How men matter: housework and self-provisioning among rural single-mother and married-couple families in Vermont, US

This paper compares married-couple households and single-mother households in the same rural area of the United States with respect to both housework and other efforts household members make to provide through their own labor goods and services they would otherwise have to purchase in the market. I argue that single mothers are disadvantaged in ways not fully captured with reference to income levels alone (on which the concept of the feminization of poverty usually depends). I also seek to study the strategies single mothers employ to ensure the completion of necessary tasks of housework and childcare, as well as those of home repair and self-provisioning. Finally, I examine some of the costs of these various strategies in order to create a fuller understanding of the lives of single mothers.