Getting Me Cheap
How Low-Wage Work Traps Women and Girls in Poverty
1 of 1 copy available
Getting Me Cheap is a riveting portrait of the lives of the low-wage workers—primarily women—who make this lifestyle possible. Sociologists Lisa Dodson and Amanda Freeman follow women in the food, health care, home care, and other low-wage industries as they struggle to balance mothering with bad jobs and without public aid. While these women tend to the needs of well-off families, their own children frequently step into premature adult roles, providing care for siblings and aging family members.
Based on years of in-depth field work and hundreds of eye-opening interviews, Getting Me Cheap explores how America traps millions of women and their children into lives of stunted opportunity and poverty in service of giving others of us the lives we seek. Destined to rank with works like Evicted and Nickle and Dimed for its revelatory glimpse into how our society functions behind the scenes, Getting Me Cheap also offers a way forward—with both policy solutions and a keen moral vision for organizing women across class lines.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
April 25, 2023 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9798350803778
- File size: 218454 KB
- Duration: 07:35:06
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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September 12, 2022
Sociologists Freeman and Dodson (The Moral Underground) deliver a moving examination of how underpaid work, unsympathetic bureaucracies, and family survival strategies set working-class American women up for lives of hardship. Many of the 250 women the authors interviewed grew up in families struggling with poverty, and they were expected to contribute their time and earnings to help make ends meet. Funneled into easily available retail, service, and care jobs that offered irregular shifts, low wages, and no benefits or paid time off, these women had few chances to develop skills that would lead to more stable work. The mothers profiled—many of them single parents—constantly struggle to find and keep quality childcare and feel guilty about being unable to conform to middle-class parenting and professional ideals, even as they recognize that those standards were set by people with more money, benefits, and time. Also discussed are frustrations with welfare regulations and with educational programs that don’t provide the support necessary for women to be both a working mother and a student, as well as the fierce pride these women take in their abilities as mothers and caregivers. Though somewhat meandering, this empathetic and eye-opening study leaves a mark.
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