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Two groundbreaking sociologists explore the way the American dream
is built on the backs of working poor women Many Americans take
comfort and convenience for granted. We eat at nice restaurants,
order groceries online, and hire nannies to care for kids. 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.
In a highly accessible mix of narrative and interviews with social
science research, Dodson unearths the untold story of a silent
movement for justice in contemporary America. Lisa Dodson spent
eight years interviewing more than 800 supervisors, teachers and
healthcare workers about their experiences interacting with the
working poor. She repeatedly heard accounts of people bending the
rules to help workers get by. These stories point to a surprising
and inspiring phenomenon of the middle class refusing to be
complicit in a fundamentally unfair enconomy.
A radically new vision of women and girls living below the poverty
line; Lisa Dodson makes a frontal assault on conventional attitudes
and stereotypes of women in poor America and the seriously
misguided "welfare reform" policies of the end of the century.
"I hear Odessa, a thirty-two-year-old woman, speak at a forum on
welfare reform. I ask her about the phrase she used, 'Don't call me
out of name, ' for it seemed to speak for a whole nation of people.
Odessa tells me that women who have no money and no one to stand up
for them get put into a bad position and they get misnamed. Most
often they get called 'welfare mothers' or 'recipients, ' words she
will no longer acknowledge. With millions alongside her, Odessa has
emerged by her own strength and some opportunity, and now she
insists upon naming herself."
While Lisa Dodson was working in a Charlestown factory twenty years
ago, the stories of the women she worked with daily captivated her;
she listened to them speak about harsh lives and their deep
commitment to family and community. It was the beginning of
Dodson's desire to learn the truth and write it down.
For over eight years, Dodson has been documenting the lives of
girls and women-hundreds of white, African-American, Latino,
Haitian, Irish, and other women in personal interviews, focus
groups, surveys, and Life-History Studies. This book is a
crossing--a class crossing--taking readers into fellowship with
people who are seldom invited to speak but who have powerful
stories to tell and who force us to abandon common myths that have
been fed to us by the media about school dropouts, teen pregnancy,
and welfare "cheats." Don't Call Us Out of Name delves deeply into
the realities of their lives, often with surprising and uplifting
stories of commonplace courage, unimaginable strength, and
resourcefulness.
Lisa Dodson does not simply give us the truth about women living in
poverty but offers realistic hope for meaningful policy reform
based on the experience and analysis of the women we have seen so
far only in stereotype and whose voices we have not truly heard.
These women emerge as critical contributors to the creation of
sound, humane public policy.
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