In this article, the importance of motherhood in the lives of Puerto Rican addicts is examined. Using a life history method, the authors interviewed 20 Latina females in various stages of recovery from addiction to crack-cocaine or heroin. Their lives as mothers took place in a context of poverty, marginalization, and abuse. Motherhood provided an identity and a line of work that grounded them amidst this dislocation. As their life options became more restricted over time, motherhood provided a lifeline through addiction and into recovery. While using drugs, they relied on a number of strategies to maintain mothering. In recovery, children became the markers of success in a treatment program. These findings challenge public images of female addicts as parents.

This study explores the relationship between child sexual abuse and adolescent motherhood, using a life story interview method. The sample consists of 27 mothers participating in a home-visitation parenting program for mothers at risk of child maltreatment. The failure to articulate the violation of child sexual abuse and to appropriately construct blame resulted in a range of self-destructive behaviors, some of which placed mothers at greater risk of teen pregnancy. Repressed feelings associated with the trauma often resurfaced with motherhood as victims re-experienced their innocence and vulnerability as children.

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The norms and expectations of “father involvement” have changed rapidly within a generation, and yet, the labor force and state institutions have not supported low-income families in a way to achieve this. In this article, we examine the narratives of 138 socially and economically marginalized fathers to identify the frames that they adopt to represent themselves as fathers, tell a coherent story about their lives, and project an identity of themselves into their futures. Despite the political–economic forces that have dramatically increased inequality in an era of neoliberal capitalism, fathers rarely alluded to structural explanations for family instability, father absence, marital dissolution, and gender distrust in low-income communities. Instead, fathers attempted to adopt socially valued identities along three symbolic boundaries that distinguished themselves from their own fathers, from welfare frauds, and from the iconic deadbeat dad. They also adopted individualistic frames that took the form of therapeutic narratives and life-course transitional narratives. In general, despite harsh structural constraints, the men imagined themselves doing better, and, in nearly all cases, being engaged fathers was at the center of these hopeful constructions. Without structural change, however, these aspirational frames are likely to become little more than false hopes.

As the scare of the‘80s demonstrated, sociology finds itself in the dubious position of being vulnerable within the university while being vitally dependent upon the university for its existence. In response, sociology has accommodated market‐driven changes in the university by expanding entrepreneurial forms of research and has struggled to legitimate itself professionally. These quests, however, have removed sociology further from the reaches of the broader public, diminishing its long‐standing tradition of addressing public issues. Re‐establishing the vitality of the discipline will require sociology to reclaim its public. To do so, changes will have to be made within the profession that encourage the role of public intellectuals, while efforts will have to be made to expand public spaces where public discourse and social action can occur.