The demonisation of single mothers.

[SantaIsAnAnagramOfSatan]

Hi,

I've ended up talking about this in various threads but have never dedicated a thread to it.

So, i'm looking for your thoughts. How do we see this in action? What are the views of single mothers? How are they propagated? Why are they propagated and why do they attract such demonisation?

I'd also like to hear about where you think the feminist vision saw single mothers, did it predict their would be more given the increased freedom women would have in their lives and their ability to leave male partners or choose to not have one without being financially or socially (though that hasn't held true entirely compared to 1960's it's at least possible to live this way) ruined?

Is women being able to have children alone a part of the feminist outcome - if women have more control over their bodies and reproduction surely it was an inevitable outcome? And is it in your mind a positive or negative thing in terms of feminism?

I'm actually going away for a few days now but hope this will attract lots of thoughts for me to read when i get back.

As for me, to put this in context, i am a single mother of a pre school boy. When i found out i was pregnant (unplanned) at 30 i decided that i was happy to be and wanted to keep the baby but that i didn't want to stay in the problematic relationship with the father. Therefore i've been a single parent from the outset.

I have framed this as about single mothers rather than single parents as it is my experience that single fathers are seen very differently, imo as heroes and glorified whereas single mothers get the demonisation treatment in popular culture.

Look forward to reading your thoughts.

Yes I just thought that was what she was getting at, as a kind of experiment. Switch it around then - fathers dead hot keen to have the children and look after them full time. Do women want that either? Not really. Most women on here would react strongly against ideas even about shared custody 50/50.

So how do you put together a society where the work of caring for children is retained as the woman's more or less automatic responsibility, and yet she is valued for it and not penalised in any way in her work outside the home?

I mean even trying to think quite openly about rejigging society, it's still a bit tricky

On the question of who is happier to live alone and who wants to be settled. It's complex isn't it.

Reading threads on here many men still enjoy a powerful "head of the household" type set-up where they get all of the good stuff and little of the shit, who would want to give that up? Having a little kingdom all of your own where you are boss.

If things were genuinely equal - in society and for the experiment to work in each individual relationship - then I suspect that people's personalities would come to the fore and there would be equal numbers of homebods and people wanting to be by themselves of each sex.

Also (controversial) it is hard to tell how much of a mother's desire to "retain" her children and how much of a fathers (usual) acceptance of relegation to non-resident parent is socialised.

Women have so little in society that hanging onto their children is a big deal...

Sakura will disagree wildly

I just don't think that mothers love/need their children more than fathers IYSWIM. But for true equality, we'd have to give some of that up, wouldn't we.

That should have been a question at the end.

What does utopia look like in terms of parents and childcare and so on?

"I just don't think that mothers love/need their children more than fathers IYSWIM. But for true equality, we'd have to give some of that up, wouldn't we."

I agree with you there ISNT.

V interesting questions ISNT

I tend to think that when DC's are babies and toddlers, the biological tie to them is stronger than when they are older -not that you love them more or anything, but that physical need for them and them for you, is obviously much stronger. And yes, it's difficult to tell how much of the wish for care and control, is socialised - if you have given up your career (or downgraded it, as is probably more common now), because the workplace is structured so that you have to do that to spend lots of time with your young children, to then have the insult of losing them, without the benefit of a well-paid, high status career, would be too much.

I can imagine that in a world where 50 50 childcare is the norm before any break up, it would be far more emotionally and practically acceptable after any break up. But I also imagine that break ups would be less traumatic, because all the social shit that goes along with it in our present society, wouldn't be there. Heteronormative monogamy might not be the dominant lifestyle, for example. (Sorry, have jsut been dying to get that phrase into a discussion since I saw SGB use it somewhere and I haven't been able to do it in RL so have to settle for here.

But then men can't breastfeed/carry children inside them. So hmmmm....

I don't see that women are innately better at childcare than men apart from social conditioning/construct.

Isn't society set up to give men more freedom?

Also the stigma of not being the parent with care and control if you are the mother, is extremely strong in our society.

If you see feeding the child as part of childcare Janos, then I don't think you can argue that it is a social construct. Women are designed to feed their babies from their bodies. Men aren't. Having said that, there was a very interesting link to a tribe where the men "breastfeed" their babies when the women aren't around - in effect, having their nipples used as dummies.

Hmm. I imagine some people look down on me for being a single mum, but for most of my life some people have looked down on me, bein made angry by my very existence, tried in various ways to make me 'be normal' - I have been slagged off and criticized for (among other things) being long-term single, being a feminist, refusing monogamy/marriage and now refusing couplehood altogether, working in the porn industry, campaigning against censorship, being moderately fat and not apologising for it, ever, or going on a diet, ever...
THough I suppose to be technical i'm more co-parent than single mother in that DS' dad, while not my partner in any sexual or romantic sense (well we did have sex in order to accidently have DS) is a very involved and good father. Who is in fact in the next room playing with DS.

I think there's an interesting dynamic in heterosexual couples that don't have children (whether by choice or circumstance) because in those relationships I know, they truly are together because of want, rather than need. They tend to both work and contribute economically to the household and that balance is a lot harder once you throw children (not literally :o) into the mix.

I am a single mother by choice and I hadn't realised until I had a conversation with a male friend about my son how very threatened that obviously makes a lot of men feel. My friend is in a relationship with a feminist who is the WOHP while he is largely responsible for childcare but even though he is happy to accept that role reversal, the idea that he is entirely surplus to requirements obviously makes him very uncomfortable.

The tiny baby/highly dependent phase lasts a relatively short while though, in terms of a lifetime, now that we can control our fertility and are generally opting for less children.

