Chapter 1. A Generative Milieu for New Families
Chapter 2. Intensive Parenting Alone
Chapter 3. “I Have a Fear of Really Screwing It Up”: Intensive Mothering in an Age of Anxiety
Chapter 4. Sketching a Changing Landscape of Intimacy: Gender Equality and Parenthood
Chapter 5. Free from the Bonds of Heteronormativity: Creative Exuberance and Spatial Dynamism in Family Home-making
Chapter 6. “What Kind of a Family Do We Want to Be?”: Trickle-Down Neoliberal Values
Chapter 7. The Legacy of a Hybrid Habitus: Navigating the Pleasures and Pitfalls of Consumer Culture

Conclusion: Anthropology of the Contemporary: The Complex, Often Paradoxical, Influence of Neoliberalism

Afterword: Anthropology of the Near Future: The Complex, Often Paradoxical, Influence of Trump 2.0’s Patrimonialism

References
Index

Single Mother by Choice

A Story of Politics and Parenting in Twenty-first Century Middle America

Linda L. Layne

268 pages, 34 illus., bibliog., index

ISBN 978-1-83695-497-2 Hb Published (May 2026)

web ISBN 978-1-83695-499-6

Details

“This is an excellent book; it is a sophisticated and timely ethnography of a new form of 21st century household.” • Mark P. Whitaker, University of Kentucky

“This book has a very creative approach to understanding new alternatives to family formation, especially in the face of the right-wing backlash against women’s push to achieve gender equality in family and intimate life.” • Cynthia Daniels, Rutgers University

Single motherhood, a new family form, demonstrates an accomplishment of paradoxical synergies between 2nd wave feminism and neoliberalism. Single Mother by Choice chronicles the journey of Ann, a 41-year-old woman throughout her intensive mothering of three donor-conceived children from infancy to tween years. The Christian Right’s embrace of neoliberalism provided a permission structure for this and other emerging families, while simultaneously influencing progressive parents with trickle down neoliberal values that weaken the moral architecture of childhood and the nation. This fine-grained analysis of one family’s life illuminates the complexities of twenty-first century, middle-class American motherhood, whether single or not.

Linda L. Layne is the author of Home and Homeland: The Dialogics of Tribal and National Identities in Jordan (1994, Princeton University Press) and Motherhood Lost: A Feminist Account of Pregnancy Loss in America (2003, Routledge) and co-producer of a television series on pregnancy loss. She has edited or co-edited numerous volumes on motherhood, parenting and consumer culture. She now studies heterosexual single mothers by choice, lesbian moms and gay dads.

Series: Volume 57, Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives

berghahn New York · Oxford

Contents

Single Mother by Choice

A Story of Politics and Parenting in Twenty-first Century Middle America

Linda L. Layne

Series: Volume 57, Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives

Subject: Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality Sociology

Area: North America

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Contents

Single Mother by Choice

A Story of Politics and Parenting in Twenty-first Century Middle America

Linda L. Layne

Series: Volume 57, Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives

Subject: Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality Sociology

Area: North America