Single Mother: The Emergence of the Domestic Intellectual

part III. Keyword: Ethics

p a r t i i i Keyword: Ethics The denunciation of single mothers has in the past relied on an intensely moral discourse of shame: the shame of getting pregnant “out of wedlock,” of not being able to support your baby, or having failed in your marriage. The intensity of these judgments has faded for many single mothers, yet the threat is always lurking, just around the corner, in the form of politicians, social scientists, and others who continue to argue, in various ways, that the two-parent family is the best structure for raising children. The most vociferous of these voices are the family values politicians, following in the footsteps of Dan Quayle. He claimed credit in his 1996 book, The American Family: Discovering the Values That Make Us Strong, for helping to create a national consensus, extending to President Clinton, on the importance of family values, best demonstrated through what he calls “the intact family,” or “the only truly functioning family. Fathers do matter. Families are the basis of our society. We must support the unified model of father, mother, and child. On this, we’re all allies. Strengthening families should not be a political issue” (2). Although Quayle has lost some support, there are now less media-hungry but still influential voices acknowledging that the intact family is no longer the norm while at the same time mourning its demise. Looking for easy explanations to troubled youth, for example, social commentators are quick to point to the high divorce rate. Looking for reasons for the high divorce rate, social commentators are prone to blame “selfish” women. Nationally syndicated newspaper columnist Cal Thomas, for example, professes deep concern about what he believes to be a disdain for marriage and blames “contemporary culture,” mentioning as a specific example Sex and the City for encouraging women to value personal happiness over commitment to marriage. The “intact family” bases its moral vision on an isolated and idealized domestic sphere. In this world, certain universal truths such as mothers’ sacrifice are grounded in biological essentialisms about gender and sexuality . There are no choices—or at least, there are only bad choices. Conservatives may advocate choice in the market but are appalled by the possibility that people might choose to inhabit different kinds of families. This is a very convenient strategy, for if the “intact family” is maintained or achieved, no further inquiry need be made. The private sphere remains private, and all the skeletons remain in the closet. Family values proponents can claim the moral high ground because they never acknowledge the complexities of parenting, the simultaneous and sometimes contradictory impulses to care for your children and for yourself. Expressions of desire—at least on the part of mothers—are indications of selfishness. Foucault gives us one way to understand the articulation of sacrifice and morals. As I discuss in the “Everyday Life” section, he traces the historical shift, in Greco-Roman times, from the practice of “care of the self” to the Christian mandate to “know thyself:” First, there has been a profound transformation in the moral principles of Western society. We find it difficult to base rigorous morality and austere principles on the precept that we should give more care to ourselves than to anything else in the world. We inherit the tradition of Christian morality which makes self-renunciation the condition for salvation. . . . “Know thyself” has obscured “take care of yourself” because our morality, a morality of asceticism, insists that the self is that which one can reject. (1997, 228) The good mother—the moral mother—knows that in order to be perceived as good, she must renounce her desires. Knowing oneself requires the rejection of bodily desires, of self-love. The mother must sacrifice all aspects of herself in order to care for her family, and in doing so, she shows herself to be defined through her relations to others. Notice how this mandate lets everyone else off the hook for caring, since care of others , both inside and outside the home, is the mother’s job—this is one criteria of an “intact family.” The bad mother is selfish and thus suspect in her ability to care for others. The bad mother becomes the object of moral denunciations. Everyone feels free to judge the bad mother. The challenge for domestic intellectuals is to resist this pressure to sacri fice oneself in order to avoid becoming...