I come back to thinking that you need to restructure society so that gender roles are completely broken down, and families can make a genuinely free choice as to what suits them, combined with employers and society being totally flexible and everyone being cool with that.

So eg if DH and I wanted to do half the work outside the home each, then our employers would agree in a flash, it would all be fine, our career prospects would not be harmed etc etc. People would be more relaxed about career breaks generally.

Just a move away from this slog yourself into the ground and everyone has to do things in quite a proscribed way, into a more relaxed, flexible and cheerful way of doing things.

Loads of studies say that happy employees are better ones, and that presentee long hours cultures are not the way to get top performance. Why does nobody listen.

Bottom line is that many single mothers are demonised as the perception is that they don't work. We worship money too much in this country, the pursuit of it, the villifying of anyone who does not pursue it at any cost.

Yes I can imagine non-frictional co-parenting being much more the norm in a non-patriarchal society.

Not that there'd be no such thing as romantic happy couples as well - just that there would be less pressure to be in one of those, or pretend to be.

LadyB - it's not surprising that feeling "surplus to requirements" would make someone feel uncomfortable in a society where status, money etc. are very important. I wouldn't feel comfortable if I were surplus to requirements.

But what's the definition of that? If a man is a loving, involved father, then surely he'd never be surplus to requirements, irrespective of how his DP sees him?

I talked about it with his partner and some other of my female friends (I have known all them for about 20 years so can be very open) and they all admitted that their partners were very threatened by how I have chosen to become a parent which I think is rather sad

that's really interesting and quite surprising LadyB.

Why on earth would men feel so threatened by women going it alone, unless they felt their own behaviour was such, that their own DP's might get wrong ideas? Maybe this is why the need to persecute women is so strong - their own shaky sense of where they fit in? Or maybe your friends are just all rather insecure?

I wonder if your friends are unusual or representative?

I don't know HB. They are all men in their 40s so a pretty narrow demographic.

I think it's probably about the fact that they feel that they contribute something very special as fathers and that I should acknowledge that my DS is missing something major in his life by not having a dad.

"If you see feeding the child as part of childcare Janos, then I don't think you can argue that it is a social construct."

No that's true...I was thinking out loud!

But then babies can be bottle fed...(whole other thread there of course).

Oh God, let's not go there.

Though there is a feminsit ding-dong to be had about that...

Probably not here though...

ive just come back-so havent had time to look at all of the thread but-
i think feminism did a lot for single mums
and i feel that for a while-things was going ok!
we often saw articles on single parents that was doing good.
i feel that single parents had more rights aswell-which was good.
having said this-i feel that single dads have always been seen in a better light!
unfortunatly-thanks to the current climate of cuts and finger pointing-with the help of the media-single parents are now the scum of the earth again-history repeats itself!
im a single parent-and at the moment i feel we re getting it left right and centre!
some dont realise that some of us are doing our best despite difficult circamstances-
actually-im very proud of what i have achieved with my daughter-
but im having to make exuses and trying harder to make people see this!
i feel that we are going backwards!
sorry if this has already been said!

ISNT "If things were genuinely equal - in society and for the experiment to work in each individual relationship - then I suspect that people's personalities would come to the fore and there would be equal numbers of homebods and people wanting to be by themselves of each sex."

I think that's a really relevant, overlooked point.
One problem is that under patriarchy, men have a lot of power when it comes to children. They get shared custody and they DO fob the childcare off onto their mothers and new girlfriends.
Two of my uncles fought tooth and nail to get custody of their daughters when their wives filed for divorce. The first received full custody (even though he had been violent in the marriage, but he was high up in the army) and then dumped her in a boarding school for 4 years. Her mother was allowed to look after her during the holidays

The other uncle fought his Irish wife for custody. She had gone back to Ireland and her daughter was really small, 4 I think, and he insisted on bringing her back to the UK every month. Fair enough, you might think. He wants to see his daughter. But he stayed at my grandmothers, and she did everything . Or some random cousin, like me, who happened to be there, was also expected to look after her. I think he really believed he was looking after her himself

This is the problem isn't it. In our current society where men seemingly hold all the cards, any idea that changes might erode mothers "claims" on their children are understandably greeted with concern.

I think the idea of everything being equal is great, if everything really is equal. In society as it stands, the idea that the children go with the father on break-up of a relationship, leaving the woman without children, and with her financial situation stuffed due to being female and having children, then that's just a horrifying idea. It is only a short while that women have been able to have their children in these circs after all.

The other problem with our utopia (and I did smile at "non frictional co-parenting") is that many people are bastards/wankers/out for revenge/whatever and that is not going to change. it may get better without a patriarchal system, but it's not going to go away. A lot of people just aren't nice and reasonable, especially at the end of a relationship.

And I am too steeped in teh current setup to imagine a setup other than man+women taking off in a big way IYSWIM. I just can't imagine living in free love communes with shared childcare. No matter how appealing it might be. Well the free love less so, the shared childcare lots!

I don't think the children should go with the father if the mother has sacrificed her career.

But if the father had more time with the children wouldn't the mother be able to get her career going again?

I think the idea where no one sacrifices their career, and childcare is split equally is the way forward, i know
lots of people who work long hours and don't see enough of their children and i don't think they realise what they are missing

But I think I'm in a minority with this opinion as I don't think men and women are ready for this or really want it.

"But if the father had more time with the children wouldn't the mother be able to get her career going again?"

No.

Sorry, but that's the simple answer to that. Middle aged women simply aren't as welcome in the world - or the workplace - as young women or as men of any age. Once you've downshifted, there is a massive resistance to upshifting again, the so called glass ceiling.

At the moment anyway. In a world where the workplace was more flexible, that vision should be possible.

I'm not sure men and women don't want it Truck, just that they're not ready to do it yet. It takes critical mass doesn't it.