Abstract

This paper investigates alternatives to studying the lives of lone mothers through the homogenizing category ‘lone mother’. This can be achieved by an analysis which combines the following three critical perspectives on the category: first, understanding the impact that contexts (both material and cultural) have on how lone motherhood is defined and experienced; second, acknowledging how the category ‘lone mother’ is but one aspect of a woman’s life in which also other categories such as gender, class and ethnicity intersect and interact; and third, examining the impact that the category ‘lone mother’ has on the lives of women. These three routes of analysis in combination allow an appreciation of the constraints placed by social inequalities on the lives of lone mothers, while not reducing these multi-dimensional lives to the one-dimensional category ‘lone mother’, and could form the basis of less stigmatizing and more effective policies.