Unbroken Homes

Single-Parent Mothers Tell Their Stories

J Dianne Garner, Wendy A Paterson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317720072
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Explore the real-life triumphs and tragedies of single-parent mothers!Unbroken Homes is a "story quilt" of personal narratives constructed from in-depth, case study interviews of five single-parent mothers. The book chronicles their journeys as mothers, daughters, and women, in relationships and in solitude, displaying their stories in their own words like the squares of a multicolored quilt. Unbroken Homes breaks through the stigma associated with "broken homes" and provides a new perspective on the reorganization of American families.Unbroken Homes encourages you to rethink some damaging stereotypical assumptions about children from single-mother headed homes. Drawing information from family research, counseling, and a cross-section of social sciences, this book is pertinent to any professional who works with single parents or their children. Unbroken Homes does not deal with what is "typical" in the single-parenting experience, nor does it give advice or proselytize. Rather, its purpose is to discover the meaning that single-parent mothers bring to their own lives, helping you to understand the dynamics of single-parent families from a uniquely personal perspective.In Unbroken Homes you will witness the ways that these women:

• experience the ill effects of gender role socialization
• work to overcome stigma
• redefine ideals for family life and gender expectations
• balance responsibilities in and outside of their homes
• stretch finances to meet the needs of their families
• regain strength and self-confidence
• encourage their children's development
• affirm the strength of their families
• cope with depression
• develop networks of support

This intensely personal collection of women's stories and reflections is a must read for everyone who seeks a better understanding of divorce, single-parenting, and being alone, from an insider's perspective.

Chapter 1

What Is Family? Mothering, Fathering, and Being Single

I didn't want to be a statistic. I didn't want people to say, “See. She's divorced. Look at her kids. They're not doing well in school.” … I just didn't want to have my kids at any disadvantage, so I probably put in more than most parents, as if there were two parents in the house.

(From Kathleen's narrative, Chapter 3)

Successful single-parent households challenge the notion that the healthiest family structure requires two parents. Faced with a preponderance of research and popular rhetoric that elevates the two-parent home to an American ideal, mothers facing single parenting cannot avoid being influenced by the stigma associated with their family structure.

Reflecting on the “family crisis” platform of political campaigns in the 1980s and 1990s, historian Stephanie Coontz (1992) maintains, “Families have always been in flux and often in crisis; they have never lived up to nostalgic notions about ‘the way things used to be’ “ (p. 2). The weight of an idealized image, however, has such a great impact that even the personal experiences of real families often fall short when measured against the myths that define families, gender expectations for mothers and fathers, and the onus of being a single woman in a “couples” world.

This chapter lays the groundwork for the narratives of the women in this book. Having conducted the interviews of the women before doing most of the library research for this study, I was surprised by how the women's narratives and reflections paralleled so many of the discussions about women and single mothers in a variety of texts, especially those which quote other single-parent women. The themes organizing this chapter are echoed strongly within the women's narratives; thus, I refer to resources cited in this chapter within the interpretive “stitching” that connects sections of each woman's monologue. These topics are also revisited in Chapter 7, which presents unique and common themes drawn from the women's stories.

This chapter summarizes and discusses pertinent literature on five major topics. The first and primary area for consideration is defining the term family: How is a family constructed in the sociopolitical context? How does history trace its development? How do normative expectations shape our concept of what is a “deviant” family? The second and third topics focus on gender, tracing the American cultural understanding of parenting and child rearing and our expectations about motherhood and fatherhood, adding important information about gender role ascription and transmission. The fourth section concentrates on divorce, contrasting the arguments of experts who focus on the damaging effects of divorce on partners and children with those who see divorce as liberation for women and a necessary end to chaotic marriages. Finally, feminist psychology provides an additional perspective on the female experience in American culture, especially the experiences of “single” women.

DEFINING FAMILY

The Way We Never Were: Myths and History

For her provocative and thorough treatise on the American family, historian Stephanie Coontz (1992) chose the title The Way We Never Were to summarize the history of families in American culture. Tracing its development from the early colonial period to the present day, Coontz depicts the way the family has become more legend than reality, more myth than truth.

Sociologists agree. Five of these common family myths are especially helpful in framing the research of sociologists, psychologists, and historians who investigate questions associated with each myth. What emerges from such investigations is the contrast between these commonly accepted myths and the lived experiences of real families. I have used these myths as a framework for discussing the phenomenon of single-parent families:

1. The myth of the harmonious family of the past: History was once witness to a “golden age of the family,” and returning to such a model would solve the problems that beset modern families.

2. The myth of separate worlds: The family is “a refuge from a cold and competitive world,” assuming that the family can be separated from the social forces that surround it.

3. The myth of the monolithic family form: The “typical American family” includes mother, father, and children, primarily found in children's books, the media, and political platforms.

4. The myth of the undifferentiated family experience: All members of a single family have common needs, experiences, and interests, and the healthy family serves all members equally well.

