American women who purposely undertake motherhood without the involvement of a male partner tend to be beneficiaries of second-wave feminist achievements in the areas of expanded educational and employment opportunities. I draw on an in-depth, longitudinal case study of one such Single Mother by Choice (SMC) to explore how the opportunities she has enjoyed and professional achievements she has attained have shaped her ‘intimate landscape.’ Intimacy means ‘innermost,’ and refers to a spatial relationship, whether physical and or metaphorical. ‘Landscape’ refers to ‘all the visible features of an area’ and ‘the distinctive features of a particular situation or intellectual activity.’ Together Carmen and I engaged in topography, producing a detailed description of the arrangement of the features of this area of her life—the intimate physical and emotional relations with her children, her dog, her mother, and close emotional relationships with her siblings and their families, some friends, and members of her church.
AngelM (2014) ‘The Women at the Top’The New York Review of Books. p 18–21. March 20.
4.
AskowitzA (2008) My Miserable, Lonely, Lesbian Pregnancy.San Francisco: Cleis Press.
5.
BenefieldR, WeschlerL, HowgateS, HockneyD (2013) David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition.Munich: Delmonico Books.
6.
BerlantL (1998) ‘Intimacy: A Special Issue’Critical Inquiry24(2):281-288. [doi:10.1086/448875]
7.
BeharR (1993) Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza's Story.Boston: Beacon Press.
8.
BianchiS M, RobinsonJ P, MilkieM A (2006) Changing Rhythms of American Family Life, New York: Sage.
9.
BockJ D (2000) ‘Doing the Right Thing: Single Mothers by Choice and the Struggle for Legitimacy’Gender & Society14(1): p. 62–86. [doi:10.1177/089124300014001005]
10.
BodenhornB (nd) ‘Fragments of intimacy and the reassembling of relations’
11.
BomemanJ and HamoudiA, eds. (2009) Being There: The Fieldwork Encounter and the Making of Truth.Berkeley: University of California Press.
12.
BudgeonS2006Friendship and Formations of Sociality in Late Modernity: The Challenge of ‘Post Traditional Intimacy’Sociological Research Online11(3). [doi:10.5153/sro.1248]
13.
ColemanL (2009) The Obligation to Receive: The Countertransference, the Ethnographer, Protestants, and Proselytization in North India. In Bomeman and Hamoudi eds.Being There: The Fieldwork Encounter and the Making of Truth.Berkeley: University of California Press. p. 113–150. [doi:10.1525/california/9780520257757.003.0005]
14.
ClarkeP, AyresI (2014) 'Girls rule, boys drool: The Chastain Effect: Using Title IX to Measure the Causal Effect of Participating in High School Sports on Adult Women's Social Lives’ Journal of Socio-Economics. [doi:10.1016/j.socec.2013.11.001]
15.
CrapanzanoV.Tuhami. A Portrait of a MoroccanUniversity Of Chicago Press, Chicago / London1980.
16.
DrexlerP (2005) Raising Boys without Men: How Maverick Moms are Creating the Next Generation of Exceptional Men.Rodale Press.
GabbJ (2010) Researching Intimacy in Families.London: Palgrave.
22.
AnthonyGiddens (1992) The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love, and Eroticism in Modern Societies, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
23.
GrayA2006“The Time Economy of Parenting”Sociological Research Online11(3). [doi:10.5153/sro.1393]
24.
GrahamS (2012) ‘Choosing single motherhood? Single women negotiating the nuclear family ideal’ in CutasD. and ChanS. (eds.), Families - Beyond the Nuclear Ideal.London: Bloomsbury Academic.
25.
GrahamS (2014a) ‘Stories of an absent ‘father’: single women negotiating relatedness through donor profiles’ in FreemanT., EbtehajF., GrahamS. and RichardsM.P.M. (eds.), Relatedness in Assisted Reproduction: Families, Origins, Identities.Cambridge University Press. [doi:10.1017/cbo9781139814737.015]
26.
GrahamS (2014b) Imagined Futures: Experiences and Decision-Making of Single Women Embarking upon Motherhood through Sperm Donation. Ph.D. Dissertation. Cambridge University.
