Call it the backlash against the backlash. Over the past decade, Americans have increasingly understood that the divorce revolution, fatherlessness and single parent households are harming our children. Now those who view the traditional family as disadvantageous to women are firing back, defending women who choose singlemotherhood and depicting fathers as superfluous.
Last fall Stanford University Gender Scholar Peggy Drexler penned the highly-publicized book "Raising Boys Without Men: How Maverick Moms Are Creating the Next Generation of Exceptional Men." This month Oxford Press released Wellesley College Women's Studies professor Rosanna Hertz's"Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice: How Women Are Choosing Parenthood WithoutMarriage and Creating the New American Family."
Certainly one can sympathize with those single mothers whosehusbands or lovers abandoned or mistreated them, and who soldiered on in the raising of their children without the father those children should have had. However, Drexler and Hertz go well beyond this, openly advocating single motherhood as a lifestyle choice.
Drexler portrays father-absent homes – particularly "single mother by choice" and lesbian homes – as being the best environments for raising boys. Hertz interviewed 65 single mothers and concluded that "intimacy between husbands and wives [is] obsolete as the critical familial bond." Whereas a family was once defined as two parents and their children, Hertz asserts that today the "core of family life is the mother and her children." Fathers aren't necessary – "only the availability of both sets of gametes [egg and sperm] is essential." In fact, Hertz explains, "what men offer today is obsolete."
Our children would beg to differ. Studies of children of divorce confirm their powerful desire to retain strong connections to their fathers. For example, an Arizona State University study of college-age children of divorce found that the overwhelming majority believed that after a divorce "living equal amounts of time with each parent is the best arrangement for children."
Objective measures of child well being believed Hertz's and Drexler's rose-colored image of fatherless families. The rates of the four major youth pathologies – teen pregnancy, teen drug abuse, school dropouts and juvenile crime – are tightly correlated with fatherlessness, often more so than with any other socioeconomic factor.
Hertz and Drexler reached their conclusions by studying families who had volunteered to have their lives intimately examined over a multi-year period – a self-selected sample hardly representative of the average fatherless family. Moreover, Hertz's and Drexler's research is largely subjective – they personally conducted interviews of single mothers to examine their family lives and – no surprise – found them to their liking.
To Hertz's credit, she does concede that the "wish among heterosexual women for a dad for their children remains strong." Perhaps the single mothers she interviewed understand the value of male parenting? Or maybe as these women's children grow the mothers see the positive impact male influence could have in their lives? Not according to Hertz. She explains, "It is not that they believe men provide a critical difference in perspective that women cannot supply." Instead, Hertz asserts that the single mothers she studied included some men in their children's lives as a way to "connect their children to male privilege." In fact, those who include men in their daughters' lives do so because they want "their daughters to know male privilege when they encounter it and to be prepared to combat it."
