Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice: How Women are Choosing Parenthood Without Marriage and Creating the New American Family (review)

There has been a massive increase in the proportions of children raised by single parents, most of whom are female, although the more rapidly growing group is male. Until about 1940, single parenthood most commonly emerged from the death of one partner, and for the next several decades from union dissolution. However, since the 1980s non-marital childbearing has emerged as the dominant route to single parenthood. Rosanna Hertz argues in this thoughtful qualitative study that women are now choosing parenthood without marriage and creating the new American family so strongly that she puts it in her subtitle.

Hertz presents the stories of 65/67 women (both figures are given), focusing on 50 who were featured and described in the book. They were interviewed individually in eastern Massachusetts between 1995 and 2004. All were employed, living outside a partnered relationship and not on welfare. Some became pregnant through known donors, some used anonymous donor sperm, some became pregnant "by accident" and some women adopted.

She found that most were reluctant pioneers, women with partners (male or female) who were either not "into" them or perhaps just not into parenthood. And far from trying to raise children without men, most made strong and persistent efforts to make sure that their children had important men in their lives (although the author herself appears to feel that this is copping out to patriarchy). She identified several stages in the decision to become a "single mother by choice." The first, the "liminal" stage, emerges as women begin to realize that their strategies to achieve a standard sequence (partner, then parent) were not likely to pan out in time; most were well into their 30s when they made the decision to adopt or pursue a nonstandard insemination. They then begin to mobilize support from key others – family, friends and, sometimes, potential donors. After the baby has entered their lives, they focus on the struggle to provide financial support and parenting, narrowing their social lives (and often cutting back on work) as nearly all modern mothers must do. In 2005, Hertz recontacted many of her interviewees, and found that many were already looking forward to the empty nest. It all feels so normal.

For each set of stages, Hertz distinguishes the origin groups, noting, for example, how the adoption group is less concerned with biological relatedness than those who used donors of one sort or another. Each section is based on the stages ("The Big Decision," "After Baby, Now What?" and "Composing a Family") and includes three chapters, reflecting in one way or another the ways these different origins nevertheless lead to standard American families.

And that is her intent. As she writes in her introduction, "The bottom line of this book is clear: we can no longer deny that the core of family life is the mother and her children." She only problematizes men as variably interested by-standers, none of whom really wants to parent the child he is contributing to, although a major theme from many of the mothers using known sperm donors is to make sure that the man who produced the sperm does not interfere too much in the families they are constructing. The men these women want in their children's lives are grandfathers, uncles and family friends, not parents.

Some of this, of course, is fair. Too many men have made their way into and through adulthood negotiating work and gender structures that do not make fatherhood a valued role. However, I would have been much happier with the book as scholarship, if Hertz had interviewed some of the known donors and thought more about men as people who would benefit as fathers and not patriarchs. A reconstruction of the family that excludes men as parents means that these women's sons learn that disengaged fatherhood is appropriate, and learn as well that...