ABSTRACT
This chapter situates our experiences of being single parents, our research, and our data analysis in a historical trajectory of mothering for schooling. Over time, middle-class women have come to play a distinctive part in reproducing their own middle-class status for their children through the public school systems of North America. Middle-class women’s work as mothers has contributed largely invisible resources of thought, energy, and involvement to the elementary schools their children attend. Although women in lower-income groups are supportive and active in their children’s upbringing and schooling, their work as mothers is done with fewer economic resources and smaller amounts of school-oriented time than those of most middle-class women. As we will see in later chapters, and as the literature on families and schools has shown, a middle-class family work organization is presumed by schools. Where mothers’ work does not, or cannot, participate fully in this social relation, the family-school’s reproduction of a middle class is jeopardized. We take up the problem of inequality in schooling as being produced partly in that relation, not external to it.
