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Say It Loud: Out of Wedlock and Proud (Newsday, February 1994)
- University of Minnesota Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
368 I’m an unmarried mother, one of those miscreants recently denounced in these pages by former education secretary William Bennett and Peter Wehner of Empower America. I am not and have never been on welfare; rather, I’m the sort of affluent Murphy Brown type Dan Quayle thinks sets a bad example for the lower classes. Nor am I functionally a single parent: I live with my daughter’s father, my companion of 14 years. I’ve always hoped we would join or start a communal household, but it hasn’t happened. As far as I can tell, our domestic routine is indistinguishable from that of married couples in our socioeconomic milieu—at least those couples who are making a self-conscious effort to share child-rearing. Our finances are equally intertwined, our problems no doubt equally banal. Still, we’ve resisted marrying, partly in symbolic protest against the relentless drumbeat for “family values,” partly because we feel no need to get the state involved in our relationship, and no irresistible economic or social pressure to do so. Since “illegitimacy” does affect both baby’s and father’s rights, we went to court to have legal paternity declared. Ironically, in New York State there’s no simple way to do this—you can’t just sign a paper. One parent has to sue the other. Since it’s usually the mother who sues the father, we did it the other way around. The judge asked me if this man was indeed the baby’s father, and if I waived my right to a lawyer and blood test results. He then pronounced Nona and Stanley daughter and dad. “May we kiss now?” I asked. To be sure, the image Bennett and Wehner mean to invoke when they call unwed childbearing the “road to economic poverty and social decay” is not white, middle class or coupled. Yet the current barrage of propaganda against unmarried mothers on welfare is also an attack on me, as surely as the Hyde Say It Loud Out of Wedlock and Proud Say It Loud 369 Amendment cutting off Medicaid funds for poor women’s abortions is an attack on all women’s reproductive freedom. The bottom line of this campaign is not saving the taxpayers money or keeping children from growing up in poverty, but restoring women’s dependence on marriage and submission to a sexual double standard. “Having children out of wedlock,” Bennett and Wehner sermonize , “is wrong—not simply economically unwise for the individuals involved or a financial burden on society, but morally wrong.” We haven’t heard this kind of talk lately, not since Quayle’s TV criticism and the Republican convention’s crudely right-wing family-values pitch were widely seen as contributing to George Bush’s defeat. In the Clinton era, cultural conservatives have shifted their ground to seemingly pragmatic arguments about why we need to stamp out unmarried childbearing: single-parent households are disproportionately poor; boys brought up by single mothers turn to crime for lack of a male authority figure. Such arguments get a better reception from the public. They exploit middle-class distaste for welfare. They come packaged in the “reasonable ” language of social science and economic policy. And they are promoted not only by arch-conservatives like Charles Murray, but by “New Democrat” think tanks and centrist politicians like Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Apparently, the success of this strategy has encouraged Bennett and Wehner to raise the rhetorical ante once again. Their bluntness is a public service, reminding us that what the right is pushing as welfare reform is moral fiat rooted in religious dogma. It is the churches that have made a moral issue of confining sex and procreation to marriage. Historically, marriage has not been a moral but an economic arrangement in which men support women and children in return for women’s domestic and sexual services. When women have means of support other than a husband, and aren’t stigmatized for unwed motherhood, they can be a lot choosier about whom they marry, or if they marry or stay married, and under what conditions. This independence makes the moralists crazy. They can’t do much about women like me—yet—so poor women, who can be punished through welfare policy, are taking the brunt of their anger. (Of course, given the poverty and social marginality of the men in their lives, many women on welfare have little prospect of marrying even if...