Nelson, Margaret THE SOCIAL ECONOMY OF SINGLE MOTHERHOOD: RAISING CHILDREN IN RURAL AMERICA. New York, NY: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2005. 228 pp. Price: US $29.95 (pb), US $95.00 (hc). ISBN: 0415947774 (hc).Reviewed by: KAREN MARCH*Most American studies on single mothers consider inner-city African-American teenagers in need of more education, stronger parenting skills and intensive economic and social support. Nelson's book examines the family situation of sixty-eight Caucasian women in rural Vermont who have come to single motherhood at a variety of ages and by various routes. There is limited knowledge on this population and Nelson's work is an important contribution to the field. The book's strongest impact emerges through its description of the daily tasks required for family survival when public transportation, housing projects, subsidized day care centers, employment opportunities, and family support programs are inadequate. Being a single mother is hard work. Being a single mother in a rural area is onerous.The women in Nelson's study respond to their situation by engaging in a strategic process of social exchange based on a vast array of interconnections with individuals who can provide money, goods and help with the tasks of daily living (pg. 5). Nelson uses the concept of social economy to encapsulate this process. Although beneficial for family survival, building and maintaining a social economy creates its own stress. In an effort to ensure equal exchange of material and non-material support, each woman keeps a mental balance sheet whereby she estimates and judges bom her own and others' contributions. Publicly, participation in a social economy creates an image of self-sufficiency. Personally, it emphasizes the lack of resources available to each woman and contributes to her perception of self as an incompetent mother who has failed her family by breaking normative standards of nuclear family life.Nelson divides the book into seven sections. Her introduction presents a brief rationale for using social economy as a concept her methodological design, and the women's demographic characteristics. Chapter One describes the social, material and geographical worlds in which these women and their families exist. This description creates a sympathetic understanding of how the social discourse of rural self-sufficiency intensifies a woman's sense of being stigmatized socially by single motherhood and heightens her desire to be self-reliant. …