Winner of the 2013 Eleanor Maccoby Award from APA Division 7

Women's schooling is strongly related to child survival and other outcomes beneficial to children throughout the developing world, but the reasons behind these statistical connections have been unclear. In Literacy and Mothering, the authors show, for the first time, how communicative change plays a key role: Girls acquire academic literacy skills, even in low-quality schools, which enable them, as mothers, to understand public health messages in the mass media and to navigate bureaucratic health...

In "Dolor y Alegria" (Sorrow and Joy), 15 mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers in the Mexican City of Cuernavaca speak about the dramatic effects that urbanisation and rapid social change have had on their lives. Sarah LeVine combines these autobiographical vignettes with ethnographic material, survey findings and her own observations. The result is a vivid picture of contrast and continuity. While many earlier publications have focused on the poor of Latin America who live at the margins of urban life, "Dolor y Alegria" explores the experiences of ordinary working and lower-middle...