ABSTRACT
Our approach in this book has been that of institutional ethnography. Our final chapter reassembles our various discoveries, both the original research and the historical trajectory in which the book’s overall perspective is located, to reconstruct the logic of the project. We have also tried to evaluate the implications of differences in economic organization for the mothering-school relation. Institutional ethnography begins in people’s experience in an institutional setting. We started with our own experiences as single parents when our children were in elementary school. Then, we went on to explore the experiences of women who were members of normal families, that is, families that conformed to the traditional model of wife, husband, and children.
