Getting Me Cheap: How Low-Wage Work Traps Women and Girls in Poverty

by Amanda Freeman, Lisa Dodson

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781620977422
Publisher:	New Press, The
Publication date:	11/29/2022
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.64(d)

About the Author

Amanda Freeman is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Hartford and a writer and researcher of motherhood and work. She lives in Westport, Connecticut, and Getting Me Cheap (The New Press) is her first book. Lisa Dodson is Research Professor Emerita at Boston College. She is the author of The Moral Underground: How Ordinary Americans Subvert an Unfair Economy and co-author (with Amanda Freeman) of Getting Me Cheap: How Low Wage Work Traps Women and Girls in Poverty (both from The New Press) and Don’t Call Us Out of Name. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Table of Contents

Authors' Note vii

1 Girls Step Up 1

2 Shifts to Work Any and All the Time 33

3 Care Work for Cheap 60

4 The Centrality of Motherhood 87

5 The Broken Promise of Childcare 111

6 Moms and Kids on a Cliff 134

7 Keeping Us in Our Place 158

8 Calling Us Up 186

Epilogue 205

Acknowledgments 209

Notes 211

Index 221

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Getting Me Cheap:
“This empathetic and eye-opening study leaves a mark.”
—Publishers Weekly

“The stories shared in this volume speak for themselves, spotlighting the frustrations, needs, and hopes of the women featured.”
—Library Journal

“An insightful book that shines light on issues that should be better understood by any responsible citizen.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“An illuminating primer placing the obstacles facing women with low-wage jobs at the forefront of intersectional feminism.”
—Booklist

“An urgent exposé and exploration of one of our most pressing social problems—hidden in plain sight. A must-read for anyone concerned about how to make America a more just and equal nation.”
—Saru Jayaraman, president of One Fair Wage and author of One Fair Wage

“This formidable book insists we face the harm of wage poverty in women’s lives and see the real costs of relying on their cheap labor. The powerful stories of mothers’ determination to care for their children become a courageous call for solidarity and collective action.”
—Ellen Bravo, activist and author of Standing Up: Tales of Struggle

“The lives that so many of us lead depend on the invisible labor of others, whose own needs are cast aside by our society. This brilliant book moves those essential workers—so many of them mothers—into the light”
—Michael Eric Dyson, New York Times bestselling author of Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America

“The United States has the highest percentage of low-wage workers of any country in the OECD aside from Lithuania—a disproportionate number of them women who provide services to better-off families. Freeman and Dobson take us inside their lives to reveal the price they and their families pay for the cheap labor they provide to others.”
—Stephanie Coontz, author of The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap

From the Publisher