Care to live: Everyday strategies among single mothers in Lithuania

What are the everyday life strategies of single mothers that help to efectively cope with daily hardships? What modes of resistance are employed, articulated or imagined by single mothers as they navigate their daily routines? This is the premise of the study that offers an in-depth ethnographic study of well-educated single mothers in Kaunas, Lithuania – a post-socialist semi-periphery marked by structural precarity. Trough feminist activist ethnography, this thesis examines how single mothers develop material, emotional, and social strategies to survive and care within conditions shaped by neoliberalism, insuficient welfare systems, and societal stigma. The concept of care is placed at the centre of this dissertation, highlighting care labour as often unpaid and invisibilized, yet – central to single mothers’ lives, constituting both a burden and a potential site of resistance. This thesis also examines how normative ideals of family, motherhood, and success intersect with class, gender, and labour to shape women’s lived experiences. Laura Lapinske is a gender and sexuality scholar at Södertörn University. This study is her doctoral dissertation.