5th January 2025:
Single mother’s are pretty badly demonised within mainstream culture, and treated as though they are a social problem. Statistics that show an ‘alarming’ rise of single mothers are treated as though they are indicative of an impending disaster, as though we are heading towards a social apocalypse if such a trend continues. Single mothers are treated on the one hand as though they are victims of deprivation or irresponsible males and on the other as though they are irresponsible, having children just to get a flat, bad mothers, and so on.
I have recently started reading the book Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives (2017), edited by Carole McCann and Seuny-Kyung Kim in my local library. Not really reading it cover to cover as it is a huge tome, but rather cherry picking the choice essays that catch my eye. One such essay was Bargaining with Patriarchy by Deniz Kandiyoti. In it she describes how in sub-Saharan Afrika women and their children are often treated culturally as social and economic units in and of themselves, and not requiring the support of a husband. In fact, she gives several examples of development projects in this region where the assumption taken was that the husband was the head of the household and therefore the one who is in control of all resources and of all agricultural work, in other words, what you might call classical patriarchy. In the three cases she mentions however the women kicked off as they regarded themselves and their children as their own responsibility and defended their own autonomy. Often they refused to work at all, or they just upped and left when development workers came in and tried to enforce classical patriarchy upon them. In their society, they regarded their own autonomy as mothers something to defend. That is, rather than the idea of ‘single mothers’ being a slight, they regarded their own autonomy as something they would fight to defend.
To quote:
In short, the insecurities of Afrikan polygyny for women are matched by areas of relative autonomy that they clearly strive to maximise. Men’s responsibility for their wives’ support, while normative in some instances, is in actual fact relatively low. Typically, it is the woman who is primarily responsible for her own and her children’s upkeep, including meeting the costs of their education, with variable degrees of assistance from her husband. Women have very little to gain and a lot to lose by becoming totally dependent on husbands, and hence they quite rightly resist projects that tilt the balance they strive to maintain. In their protests, wives are safeguarding already existing spheres of autonomy.
Commenting on Ashanti marriage, Abu singles out as its most striking feature ‘the separateness of spouses’ resources and activities and the overtness of the bargaining element in the relationship. Polygyny and, in this case, the continuing obligations of men and women to their own kin do not foster a notion of the family or household as a corporate entity.
… it is within a broadly defined Afro-Caribbean pattern that we find some of the clearest instances of non-corporateness of the conjugal family both in ideology and in practice... Works on historical transformations suggest that colonisation eroded the material basis for women’s relative autonomy without offering attenuating modifications in either marketplace or marital options. The more contemporary development projects discussed above also tend to assume or impose a male-headed corporate family model, which curtails women’s options without opening up other avenues to security and wellbeing. Consequently, they openly resist them.
The term 'single mothers' is largely considered derogatory because it assumes that women ought to have a husband, but at least in some areas of the world, this is not the case, and women consider themselves and their children as separate economic and social units. Regardless of what you think about polygyny, I think the cultural idea of women and children being considered and valued as social and economic units in and of themseves, rather than the 'corporate family' model, is a valuable one, perhaps better suited to a more libertarian culture. I don't know, I just thought the essay was really useful in reconsidering the huge emphasis on the corporate family model with the man at the head. It seems to me that single mothers get a bad deal out of this cultural norm when that needn't be the case.
And another advantage of this perspective is that it removes the slur that single mothers are ‘poor and uneducated working class women of low repute’. Suddenly they are recast in a very different cultural light, one that actually reflects much better upon them and their choices, and that does not demean them just because for whatever reason they have chosen not to live with the father(s) of their child or children, or indeed any husband, whether father or not. Instead, they have chosen to embrace their autonomy and look after their own children. I think this recasts the whole subject of ‘single mothers’ in a very different light, one in which it isn’t a problem at all, but rather a cultural choice.
Okay, so I know the issue is more complicated than that, but in this small blog piece on the matter I just wanted to present a different perspective, one that I think is actually more human and less dehumanising, and that offers food for thought. I have often felt that a mother and her children were a separate economic and social unit, and a more natural unit than the contemporary ‘corporate’ family, and for that reason I found this essay, written in 1988, to be illuminating and worth sharing*.
*(Though I appreciate that the essay was written to demonstrate how women bargain with oppressive patriarchy's in different parts of the world in order to maximise their own interests rather than to discuss what might be more libertarian ways of organising social and economic life for women, I nonetheless think it has value in serving that purpose too.)