ABSTRACT
This article focuses on lone mothers’ poverty in the familistic Italian welfare regime. In order to appreciate its peculiarities, the study of the Italian situation is developed comparatively by taking into account two other European settings: Germany and Great Britain. What comes out of this analysis is that lone mothers’ poverty is a very complex phenomenon, since women’s risks of poverty are strongly connected to the close interaction of gendered processes in the labour market, domestic circumstances and welfare systems that can substantially vary from one country to the next. In Italy, there is a specific arrangement between family, the labour market and the welfare state, and, within this triad, it is the family that plays the most crucial role.
