Working class mothers as economic providers and heads of families in Buenos Aires

Abstract

This paper is about the familial and personal experiences of poor women who are heads of households in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area and who are also mothers. Their families do not follow the traditional nuclear family model in three ways: the woman is the principal provider, the woman is the head of the household and a single parent or the family consists of a man and woman in a second or successive union who have each been separated or divorced from someone else, one orboth of whom have children from a previous partner who live with them. This paper looks at the ways in which these non-traditional situations affect and empower the women, and how their relationships with their children and their partners are affected.