5. The myth of family consensus: Families are successful if harmonious and loving. (Baca Zinn and Eitzen, 1990, pp. 7–21)

What Golden Age?

To the first myth, historians respond that no historic golden age of the family ever existed (Baca Zinn and Eitzen, 1990; Coontz, 1992; Demos, 1986). In a misguided attempt to find solutions to problems that reside in a combined social, political, cultural, and economic context, family “reformers” look for traditional models from past history, but such models either never existed or existed in a totally different context. Instead, such models are amalgamations of “scripts” from a number of different times and locations (Coontz, 1992).

Even the indices of “decay” traditionally used to trace social disorganization have no consistent or reliable interpretation. Data on historical families are available, but some data collection methods and operational definitions associated with recorded data have changed over time. For example, divorce rates predating current court-reported divorce proceedings never reflected the desertions that constituted many divorces before legal records were kept. Increases in child abuse reporting rates may reflect changing attitudes toward child rearing; for example, “Spare the rod, spoil the child” has completely changed from a warning against permissiveness to grounds for social service intervention. High school dropout rates were actually higher before 1940, when less than half of those students who made it as far as secondary education actually fin-ished. Measures of youth violence in pre-Civil War statistics name New York City as the “most dangerous place in the world,” and higher youth homicide rates in the 1930s compared unfavorably to those as recent as the 1980s. In the 1820s, per capita alcohol consumption was three times higher than it is today, and the major drug epidemic of the 1800s included opium, cocaine, and morphine (Coontz, 1992).

There is no real value in attempting to locate any single ideal family form in American history, since all forms can be disputed. Family historians agree that “there is no one family form that has ever protected people from poverty or social disruption” (Coontz, 1992, p. 5). The colonial family, for example, often selected as a model of discipline and the Puritan ethic of hard work, was predicated on an all-powerful father who literally owned his wife and children and could use or abuse them, with the blessings of both church and state (Demos, 1986). The intact nuclear family was nonexistent in this era, which witnessed one-third to one-half of all children in colonial families deprived of at least one parent before the age of twenty-one (Coontz, 1992).

The Victorian ideal depicted in serene images of mother, father, and children around the family Christmas tree was really built on the child and female labor of the working classes. In fact, prior to the 1900s, the concept of holidays such as Thanksgiving and Christmas presenting warm opportunities for family bonding was not yet developed, and not even close to the emotional intensity of the current era. Conditions in child labor sweatshops spurred turn-of-the-century reformers to cry for a “return to the traditional family” of the antebellum period. During this time, a new division of labor by age and sex and the segregation of work outside the home from domestic work within the family led to unprecedented gender role divisions, establishing gender-based disequilibrium that persisted beyond its historical antecedents (Coontz, 1992).

Nostalgia for the family of the 1950s, persistently the object of conservative political acclaim, is symbolized almost universally in the literature as the Ozzie and Harriet caricature. The much celebrated nuclear family of the 1940s and 1950s actually represented an “aberrant period” in the history of the family (Stacey, 1990). During this time, unlike previous trends in the American family, women became mothers at an earlier age; fertility increased, with teenage pregnancy more than doubling for white women; divorce rates declined; and women's educational parity with men dropped. The extended family of the depression era, romanticized in the television series The Waltons, was abandoned in favor of a “new” isolated middle-class family with strong democratic values and equally strong expectations for attaining both material wealth and perfect familial harmony, a life shared by few 1950s families. Trying to live up to the image, rather than accept their own reality, sent middle-class women to psychotherapists in unprecedented numbers, where they were prescribed tranquilizers, whose manufacture and sale, along with alcohol consumption by women, skyrocketed (Coontz, 1992).

The much touted prosperity of this era was not idyllic for the 25 percent of its families who were considered poor, the 33 percent of its children living in poverty, and the 60 percent of its senior citizens whose yearly income was less than $1,000. Minority families were virtually excluded from the benefits of middle-class prosperity, with 50 percent of two-parent African-American families considered “poor.” Women were “forced” from jobs held before World War II, encouraged to “choose” domesticity and child rearing, and punished if they remained employed through demotion to lower-status and lower-paying jobs (Coontz, 1992, pp. 23–30). However, despite one-fourth to one-third of all marriages contracted in the 1950s ending in eventual divorce, this time period fostered a “particularly distorted impression of normalcy and time-lessness of the modern family system” in the baby boomers who were raised by its parents (Stacey, 1990, p. 9).

The Nuclear Family in the Nuclear Age

The genesis of the second myth of the family as protection from the world may be attributed to the post-Civil War reformers who reacted to the difficult industrial conditions of an increasingly urban population by forging campaigns to “save the children” of the working and largely immigrant classes. Political attention to these issues led to the enactment of legislation that supported the nuclear family, prohibiting child labor and enforcing female domesticity by giving the government power to regulate work hours and tasks for women. This had an invasive, rather than protective, effect for families—mostly the poor and working classes—whose family functioning did not fit the “model of the true home” (Coontz, 1992, p. 133)

Predating post-Civil War courts' actions regulating marriage, birth control, and criminality by minors, antebellum courts had already adopted the white, Northern middle-class family as the privileged model, and those unfortunate citizens whose families “failed” in comparison were sometimes institutionalized, giving the government the power to act in loco parentis (Coontz, 1992).

