Young Single Mothers The Work of Proving Fitness

The relationship between "work " and young single mothers involved with social service agencies has primarily been delineated in two ways: through conservative and feminist discourses. I argue in this paper that a third way to conceptualize labour circulates in the field of social services but is primarily unacknowledged by practitioners and policy pundits. This conceptualization revolves around the crucial and risky work of young single mothers needing to prove fitness in order to be ~ermitted to parent their children. As part ofa qualitative study on young single mothering and social services, I interviewed five white, front-line social service practitioners. I approached directors of the umbrella organization of agencies whose mandate is workwith young single mothers and gained their permission to send letters to their casework staff, soliciting volunteers. Ensuring anonymity, four participants came forward. The fifth was suggested by a practitioner in the field. The workers were employed in both urban and rural voluntary settings devoted to providing help to young single pregnant and parenting women. After introducing the existing articulated feminist and conservative dis-courses of work, I will use data from the interviews with these participants to describe a third way to understand the required labour of this population. An explanation for why women must the work of proving fitness and the silence surrounding this discourse ofwork are also proffered. Acknowledged discourses about young single mothers and work There is ambivalence about whether motherhood should be valorized and women encouraged to stay home with their children, or whether they should be citizen-workers, who contribute to the market through their labour. A Journal ofthe Association for Research on Mothering / 7