Abstract

In 2010 in the city of São Paulo, 37 percent of mothers were solo mothers, compared to 16 percent in 1960. This meant that more than 1 million women in 2010 were raising their children without a partner. The increase in solo motherhood is not an isolated phenomenon, but part of deep transformations that have reshuffled entrenched formations of gender hierarchies, family arrangements, class inequalities, and racial discrimination in São Paulo. In recent decades, many young women found possibilities to shape their lives in ways that not only differed from their mothers’ but that also significantly challenged the previously dominant model of the heteronormative nuclear family organized around a breadwinner and a housemaker. Analyzing the lives of solo mothers, this article identifies an emergent formation of collective life in which the nuclear family emerges as a minoritarian arrangement (around 40 percent) and in which women feel empowered to simply lead other lives.

Keywords

solo mothers; nuclear family; reshaping gender roles; household compositions; collective life; peripheral feminism; São Paulo

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2026 Teresa P. R. Caldeira

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.