Single by chance, mothers by choice - Rosanna Hertz

This book is about women who are single by chance and mothers by choice. They are among the growing segment of women with jobs, often high-paying professional ones, who have elected to bypass the storied progression from love to marriage to motherhood.

They have taken matters into their own hands, as it were, to fulfill a familiar dream in an unfamiliar way.

Just who are these single moms? Why did they reverse the traditional order of love, marriage, and children? Where are the partners in their lives? Are the families they're froming transcient phenomena-detours, as it were, around temporary roadblocks to a more conventional arrangement? Or is the mother-child pair a finished family?"

To answer these questions, Rosanna Hertz interviewed 65 women - ranging from physicians and financial analysts to social workers, teachers and secretaries - who speak candidly about how they manage their lives and families as single mothers.

Rosanna Hertz / Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice. How women are choosing parenthood without marriage and creating the new american family / Oxford University Press / 2006