Direct government interference, however, was only one force shaping the destiny of families. Historically, “the family was as much acted upon as it was an actor in its own right” (Demos, 1986, p. 18). Economics, social welfare agencies, and psychological, sociological, and educational agencies intervened directly in the functioning of families. Throughout history, the relationship between the family and other institutions has been complicated by many factors—such as workers' pay, hours, and conditions; neighborhood dynamics; schools and other social agencies—taking active roles in defining and setting limits on family time, space, and even daily living conditions (Stacey, 1990). In a dichotomy of evasion and invasion, whereby the state has moved to “protect” family privacy, it has also allowed, and in some cases encouraged, business practices such as forced transfers, layoffs, long work hours, restricted health benefits, and the lack of parental leave policies to manipulate the home economically (Coontz, 1992, p. 146).

Social reform often meant enforcing norms. The Social Security Act of 1935, hailed as family protection, in effect solidified the gender lock on work, enforcing the stereotype of male as breadwinner through whom the female would receive benefits. State inter-vention in family life escalated with the welfare system and a continued emphasis on the state role in “managing” marriage and family functions. Economics and morality became mixed, indistinguishable from each other, with white, middle-class Protestant values becoming the touchstone by which all families were measured for “worthiness” to receive aid. Historian William Graebner (1987) called it “democratic social engineering,” a system of state regulation of families whose purpose was to preserve economic inequality and conservative social control (as cited in Coontz, 1992, p. 140).

Even the rise of therapeutic intervention in social work and psychology made the forces outside the family ever more controlling of its members. Throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, continual additions to legislation regulated internal family affairs, from domestic violence to parenting to sexuality. The state itself became the sole mediating body in marital disputes (Coontz, 1992, pp. 137–140). Nowhere, however, is the interplay between outside forces and the family better illustrated than in the family of the 1950s.

Reiterating the assertion that the family of the 1950s was “a historical fluke,” Coontz (1992) explains that it was literally “created” in response to “a unique and temporary conjuncture of economic, social and political factors” (p. 28). Home and hearth became the symbolic defense for the cold war that raged outside, and the family was heralded as the first line of defense against the communist threat. Fear, popularized by the McCarthy trials and escalated by nuclear arms proliferation, contributed to the inward turning of the family, which sought escape in “domestic bliss” from an ever uncertain future (Stacey, 1990, p. 10). The children of the 1950s family often engaged in projecting an image of their family's health when, in reality, families were not without problems. The family members of the 1950s were more interested in “preventing the outside world from [seeing] the harsh realities of family life” than they were in promoting world peace. Popular plays of this time by Tennessee Williams, Eugene O'Neill, and Arthur Miller depicted the degradation of families and revealed the explosive emotions that seethed not too far below the surface of the image (Coontz, 1992, pp. 33, 34). In 1990, Benita Eisler wrote, “Behind the hedges and driveways of upper-middle class suburbia were tragedies of madness, suicide, and chronic and severe alcoholism” (as cited in Coontz, p. 34).

Capitalism was perhaps the major creator and supporter of the 1950s nuclear family unit, but it was also the source of its eventual dissolution. From the subsidizing of single-family homes to the heavy marketing of home products and the deliberate promotion of the “American Dream” (single-family home, two parents, two cars, two kids, and economic self-sufficiency), the commercialism of the “boom time” led to the absolute necessity for two wage earners in the family and the subsequent influx of women into the workforce. Commercial ventures capitalized on the consumerist mentality they helped to create, focusing marketing strategies on women and children. Widespread support for education encouraged the upward mobility of youths raised in the 1950s, and baby boomers carried the increased materialism far into their adulthood in the 1980s (Coontz, 1992, pp. 38, 171).

Coontz (1992) sums up the curious dichotomy between family illusions of privacy and state incursions into family affairs:

neither the family nor the state is unitary, and relations be-tween them are far more complicated than this. In the final analysis, the entire notion of the state undermining some pri-mordial family privacy is a myth, because the nuclear family has never existed as an autonomous, p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• About the Author
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. What Is Family? Mothering, Fathering, and Being Single
• Squares of the Quilt: Single Mothers Through their Own Eyes
• Chapter 2. Judith: “Getting My Life Back”
• Chapter 3. Kathleen: “I Want to Do Everything Right”
• Chapter 4. Shawna: “Stand Your Ground”
• Chapter 5. Lyn: “Just Get On with It”
• Chapter 6. Sarah: “Reparenting the Child in Me”
• Chapter 7. Viewing the Quilt: Patterns and Themes
• References
• Index