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247 Q In 1992, Vice President Dan Quayle famously criticized a popular sitcom character for choosing to be a single mother. Murphy Brown, he claimed, was “mocking the importance of fathers.” Quayle’s tirade against a fictional character proved a bit embarrassing. It made headlines and fueled countercritique that, at a time of waning support for the first Bush administration, made sense to many Americans. Diane English, creator of Murphy Brown, quipped, “If the Vice President thinks it’s disgraceful for an unmarried woman to bear a child, and if he believes that a woman cannot adequately raise a child without a father, then he’d better make sure abortion remains safe and legal.”1 Quayle’s moralizing and English’s defense of women’s autonomy, though a short-lived scuffle, resonated both forward and backward in time. Two important features of motherhood have been logical extensions of modern life: women’s control of reproduction and women’s lagging opportunities to financially support their children; these were controversial in 1992, and they are still controversial today. Cultural anxiety about working mothers peaked in the 1980s, thereafter becoming so increasingly commonplace as to provoke fewer and fewer apocalyptic predictions about the future of the country. But public debates about abortion became more heated and polarizing over time, especially with the rise of a well-financed anti-abortion movement and its coordinated legal strategy aimed at dismantling the provisions of in Roe v. Wade. Debates about women’s reproductive bodies have echoed nineteenth-century struggles, with new technological and partisan political twists and possibilities for surveillance and commercialization of women’s wombs unknown to previous generations. Meanwhile, for all the zealous defense of the sanctity of marriage, a dramatic trend toward mothering outside marriage would flummox Americans right down to the present. The very diversity and disruptions of maternal experiences continue to challenge expert prescriptions. New forms of maternal politics have emerged, but mothers have persisted in taking considerable c h a p t e r 1 0 Mothers’ Changing Lives and Continuous Caregiving 248 Mothers of Invention individual responsibility for a fraying social support system as they rear their children. Changing Families and Female Life Patterns In 1975, Americans saw a marked departure from the monotonously middle-class white family that the postwar purveyors of culture had projected onto their television sets. Divorced single mother Ann Romano appeared in One Day at a Time, which aired for nine seasons and enjoyed great popularity. In movies such as Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) and An Unmarried Woman (1978), Americans watched the fictional journeys of single mothers surviving and thriving.2 The mold was cracking open much more emphatically in the real world.The changes in American family life, and therefore motherhood, in the past half-century, especially since the 1970s, have been more rapid and for many more bewildering than in any other period. The social movements described in chapter 9 challenged expectations and fueled changes in the family. So too did a growing need for women’s income, men’s declining income potential as breadwinners, economic contraction, and changes in reproductive possibilities and technologies. Divorce rates increased significantly, more than doubling between 1960 and 1980.3 Feminism certainly influenced women ’s willingness to leave relationships that ranged from unsatisfying to abusive, while the individualist ethos of the 1970s contributed to men’s departures as well. Furthermore, Americans no longer rushed into marriage; the average age of marriage rose from 20.3 in 1960 to 22 in 1980, and by the 1980s, one in six women were choosing not to marry. By 2010, the average age of marriage for women was 26, and for men, 28.4 From the 1960s forward, motherhood became less tightly scripted and confined within heterosexual marriage and male-breadwinning/female-caregiving dichotomies . On the whole, women have long modified their child-rearing practices, in keeping with the challenges posed by each era’s economy, the prescriptions of the culture, and personal preferences; women were having on average fewer children. The birth rate had fallen markedly in the 1930s and picked up to historic proportions in the affluent baby boom era, peaking at 3.8 live births per woman, a twentiethcentury record. Expanded access to contraception and abortion and a contracted American economy in the 1970s contributed to another falling birth rate, as did concerns about population growth, cultural questioning of the hyperdomesticity of the baby boom era, and women’s increased participation in education and...

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