27.
HertzR (2006) Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice: How Women are Choosing Parenthood without Marriage and Creating the New American Family.Oxford: Oxford University Press.
JacksonP (2013) Call for Papers Intimate Ecologies of Social Reproduction for a panel to be held at the annual meeting of the Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers Tampa, April 8-12, 2014
30.
JadvaV, BadgerS, MorrisetteM, and GolombokS (2009) “Mom by choice, single by life's circumstance…’ Findings from a large-scale survey of the experiences of single mothers by choice’, Human fertility, 12, p.175–84. [doi:10.3109/14647270903373867]
31.
JamiesonL (1998) Intimacy: Personal Relationships in Modern Societies.London: Polity Press.
32.
JamiesonL (1999) Intimacy Transformed? A Critical Look at the ‘Pure Relationship’Sociology33(3):477-494.
33.
JamiesonL (2011) “Intimacy as a Concept: Explaining Social Change in the Context of Globalisation or Another form of Ethnocentrism”Sociological Research Online16(4)15. [doi:10.5153/sro.2497]
34.
JamiesonL. (2006). Intimacy. In HarringtonA., MarshallB., & MullerH. (Eds.), The Routledge Encyclopedia of Social Theory, Routledge.
35.
LayneLL (1996) “How's the Baby Doing?’: Struggling with Narratives of Progress in a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit’, Medical Anthropology Quarterly10(4):624-656. [doi:10.1525/maq.1996.10.4.02a00130]
36.
LayneLL (2010) ‘Donors and Daddies, Fathers and Lovers: The Presence of (Mostly) Absent Men in Narratives of Single Mothers by Choice’, Phoebe: Gender & Cultural Critiques21(2):1-20.
37.
LayneLL (2013a) ‘Creepy,‘ 'Freaky,’ and ‘Strange’: How the ‘Uncanny’ can Illuminate the Experience of Single Mothers by Choice and Lesbian Couples who Buy Dad.’Journal of Consumer Culture14 (2), July. [doi:10.1177/1469540513482600]
38.
LayneLL (2013b) ‘Intensive Parenting Alone: Negotiating the Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood as a Single Mother by Choice’ in (Eds.) Faircloth, Hoffman and Layne.Parenting in Global Perspective: Negotiating Ideologies of Kinship, Self and Politics. p. 213–228. Routledge.
39.
LayneLL (2014) “I have a fear of really screwing it up': The Fears, Doubts, Anxieties, and Judgments in the Experience of One American Single Mother by Choice”Journal of Family Issues.
40.
LayneLL, GrahamS (2013) “That's Selfish’: Moral Judgments by and about Single Mothers by Choice in the US and UK’Workshop on The Rhetoric of Selfishness and Selflessness, Cambridge University, June.
MattesJ (1994) Single Mothers by Choice: A Guidebook for Single Women Who are Considering or Have Chosen Motherhood.New York: Random House.
43.
MorrisetteMikki (2008) Choosing Single Motherhood: The Thinking Woman's Guide.Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
44.
MurrayC, GolombokS (2005a) ‘Going it alone: Solo mothers and their infants conceived by donor insemination’, American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 2, p. 242–253 [doi:10.1037/0002-9432.75.2.242]
45.
MurrayC, GolombokS (2005b) ‘Solo mothers and their donor insemination infants: follow up at age 2 years’, Human Reproduction, 20, p. 1655–1660. [doi:10.1093/humrep/deh823]
NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION (2014) National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, NSF/NIH/ED/USDA/NEH/NASA Survey of Earned Doctorates; special tabulation (February 2014).
RadinP (ed.) [1926] 1983Crashing Thunder: The autobiography of an American Indian.Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
52.
RichardsM P M (2014) ‘A British history of collaborative reproduction and the rise of the genetic connection.’ In (Eds.) FreemanF, EbtehajF, GrahamS, RichardsM.Relatedness in Assisted Reproduction. Families, Origins and Identities.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [doi:10.1017/cbo9781139814737.003]
