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Despite cultural scripts that continue to view fathers as the primary breadwinners in their families, there has been a striking escalation of mothers’ assumption of that role. Over the last twenty years, the rate at which mothers become the primary breadwinner has increased by almost 50 percent and an astonishing 70 percent of American mothers can expect to become the primary earner for their household for at least a year before their first child turns eighteen. In The Motherlode, sociologist Jennifer L. Glass traces the rise of mothers as the primary financial providers for their children, investigates the causes of this increase, and evaluates the consequences of this shift for mothers and families.

Glass finds the swift increase of fiscal responsibility for children by their mothers is occurring in households of all racial backgrounds and across the educational spectrum. This increase is not due to more divorces or relationship breakups. In fact, the most rapid growth in mothers’ financial responsibility for the household has come from married mothers, not single mothers, and about half of contemporary mom-breadwinners have spouses or romantic partners living in the home. Nor is it due to a narrowing of the gender pay gap or mothers’ ability to out-earn their partners—the bulk of breadwinning mothers see large financial losses or are better off financially but still living in poverty when they become the primary earner. Instead, this rise is due to broader, long-term changes in the economy, which have led to less job security and wage stagnation for all workers.  

The increase of mothers’ financial obligations to their children has occurred at the same time that nonfinancial responsibilities for children has increased—more time is dedicated to identifying, evaluating, and obtaining goods and services for children, including healthcare and schooling. There has not been a corresponding increase in support for mothers by their employers, the government, or fathers. This leaves mothers with greater burdens of both financial support and nonmonetary care for their children, which increases the number of children that are vulnerable to dependency on their mothers’ earnings and intermittent poverty. While this rise in maternal breadwinning is unlikely to decline anytime soon, Glass suggests policies that could provide mothers with more support, such as enacting labor protections for care occupations dominated by women and federal paid family and medical leave and providing federally funded, wraparound, non-means-tested systems of childcare.

The Motherlode is an illuminating and in-depth examination of the surprisingly pervasive phenomenon of maternal breadwinning in American society. 

The expression “the New South” was introduced by Henry Grady, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, to a New York audience in 1886; every generation of writers since has used the term. The southern population, unique in its socioeconomic and cultural characteristics, has always been a topic of major interest with U.S. demographers.

The articles in this book, the majority of which were originally presented at the Southern Regional Demographic Group meeting in 1976, deal with fertility, mortality, migration, and the factors that influence these components. A number of the contributors trace patterns of demographic change in the South showing convergence with the rest of the United States. Questions are raised about whether the convergence represents a permanent trend—possibly due to increased communication—or whether further divergence may be expected in the future.

The contributors include Dudley L. Poston, Jr., William J. Serow, Robert H. Weller, Ronald R. Rindfuss, Harry M. Rosenberg, Drusilla Burnham, David F. Sly, Omer R. Galle, Robert N. Stern, Joachim Singelmann, Susan E. Clarke, and George C. Myers.

    Today Ireland’s population is rising, immigration outpaces emigration, most families have two or at most three children, and full-time farmers are in steady decline. But the opposite was true for more than a century, from the great famine of the 1840s until the 1960s. Between 1922 and 1966—most of the first fifty years after independence—the population of Ireland was falling, in the 1950s as rapidly as in the 1880s. Mary Daly’s The Slow Failure examines not just the reasons for the decline, but the responses to it by politicians, academics, journalists, churchmen, and others who publicly agonized over their nation’s “slow failure.” Eager to reverse population decline but fearful that economic development would undermine Irish national identity, they fashioned statistical evidence to support ultimately fruitless policies to encourage large, rural farm families. Focusing on both Irish government and society, Daly places Ireland’s population history in the mainstream history of independent Ireland.
    Daly’s research reveals how pastoral visions of an ideal Ireland made it virtually impossible to reverse the fall in population. Promoting large families, for example, contributed to late marriages, actually slowing population growth further. The crucial issue of emigration failed to attract serious government attention except during World War II; successive Irish governments refused to provide welfare services for emigrants, leaving that role to the Catholic Church. Daly takes these and other elements of an often-sad story, weaving them into essential reading for understanding modern Irish history