ABSTRACT
This book is about how women negotiate lone motherhood in Britain and Germany
within late modernity. The western industrialized world has been experiencing
dramatic changes in family structures since the 1970s. The nuclear family consisting
of a father, mother and their child or children is declining; divorce and cohabitation
rates are increasing rapidly (Giddens 1997, 148); women are having their children
at a much later age and having fewer children than ever before (Gonzáles López and
Solsona Pairó 2000, 60). But the most striking change in family composition has
been the escalating number of lone parent families. This is a growing female life
form, since the mother heads most lone parent households. I am going to use the
term ‘lone’ mother rather than ‘single’ or ‘solo’ mother as the majority of women
defined themselves as a lone mother in my interviews in Britain. In Germany, they
refer to themselves as Alleinerziehende (alone-educators). For the purpose of this
study a lone mother is defined as a mother who lives alone with her child.
