New release! 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. Destined to rank with works like Evicted and Nickled 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 of organizing women across class lines.
By Amanda Freeman & Lisa Dodson. Hardcover. 256 pages. Published by New Press, 2022.