Lone Mothers and Paid Work: Human Capital or Gendered Moral Rationalities?

Abstract

The previous chapter showed that whether or not the interviewed lone mothers decided to try for paid work was, for them, first and foremost a social and moral choice. This choice, in turn, reflected socially negotiated and socially patterned ‘gendered moral rationalities’ about what constituted ‘good’ mothering and how this might be combined with paid work. Calculations about individual utility maximisation, and in particular perceived economic costs and benefits, were only important once these understandings were established. The task of this chapter is to assess the typicality of these process findings, and it does this by using extensive research based on the British census. Section 5.2 undertakes this task with reference to how different social groups of lone mothers combine motherhood and paid work, using the 1991 Household Sample of Annonymised Records (SARs), and section 5.3 examines how these combinations may change over time using the Longitudinal Study (LS) for 1981–91.KeywordsLabour MarketHuman CapitalBlack WomanEmployment RateDependent ChildThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.