Linda Layne

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Affiliated Faculty at University of Cambridge

American women who purposely undertake motherhood without the involvement of a male partner tend to be beneficiaries of secondwave feminist achievements in the areas of expanded educational and employment opportunities. I draw on an in-depth, longitudinal case study of one such Single Mother by Choice (SMC) to explore how the opportunities she has...

Since the 1980s, a growing number of American women are choosing to start a family without a male partner. Not only are these women going against the norm, they do so in an era of “intensive mothering,” which places enormous responsibility on mothers to assure that their children have every possible advantage and judges mothers for the way their ch...

“Intensive Parenting Alone: Negotiating the Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood as a Single Mother by Choice”

The study of human reproduction has focused on reproductive “success” and on the struggle to achieve this, rather than on the much more common experience of “failure”, or reproductive loss. Drawing on the latest research from The UK and Europe, The United States, Australia and Africa, this volume examines the experience of reproductive loss in its...

In recent years, miscarriage, stillbirth, and early infant death have increasingly come to pose problems of meaning for middle-class Americans. What is the status of the woman, of her partner, of that which was lost? Why did it happen? What does it mean? How ought one to behave? The dominant strategy in the United States for dealing with this ambig...