Compromises to Carework: The Social Organization of Mothers' Experiences in the Low-Wage Labor Market after Welfare Reform

Using institutional ethnography (IE), this article explores the social organization of mothers' carework after welfare reform. Carework experiences are shaped by the conditions of low-wage work, welfare policy, and the discourses in which these mothers are embedded. Three discursive frameworks emerge in these women's discussions of the ways they balance carework and paid work: the mothering discourse, the ideological code of the Standard North American Family (SNAF), and a discourse of work enforcement (Piven 2001). Mothers engage these discourses in various ways that recruit them, to varying degrees, into participating in the ruling relations of neoliberalism, which subordinate them.