Motherhood and Social Exclusion

Christie Byvelds is a mother and registered social worker. She is a sessional instructor with the School of Social Work at Carleton University, and she practices both clinically and as a private research consultant. Heather Jackson, a former teen mom, is now a 30-something single mom of a teen. She is often mistaken as her daughter’s friend or sister! She is a former site producer of girl-mom.com. Currently, she works as a birth doula and an early childhood counsellor in Rhode Island. She published a chapter in The Bakken Goes Boom regarding the change of maternal health related to the oil boom in North Dakota (where she grew up!). In addition to this, she is also co-editor of Feminist Parenting and is currently co-editing Motherhood and Abortion anthologies through Demeter Press (http://demeterpress.org/). Her writing has also been published on thepushback.org, hipmama.com, girl-mom.com, muthamagazine.com, books, and zines.

"This collection makes a significant contribution to the study of mothering that takes place in conditions of social exclusion. While there are many studies that address the issue from the perspective of women in general, this book is among the few that detail the effects on mothers of these conditions, and the chapters based on in-depth interviews, as well as the auto-ethnographic narratives are especially illuminating. The strength of the collection is that it really focuses attention on social and policy issues that need to change in order to alleviate some of the problems the mothers in the collection discuss. " -- Dr. Tatjana Takševa, Associate Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, Women and Gender Studies Program, Saint Mary's University