| Summary: | Women mother. In our society, as in most societies, women not only bear children. They also take primary responsibility for infant care, spend more time with infants and children than do men, and sustain primary emotional ties with infants. When biological mothers do not parent, other women, rather than men, virtually always take their place. Though fathers and other men spend varying amounts o f time with infants and children, the father is rarely a child's primary parent. Over the past few centuries, women of different ages, classes, and races have moved in and out of the paid labor force. Marriage and fertility rates have fluctuated considerably during this same period. Despite these changes, women have always cared for children, usually as mothers in families and occasionally as workers in child-care centers or as paid and slave domestics. Women's mothering is one of the few universal and enduring elements of the sexual division of labor. ... This book analyzes women's mothering and, in particular, the way women's mothering is reproduced across generations. Its central question is how do women today come to mother? By implication, it asks how we might change things to transform the sexual division of labor in which women mother. -- Introduction (pages 3-4).
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