Not the Whole Story: Challenging the Single Mother Narrative

Conclusion — Lea Caragata

211 Conclusion Lea Caragata Lucy starts her story by telling us that she is a single mom not by choice but because she had to leave an abusive relationship. This notion of choice is a fundamental idea in capitalist western democracies. Lucy must declaim that she had no choice because the common presumption is that people, single mothers, have made sets of choices, freely undertaken, that have created their present circumstance. If this book seeks to refute just one element of the common public discourse—it is this idea of freedom of choice. Van Parijs (1995) suggests that there are three conditions that must be satisfied for freedom to exist. The first is the presence of a well-established structure that enables the rule of law, enables security. The second is that this structure enables each person to own herself (self-ownership), and the third is that the structure enables each person the greatest possible opportunity to do what they might want to do. Although this is but a small element of a much larger and more complex philosophical argument, it is important in concluding this volume to draw attention to this idea of freedom of choice. Against the criteria set out above, none of our co-authors could reasonably be considered to have been able to act freely, to be agents in their lives. The rule of law that should have protected their basic personal security failed them, permitting often-repeated abuse. Furthermore, the very concept of self-ownership is inconsistent with any understanding of deep and enduring poverty, single parenting, and experience of abuse. The opportunity to do what they might have wanted to do has been constrained in most of these women’s lives since childhood. Wendell (1990) suggests that “much of what women appear to do freely is chosen in very limiting circumstances , where there are few choices left to us,” and this too accurately describes the life stories narrated here. 212 Conclusion The feminist philosopher Marilyn Frye (1985) takes up this issue of choice: I am committed to the view that the oppression of women is something women do not choose. Those of our activities and attitudes which play into women’s oppression are themselves strategies we are forced into by the circumstances of oppression we live with. A woman may continue to live with the man who batters her, but the choice to remain is not a free one; it is a choice among evils in a severely constrained situation, and she has not chosen that situation. The oppression of women is something consisting of and accomplished by a network of institutions and material and ideological forces which press women into the service of men. Women are not simply free to walk away from this servitude at will. But also, it is clear that there has always been resistance to female servitude, taking different shapes in different places and times. The question of responsibility, or rather, one important question, is this: Can we hold ourselves, and is it proper to hold each other, responsible for resistance? Or is it necessarily both stupid cruelty and a case of blaming the victim to add yet one more pressure in our lives, in each others’ lives, by expecting, demanding, requiring, encouraging, inviting acts and patterns of resistance and reconstruction which are not spontaneously forthcoming? (pp. 215–216) The stories of resistance and reconstruction told in this volume were offered spontaneously by women who see in such resistance and reconstruction the possibility that perhaps an entire system, but at least some of the individuals that act within it, will join them in this struggle for real freedom of choice. Such freedom is essential for women’s lives, lone mothers’ lives, to be celebrated—for their love and commitments to their children and for their contributions to their communities. Freedom for women can only exist if their rights, as both children and adults, to be safe from abuse and from the debilitating effects of profound deprivation are protected and safeguarded. Such protection—and the freedom of choice that derives from it—was absent from the lives of these 16 women and from the many others whose stories are similar. Amartya Sen (2000) suggests that material deprivation in the contemporary era is sufficiently powerful that it affects both the social dimensions of citizenship and then, compoundingly, one’s feelings of belonging, the Conclusion 213 construction of subjectivity. We...