Lone motherhoods in context

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.