Mothering Alone: Rethinking Single Motherhood in America

I think maybe some of us misunderstood what second-wave feminism was about. I for one thought it was all about the end of gender-as-we-knew-it. I thought that girls and women would no longer be trapped in femininity, and boys and men no longer trapped in masculinity. My husband and I used to occasionally dash into a toy store and run through, moving things out of the aisles marked "Boys" into the ones marked "Girls," and the other way around. It was as important to us that dolls and kitchen sets landed in the Boys aisle as it was that trucks and pirate sets showed up in the Girls aisle. At home, we shared child rearing, leaving notes on the diaper box, the only place we were both guaranteed to see. We seemed to have spent those years passing a baby over a subway turnstile as we dashed to and from work, or slipping a sleeping baby through our cat's cradle of intertwined arms as we took turns sleeping through a difficult night. Those were the days.

It seems, some thirty-odd years later, that I was mistaken. Second-wave feminism now seems to have been about making it possible for women to pump milk in law offices and laboratories, for richer women to hire poorer women to feed that milk to babies, for (some) women to "have it all." There may well be more men raising children as single fathers and as gay couples, but overall, it seems that the men who are partnered with women have increased their child-rearing responsibilities very slightly, and many, many more women are raising children without any men around at all. In some grand calculus, the percentage of overall child care done by American women compared with American men is probably about where it was before second-wave feminism.

But it does all feel rather different. Single motherhood has changed, from an aberration or a tragedy to a way of life, a perfectly ordinary way to raise children. And that is what each of these books is addressing: how single motherhood has shifted in the United States, to a choice, a value, a different attempt at the American dream.

Sidel starts—and it's good to begin with Sidel, the senior author here and one who has been wrestling with related problems for a long time—with a heartbreaking quick tour of single motherhood in the United States, from Nathanial Hawthorne's Hester Prynne; to Ronald Reagan's attack on "welfare queens"; Dan Quayle's even more bizarre attack on Murphy Brown; Clinton's attack on all poor mothers, known as welfare "reform"; and finally (written well before Obama was a gleam in our collective eye), to George Bush's calls for abstinence rather than sex education and marriage as a strategy to end poverty. Quite the country we've been living in. Another few pages in and we have the statistical portrait of single mothers: there are more of them than there used to be, and there are more of them among the poorer and darker people of the United States. Another few pages on methodology, and we get to the heart of the book by page 19: in-depth interviews with fifty women who became single mothers without intending to. Some fell into pregnancies and thought the relationship would continue; some were widowed, separated, divorced. Some were right in the midst of their single motherhood while being interviewed; some were reflecting back from marriages, or from the vantage point that grown children give a woman. If Single Motherhood is a place, a position one occupies in the...