GETTING ME CHEAP | A Busboys and Poets Books Presentation
Join us to learn how low-wage traps women and girls in poverty.
Amanda Freeman and Lisa Dodsen’s new book GETTING ME CHEAP is a riveting portrait of the lives of the low-wage workers—primarily women—who make this lifestyle possible. Sociologists Lisa Dodson and Amanda Freeman follow women in the food, health care, home care, and other low-wage industries as they struggle to balance mothering with bad jobs and without public aid. While these women tend to the needs of well-off families, their own children frequently step into premature adult roles, providing care for siblings and aging family members.
Based on years of in-depth field work and hundreds of eye-opening interviews, Getting Me Cheap Explores how America traps millions of women and their children into lives of stunted opportunity and poverty in service of giving others of us the lives we seek. Destined to rank with works like Evicted and Nickle and Dimed for its revelatory glimpse into how our society functions behind the scenes, Getting Me Cheap also offers a way forward—with both policy solutions and a keen moral vision for organizing women across class lines.
Amanda Freeman and Lisa Dodson are joining us on the Busboys stage to discuss their new book. They will be joined in conversation by Wendy Chun Hoon and Sammy Chavin-Grant. Copies of the book will be available for purchase during and after the event, and Fishman will be signing following the program.
This event is free and open to all. Our program begins at 6:00 pm, and will be followed by an audience Q&A. Copies of GETTING ME CHEAP will be available for purchase before and after the event. Please note that this event is VIRTUAL and will be livestreamed.
We ask that guests RSVP in order to receive direct updates about the event from Busboys and Poets Books.
Amanda Freeman is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Hartford and a writer and researcher of motherhood and work. She lives in Westport, Connecticut, and Getting Me Cheap (The New Press) is her first book.
Lisa Dodson is Research Professor Emerita at Boston College. She is the author of The Moral Underground: How Ordinary Americans Subvert an Unfair Economy and co-author of Getting Me Cheap: How Low Wage Work Traps Women and Girls in Poverty (both from The New Press) and Don’t Call Us Out of Name. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
Wendy Chun-Hoon serves as the 20th director of the Women’s Bureau, appointed by President Biden on February 1, 2021. Wendy is skilled at coalition building, bridging strategy across grassroots community organizing, and public sector policy making at state and national levels. She has held senior positions in Maryland state government and private philanthropy, overseeing large-scale, results-driven initiatives for worker and family economic justice. For the past 10 years, Wendy’s led Family Values @ Work, a national network of grassroots coalitions that have won more than 60 new paid leave policies bringing new rights to 55 million workers and their loved ones and are organizing to win greater access to child care, and fair wages and employment conditions for workers.
Sammy Chavin-Grant is the Family Values @ Work Federal Policy Manager. Growing up Jewish in Charleston, SC, Sammy learned from a young age that our world is designed to exclude people. This lesson evolved throughout her life into a passion for creating equitable systems that prioritize racial, gender, and economic justice. This led Sammy to Washington, DC, where she volunteered by night as an organizer for the DC Paid Family Leave campaign and worked by day on building collective power to enact federal policy change. Sammy now works to build federal momentum for paid family leave and child care in partnership with our network and communities across the country. Sammy lives in DC with her husband and loves to read fiction novels and enjoy a good meal with friends and family. She holds a B.S. in Neuroscience and a B.A. in French from Lafayette College and a Masters in Political Management from George Washington University.
