front cover of Mothering Inner-City Children
Mothering Inner-City Children
The Early School Years
Katherine Brown Rosier
Rutgers University Press, 2000

There are few groups more stereotyped and demonized than "welfare mothers," particularly low-income, African American women raising children in the inner city. But what are the day-to-day stories behind the stereotypes? How do African American mothers (both single women and those living with a partner) in poor families handle their roles as parents? What support networks do they rely on to help raise their children? How do their personal histories affect their parenting styles?

Sociologist Katherine Brown Rosier spent three years interviewing and observing Indianapolis mothers as their children made the transition from a Head Start program to kindergarten and through second grade, analyzing the families in their homes, schools, and other social settings. She brings forth the voices of the mothers, children, and their teachers, providing a multifaceted picture of how low-income African American families cope with the daily pressures and responsibilities of child rearing.

Rosier also examines how larger socio-economic factors influence these families' specific circumstances and histories. What child-rearing strategies do these mothers employ, she asks, to promote a smooth transition into school despite complex discontinuities among their homes, schools, and communities? How are these strategies viewed and supported or impeded by teachers, family, friends, and neighbors?

Until now, most research on poor African American families has focused so intently on the problems confronted by this seemingly homogenous group that the routine practices of every day life have been ignored. In this unique project, Rosier allows the families' individual experiences and thoughts to contribute to and complicate current research.

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front cover of They Raised Me Up
They Raised Me Up
A Black Single Mother and the Women Who Inspired Her
Carolyn Marie Wilkins
University of Missouri Press, 2013

At the height of the cocaine-fueled 1980s, Carolyn Wilkins left a disastrous marriage in Seattle and, hoping to make it in the music business, moved with her four-year-old daughter to a gritty working-class town on the edge of Boston. They Raised Me Up is the story of her battle to succeed in the world of jam sessions and jazz clubs—a man’s world where women were seen as either sex objects or doormats. To survive, she had to find a way to pay the bills, overcome a crippling case of stage fright, fend off a series of unsuitable men, and most important, find a reliable babysitter.

Alternating with Carolyn’s story are the stories of her ancestors and mentors—five musically gifted women who struggled to realize their dreams at the turn of the twentieth century:

Philippa Schuyler, whose efforts to “pass” for white inspired Carolyn to embrace her own black identity despite her “damn near white” appearance and biracial child;

Marjory Jackson, the musician and single mother whose dark complexion and flamboyant lifestyle raised eyebrows among her contemporaries in the snobby, color-conscious world of the African American elite;

Lilly Pruett, the daughter of an illiterate sharecropper whose stunning beauty might have been her only ticket out of the “Jim Crow” South;

Ruth Lipscomb, the country girl who dreamed, against all odds, of becoming a concert pianist and realized her improbable ambition in 1941;

Alberta Sweeney, who survived a devastating personal tragedy by relying on the musical talent and spiritual stamina she had acquired growing up in a rough-and-tumble Kansas mining town.

They Raised Me Up interweaves memoir with family history to create an entertaining, informative, and engrossing read that will appeal to anyone with an interest in African American or women’s history or to readers simply looking for an intriguing story about music and family.

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