Doing It All: The Social Power of Single Motherhood

Russell, a journalist and single parent, debuts with a probing meditation on how society fails unmarried mothers. The social ideal of the nuclear family harms women, Russell contends, citing as proof the story of a mother in Germany who was forced by the country’s courts to grant her manipulative ex-boyfriend joint custody of their son. Despite the fact that the son cried inconsolably after every visit with his father, the judges viewed such an arrangement as an acceptable approximation of the two-parent household to which all families should aspire. Though the peer support network Single Mothers by Choice was founded in 1982 by psychotherapist Jane Mattes to “refute the assumption that single motherhood is always a misfortune or mistake,” Russell criticizes the group for ostracizing women who become single mothers from divorce or unplanned pregnancy. Envisioning alternative social arrangements to better support mothers and children, Russell finds a powerful model in the “othermothering” networks seen in Black communities—in which women, potentially but not necessarily related by blood, rely on one another to meet the needs of each other’s children—and advocates for policies that ease the burden of childcare, such as a universal basic income and reduced work week. Buoyed by searching analysis and affecting stories, this makes a persuasive case for normalizing alternatives to the nuclear family. (May)