This paper argues that financialisation exacerbates gender inequity in the United States. During the Recession, wealth-stripping activities were targeted at single female homeowners prompting severe asset depletion among single women, people of color, and those who depend on them. Rather than protecting them from risk, their home equity and bodies absorbed the failures of capitalism within their network. The paper draws on a thematic analysis of interviews with 21 single female homeowners who experienced mortgage default. Rather than focusing on risk incidence, I take their relational pathways as the object of inquiry demonstrating how activities of gendered care work act as conduits and amplifiers of financialised risk that extends the responsibility for unpaid social provision throughout the lifespan. The analysis demonstrates how their status as homeowners positioned them in between market failures and the consequences of austerity thereby restructuring the function of home equity.
Socialisation in a single-parent family has been associated with negative consequences both in previous research and popular discourse. This article investigates whether this association may be different in a society with a high rate of divorce and extramarital fertility. Using data from the Czech contribution to the EU-SILC survey, it tests hypotheses concerning the difference between the current situation of adults who grew up in single-parent families and those who were raised in intact families. We look for the influence of socialisation on single-parent families in three areas—educational attainment, current partnership situation, and current family income. The results of regression analyses show that the differences between children from single-parent families and those from intact ones are very small in the area of education (the influence is apparent only at the secondary school graduation level, no difference is present at the tertiary education level), relatively weak in the area of partnership situation, and imperceptible from the viewpoint of family income. These results exclude a causal explanation for the influence of single-parent families on outcomes, cast doubt on selective principles, and open space for interpretation in terms of mechanisms of family de-institutionalisation.