Centering working-class women’s knowledge: a feminist geography of lone-motherhood over life-course in Scotland’s urban peripheries

Easterhouse in Glasgow is amongst the most persistently deprived housing-estates in Europe. During the 1980s it saw a threefold increase in lone-mother households. This dissertation explores lone-mothers’ experiences of poverty in Easterhouse between 1980 and 2021, investigating their use of female social networks to ‘get by’ and ‘get on’ through the challenges associated with gender, place, poverty, and lone-motherhood. The research comprised thirty semi-structured repeat interviews, assisted by photo-elicitation, capturing the adult life-course experiences of ten lone-mothers in Easterhouse since the 1980s. Interview transcripts were analysed in NVivo using thematic-methods to connect women’s accounts with key themes of social and economic change over time. The research found unexpectedly that all participants had entered lone-motherhood as a result of abuse by men. Localised female social networks provided important instrumental, emotional, and financial support during the transition to lone-motherhood and into mid-life-course, which allowed lone-mothers to ‘get by’. Yet female networks could often hinder women’s efforts to ‘get on’. In later life, participants remained almost solely reliant on female networks, which took on a new cathartic role in helping women navigate the emotional damage of lives characterised by persistent trauma. The study illuminates hidden histories of lone-motherhood, concluding that Easterhouse is a place where violent-masculinities have had lasting impacts on women’s wellbeing and network engagement. It contributes new understanding of structural oppression in disadvantaged settings, older women’s conceptions of ‘getting on’, the meaning of lives well lived in persistently deprived contexts, and the importance of internal resources in overcoming poverty-related-adversity over time.