theories of gender and transnationalism, and relations of gender and reproductive technologies to biological citizenship. Last is an introduction to the articles in this special issue.

How Could a Scientist Become a National Celebrity?

In Korea, scientific excellence has been perceived as one of the key elements of modern nation-building. Moreover, from the late 1990s to the early 2000s, the government represented biotechnology as the future engine of the economy. Hwang succeeded in representing himself as the hero of Korean science by appropriating the public eagerness for scientific achievement. However, he relied on nationalist rhetoric too often against criticisms, which eventually made a considerable part of the public turn skeptical about his integrity. Although various forms of techno-nationalism are still pervasive in Korea, Hwang’s scandal has given a valuable chance for reflection on the relationship of science and nationalism.

Family Composition and Remarriage in Pre-Transitional Italy: A Comparative Study

It is well known that timing and intensity of remarriage were strictly dependent upon demographic, socio-economic, cultural and legislative factors specific to each community. Thus, the aim of this paper is to compare the extent to which such factors may affect the remarriage patterns of three pre-transitional Italian populations that were different in many respects. By using micro-level data of the sharecropping communities of Casalguidi and Madregolo and the Alpine village of Treppo Carnico, we highlighted similarities and differences in the respective remarriage patterns, in particular, the far lower intensity in the mountain community with respect to the sharecropping ones. Our findings show that along with differences in the demographic system, household structure and land tenure, normative elements concerning widows and the dotal system could in part explain the differentials we found.

The State of American Boyhood

The existence of a “boy crisis” in the United States is a topic of public policy debate. This study examines the state of American boyhood, using not only the commonly reviewed indicators of school achievement but also mental health, premature death, injury, delinquency, and arrests. Boys are in trouble in many areas: low rates of literacy, low grades and engagement in school, high dropout from school, and dramatically higher rates of placement in special education, suicide, premature death, injuries, and arrests. Girls, however, suffer from other problems, especially depression, suicidal ideation and attempts, and eating disorders, and are less likely to achieve at the very highest levels in mathematics and science. This study argues that both boys and girls suffer from characteristic problems, but the issues affecting boys are serious and neglected.