ABSTRACT
This book begins in our own experience. Both of us were, at the time we first started talking about doing the study, single parents with our children in school. Dorothy had been a graduate student and then a professor at a university for most of the time her children were small; Alison had been a clerical worker, a waitress in a bar, a welfare recipient while attending university, and a research associate. She went on to become a university professor. Over the period of two or three years before we decided to undertake the research, we shared confidences, complaints, miseries, and guilt arising from our relationship to our children’s schools. On long walks through the ravines of Toronto, we shared the stories of our mothering work, of our children’s struggles, of our fears about interfering, of pushing teachers too hard, and of not pushing them hard enough. On these walks, we also framed our collaborative research project on mothering for schooling.1
