Sidel - Unsung heroines single mothers and the American dream

T he denigration and demonization of single mothers has deep roots in American culture. Mothers without husbands have been looked upon with suspicion and hostility since the time of the earliest settlers. Today's concerns about the weakening of the traditional family and about related issues such as single motherhood, divorce, sexual permissiveness, teenage pregnancy, and abortion have formed a central theme in American society for generations. Both the early Settlement Laws and the Colonial Poor Laws of seventeenth-century America punished husbandless women and unwed mothers, differentiating between the deserving and the undeserving. During the early years of the twentieth century, programs to help the poor stated that only fit and worthy women would receive help; these generally were white widows.

The recent period of intensified concern about single motherhood was spurred by the ascendancy of conservative ideology in the United States as marked by the election of Ronald Reagan as president. Rapid social change during the 1970s and 1980sincreasing numbers of single mothers, especially women having children outside marriage; a significant increase in teenage pregnancy and birth; a continuing high divorce rate; and fundamental changes in the roles and status of womencontributed to the anxiety about social issues. Reagan's infamous labeling of poor women as welfare queens was accompanied by significant cutbacks in essential social services, particularly for poor women and children. In the early 1980s Medicaid, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the food stamp program, maternal and child health services, and day care were all slashed. These cutbacks increased the number of poor people and had a particularly devastating impact on female-headed families. Consequently, during this period there was a significant increase in both the feminization and the minoritization of poverty.

Since the early 1990s, single mothers have continued to be systematically stereotyped and stigmatized. Poor single mothers have once again been vilified as being lazy, irresponsible, dependent, deviant, and, above all, living off the hard work of others. Single mothers, particularly those who have children outside of marriage, have been blamed for virtually all the nation's social problemsthe breakdown of the family, the crime rate, drug and alcohol addiction, illiteracy, homelessness, poverty, and students' poor academic performance. Perhaps the most denigrating and dehumanizing attacks on single mothers occurred in 1995 on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives when, as part of an effort to reduce the money spent on social welfare programs, two members of Congress compared welfare recipients to animals. This campaign was fueled by conservative Republicans, spearheaded by Newt Gingrich and buttressed by the work of the social scientist Charles Murray, who labeled out-of-wedlock births the single most important problem of our time as he railed against the culture of illegitimacy.

In 1992, the then vice president, Dan Quayle, set off a firestorm by condemning Murphy Brown, the central character in a popular television sitcom, for having a baby outside of marriage. Interestingly, during the episode in which Murphy Brown decided to have the baby, she debated between having an abortion and bearing a child. Quayle was surely not calling for her to terminate the pregnancy; he was clearly criticizing her for not being married before becoming pregnant. In the same speech, Quayle also suggested that unmarried women with children were at least partially responsible for the lawless social anarchy that erupted in the May 1992 riots in Los Angeles following the acquittal of the four police officers who brutally beat Rodney King. Several months later, an influential and widely read article by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead titled Dan Quayle Was Right was published in the