Cut Adrift: Families in Insecure Times
ISBN: 9780520958456
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / University of California Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Equality -- United States; United States -- Social conditions -- 21st century; United States -- Race relations;

With this well-researched book, Cooper, a sociologist at Stanford University's Clayman Institute, leads a grand return to a publicly committed sociology that is accessible, elucidating, and grounded in real stories. The book charts how individual American families at all income levels have dealt with the anxiety induced by the recent recession. Though each story is sensitively told and rich with personal details, the research focuses on the author's core finding-the variation of "security strategies" among families. Though conventional wisdom dictates that wealthier families feel more secure, Cooper finds the opposite is true: they experience a mixture of status anxiety and the sense that everything they have isn't enough. Parents fret about having enough money to send their children to elite schools, even if they have more than enough to pay for state universities. For the poorer and middle-tier families-contrary to popular stereotypes of the grasping, entitled modern American-many are figuring out how to survive with less, and even valorizing that. Cooper offers a robust analysis of gender dynamics, with sharp insights about the heavy burden on women to manage the family's anxiety. Cooper's necessary and timely study is a discomfiting reminder of the human cost of the recession. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Cooper Marianne :

Marianne Cooper is a sociologist at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University and an affiliate at the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality. She was the lead researcher for Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg and is a contributor to LeanIn.org. She received her PhD in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley.


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