The New Math of the Single Mother
Why the ranks of America’s unmarried moms keep
growing.
By JUNE CARBONE and
NAOMI CAHN in Politico Magazine
Over the course of our
years-long research about the work and family lives of women across the
country, we have been surprised by a common pattern threading through popular
blogs, religious radio talk shows, sociological studies and the accounts of our
friends, neighbors and acquaintances. Compared to a decade ago, higher rates of American women are getting pregnant unintentionally; indeed,
the United States has one of the highest unintended birth rates in the
developed world. At the same time, more women today have the children, and they often justify the decision in
terms of their Christian faith and opposition to abortion. The surprise?
Neither these women nor their families see much point in marrying a man merely
because they are pregnant.
There are competing
explanations for the rise in single mothers in the United States. To the Rick
Santorums of the political world, the increase shows “the fabric of this
country fall[ing] apart.” Others argue that mothers who chose not to marry are
the face of today’s independent woman—free from social and religious pressures
around marriage and child-rearing, leaning in and having it all too. As a
blogger for one of the country’s most widely read websites covering religion argues, today’s single mothers—who he says
“control the wealth, guard the home, rear the children and provide for the
family”—could represent a new “matriarchy.”
In reality, it’s not so
simple. Yes, single-parent families, which have tripled in the United States since 1960, mark women’s increased
independence. Many single mothers are proud that they can take care of
themselves, however hard it is for them to do so, and they are proud of their
decision to bear and raise children on their own, which would have ostracized
them in another era and risked ruin for them and their children.
Yet, the rising number
of single mothers in the United States also reflects an economy that limits
their choices. As income inequality in this country has shot up over the past
30 years, it has affected men even more than women. Between 1979 and 2007,
every group of men except for college graduates saw its incomes fall, while
every group of women except for high school dropouts enjoyed an increase in
income, according to the Pew Research Center. This means that there are more men at the top and bottom of the
income ladder, and a larger group of women in the middle with fewer acceptable
partners. Moreover, the men at the bottom have lost ground not only in terms of
income, but in rising rates of unemployment, job instability, lack of community
involvement and a corresponding loss of status. In these circumstances, marrying
and staying married can be more burden than boon. As one divorced mother we
interviewed told us, “I can take care of myself. I can take care of myself and
the kid. I just can’t take care of myself, the kid and him.”
Much as we should
celebrate economic advances for women, the rise of single-parent families,
then, reflects women’s lack of better choices and the realities of modern
economic conditions more than a concerted social movement ratifying female
empowerment. The percentage of female-headed households with children living in
poverty has gone up, from 33 percent in 2000 to 41 percent in 2011. All told, more than half of all children living in poverty in this country are part of
single-mother households.
How did we get here?
Let’s consider the origins of today’s single-parent families, more than 80
percent of which are headed by
women. The causes are not mysterious. In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a
brash young undersecretary of labor, wrote his infamous memo on the African-American family to call
attention to the disappearance of jobs for low-income men in inner cities of
the rustbelt North. His dramatic language about a “tangle of pathology” still
inflames racial wounds. But if restated in sociological terms, his diagnosis
surely commands near-unanimous support: Whenever stable employment declines for
the men in a social group, marriages and family lives in turn become less
stable. Divorce rates increase, women become more likely to have children on
their own, and women faced with poor marriage prospects become even pickier
about entering into a relationship at all.
Later sociologists, such
as Bill Wilson at Harvard University, explained why: The real problem is not that women simply won’t stay with
lower-earning men, though that sometimes happens. To a greater degree, the
problem is that the men who lose out in a more unequal society—by losing their
jobs, taking lower paying ones, possibly even becoming depressed—behave badly.
Laid-off men help out less at home than those working full time, and they are more
likely to drink or abuse their
intimate partners, giving women even more reason to raise their children on
their own. As inequality increases, so do substance abuse, arrests and imprisonment.
Collectively, job
instability, chronic unemployment, violence, mass incarceration and substance
abuse cause
women to write off high percentages of men in poorer communities as
unattractive long-term partners. An overwhelming share of never-married
American women—78 percent—say it is “very important” to them to have a spouse with a steady
job; that factor is even more important than shared values about having and
raising children. But only 46 percent of men rate a steady job as “very
important.” Sociologists Marcia Guttentag and Paul Secord observed in a number
of cross-cultural studies that when marriageable women outnumber the comparable
men in a given marriage market, the acceptable men—the ones who still have
jobs—find
that they can play the field, and do. But women burned in their initial
relationships, whether by the seemingly responsible partner they found cheating
on the side or the charming slacker dude busted for meth, become jaded.
