FAMILY, FEMINISM, AND RACE IN AMERICA

Feminist scholarship has advanced our understanding of the family's relationship to the economy and the state over different historical periods. Theorizing about gender, class, and family life has led us to conclude that global explanations of the family are false. Our knowledge about the meaning of racial stratification for family life, however, still remains fragmented. This article asks, What does including race have to offer the study of the family? Analysis of two streams of revisionist family scholarship demonstrates the need for reconceptualizing racial diversity in a way that embraces the experiences of White families as well as racial ethnic families. Family upheavals created by industrialization and deindustrialization offer concrete examples of the importance of race in theorizing family life throughout American society.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/66994/2/10.1177_089124390004001006.pd

NEGOTIATING INDEPENDENT MOTHERHOOD

The authors examine the experiences and ideals of African American working-class mothers through 20 intensive interviews. They focus on the women's negotiations with racialized norms of motherhood, represented in the assumptions that legal marriage and an exclusively bonded dyadic relationship with one's children are requisite to good mothering. The authors find, as did earlier phenomenological studies, that the mothers draw from distinct ideals of community-based independence to resist each of these assumptions and carve out alternative scripts based on nonmarital relationships with male partners and shared care of children.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/66930/2/10.1177_089124396010002007.pd