They invest in themselves, not their relationships.
In their 2005 book, sociologists Kathy Edin
and Maria Kefalas, for example, quote one young woman, a white high school
dropout who had a child in her teens with a man who was awaiting trial:
That’s when I really
started [to get better], because I didn’t have to worry about what he was
doing, didn’t have to worry about him cheating on me, all this
stuff. [It was] then I realized that I had to do what I had to do to take care
of my son. … When he was there, my whole life revolved around
him, you know, so I always messed up somehow because I was so worried about
what he was doing.
Both men and women view marriage as a serious undertaking that
rests on trust, commitment and mutual exchange. Yet low-income women today are
warier of marriage than lower-income men, according to a 2013 study. Among 18-to 29-year-olds
without a high-school diploma, 67 percent of men versus 47 percent of women say
they expect to marry their current partner; among those with at least some
college, 68 percent of women versus 46 percent of men expect to marry their
current partner. In their twenties, better-educated men and less-educated woman
may have partners whose promise does not match their own; their
reluctance to commit increases with the disparities in their circumstances.
Without the ability to choose commitment to a partner who carries
his own weight in the relationship, women choose the second-best option:
independence, which allows them to control their own finances and their
partners’ access to their children. They also recognize that commitment to a
partner who cannot be trusted or who is a net drain on the family’s material
and emotional resources is a fool’s errand.
So is this new system of matriarchy? Emphatically not. Instead,
the system of greater economic inequality that writes off a high percentage of
low-income men is still a system of male power, with women simply choosing
single parenthood as the lesser of two evils. If single-family households were
really a sign of a new matriarchy—a reflection of women’s increased societal
power—we would simultaneously be seeing the decline of the patriarchal social
structure that has long defined American society (and that women like us
rebelled against during our college days in the seventies).
That prevailing system of male dominance had three overlapping
parts—each of which is still largely intact. First, it included the male
societal power that came from almost exclusive male access to the most
influential and highest-paying jobs. Today, women constitute almost half of the labor force,
and the gender wage gap for full-time workers—that is, the difference between
men and women’s incomes—has shrunk considerably. Yet, since 1990, the gender gap in wages
specifically for college graduates has actually increased; in fact,
taking into account factors like education level, specialty and hours worked,
the most dramatic increases between male and
female wages have come for those above the 90th percentile in income. In other
words, women’s wages aren’t just lagging behind men’s in top income
brackets—they’ve fallen farther behind; in a more unequal society, men have
been the big winners at the high end of the income spectrum. Competing for top
jobs has increasingly taken the form of working greater hours, and among the
elite, women are still much more likely than men to drop out of the labor
market when children come.
Second, our society’s longstanding, and still prevailing,
patriarchal system also extends to male political power—the ability to secure
laws reflecting male preferences and perspectives over female ones. According
to various polls, women as a group are more
likely to support a larger role for government in providing basic services,
while men as a group are more likely to prefer the economic policies that
have contributed to increasing economic inequality—deregulation of Wall Street,
for example. These are the prevailing economic policies of the day; men,
particularly the most powerful men, are still winning out on political issues.
Third, patriarchy has also meant male power over the family.
Feminist denunciations of marriage, after all, have often described it as a
system that secured male power over children, as well as males’ ability to set
relationship terms for dependent wives who vowed at the altar “to obey” and
faced ignominy if they left unhappy unions. But the new single-parent system
cannot be termed a matriarchy that gives women power over relationships. State
laws relating to family and marriage have made long term alimony less common
and reduced the child support obligations of higher earners who obtain
shared custody orders. Custody standards, in turn, have also moved away from a
preference for primary caretakers to insistence on shared parenting—a useful
shift when both parents can take on that responsibility, but a less realistic
one between two people who never made a long-term commitment to each other.
Empirical studies show that women, who initiate the overwhelming
majority of divorces, become less likely to do so if they fear loss of control
over their children. The states that insist on shared custody still restrain
women who would like to end their relationships and make marriage that much
less attractive.
The word “matriarchy” suggests power, and it is hard to see what
power today’s struggling single mothers exercise. Their hard-won independence,
in a world where they do not have the power to create better relationships or
stronger communities, is under assault. They might be better off unmarried than
married to unemployed boyfriends who still live at home with their mothers. But
with children to raise, bills to pay and multiple jobs to go to, do they really
have any other choice?
June Carbone, Robina chair of law, science and technology at the
University of Minnesota, and
Naomi Cahn, Harold H. Greene professor at George Washington
University Law School, are authors of Marriage Markets: How Inequality Is Remaking the American
Family.
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