Independent Women's Forum - Research Areas > Marriage and Family Structure

New at IWF: Holding Her Head High

info@iwf.org (Allison Kasic) — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 12:28:00 EDT

IWF visiting fellow Princella Smith reviews Janine Turner's new book, Holding Her Head High, here.

Holding Her Head High

info@iwf.org (Princella Smith) — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 10:59:00 EST

A fabulous new book by Janine Turner (of Northern Exposure, Strong Medicine, and Cliffhanger fame) tackles an issue close to many women: single motherhood. Turner, herself a single mother, bases her book, Holding Her Head High: 12 Single Mothers Who Championed Their Children and Changed History, on the stories of 12 extraordinary women in history who were single mothers at a time when it wasn't so common to see a woman raising a child by herself. There were not support groups or government aid to help these women along the way. Turner's extensive historical research reveals the struggles of women whose stories are buried in history textbooks.

Many single women will see elements of their own experience when they read about the lives of Queen Blanche of Castile, Christine de Pazan, Abigail Adams, Belva Ann Lockwood, Harriet Jacobs, and others. Turner draws lessons from each woman's life, and intersperses their stories with personal observations from her own life as a single mother.

Before reading Holding Her Head High, I had limited understanding about the extent of influence that Queen Blanche had on her son, the renowned St. Louis IX and how both her warlike preparations and skilled diplomacy awed the nobles of her kingdom. I was unaware of Christine de Pizan's bold criticism of misogynist male writers of the 14^th and 15^th centuries and the bravery of her revolutionary writing. I knew little more about Abigail Adams than that she was the wife of the second President of the United States; I didn't appreciate her full impact as her husband's counselor. Coined "Mrs. President" by many, she managed a household with five children and managed to raise a future president in second oldest son, John Quincy Adams. Turner also highlights Belva Ann Lockwood, who was one of the first female lawyers in the United States. Lockwood lobbied Congress for an anti-discrimination bill after being banned from practice in the U.S. Supreme Court. Of personal interest to me as an African-American was the story of Harriet Jacobs. She was born a slave and escaped the sexual brutality of her slave master to become a free woman and impressive author who wrote in vivid details of her longing to free the slave children she left behind.

Whether a woman is forced into single motherhood through the situation of a spouse's death, a spouse's overwhelming job, or the spouse's decision to choose another partner, this book underscores situations every single mother can relate to and through which every person can become inspired. Janine Turner deserves praise for the work, research, and the heart that she displayed while encouraging women of all backgrounds to hold their heads high.

Princella Smith is a Visiting Fellow for the Independent Women's Forum.

More on Education and Marriage

info@iwf.org (Carrie L. Lukas) — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 08:37:00 EDT

Just to jump on the whole married parents vs. unmarried parents debate between Charlotte and Anne, I don' think there is much doubt that kids from parents with married parents tend to achieve more academically then kids who lack that support. There is a pretty robust literature on the subject (see this article from the Journal of Marriage and Family, the Heritage Foundation has written much on the subject, and I am sure there are lots of other sources if you google around). Of course, there are exceptions to this rule, there are single parents who are totally dedicated to their child's intellectual development and their children thrive, but in general they have less resources financially and less time to spend on monitoring their child's education. That has consequences for their children.

This isn't meant to impugn single parents but I do think this is a conversation worth having. People should be aware of the benefits of marriage (and staying married) for kids. Much of our culture seems to discourage couples contemplating divorce from considering staying together for the sake of the kids, yet it in many circumstances it might make sense to do just that. Of course there are many cases of marriage that just need to be over, but many rocky marriages are worth preserving. Studies have shown that the majority of unhappy marriages don�t stay unhappy over the long term and some couples who get divorce later wish they had worked harder to preserve their marriage. (I write about this a bit in my book and if you are really interested in this check out The Case for Marriage.)

Certainly the increase in failed or never formed families puts a strain on our education system, but that's not an excuse for the poor services offered in too many of our public schools. We need to change the dynamic behind our system of schooling so that schools have to work to retain kids. That begins by creating more options for how parents can select schools for their children. Right now, for the most part, where I child goes to school is based on where he or she lives. That makes it tough for parents, particularly low income parents, to switch schools if they are dissatisfied with the education their child is receiving.

Someone reading this might say if part of the problem with educational attainment rests with the parents, why would we think that things would get better if parents got to select their child�s school. The good thing about a marketplace is that you don't have to know everything about a service or product to benefit from the market dynamic. The fact that there are some people who know a good mechanic from a bad one means that someone like me (totally uninformed about such things) is more likely to get a good mechanic because those who knew what they were doing made informed choices and drove the worst mechanics out of business.

No system is going to be perfect, but as we have seen with just about all other areas of life, markets generate better outcomes than the government.

Education and Marriage

info@iwf.org (Charlotte Hays) — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 08:54:00 EDT

Let it never be said that we at the IWF march in lockstep. Stepford wonks we aren't. I'd like to respond to Anne's response to an item I posted on education. In talking about failures in education, I referred to "unmarried parents who don't provide an environment in which homework can be done, indeed, don't provide an environment where kids are even urged to doing their homework." Anne responded with an item headlined "Unmarried Parents are a Red Herring in Education Reform:"

I would argue, and yes it does seem I do that a lot on this blog, that the marital status of a parent has less to do with a parent encouraging a child to complete their homework assignments than other factors. Yes, being a child of a single or unmarried parent can have its difficulties and ideally every child would live in a loving, nurturing household, under the watchful caring eye of both a mother and father, but welcome to the real world. During my formative years I knew many kids from single parent households who excelled in their studies. I also knew kids from typical two-parent, nuclear families who lived in chaos that was reflected in their, let's not say intelligence, but their drive to achieve. My point being, I don't see the correlation.
Working to instill in children the importance of education and learning is part of being a good parent, single or married, mother or father. I would argue, it isn't that there are too many unmarried parents; there are too many parents with misguided priorities. These priorities are indeed a product of society as a whole.

I would argue that if you are an unwed parent (and I refer to never-married parents, not those who have tried and failed), then ipso facto you have "misguided priorities." Many children from marriageless households, especially those, I would guess, of affluent unmarried parents, do quite well. But a chaotic family life, and single-parenthood is all too often a prescription for chaos, is harmful to a child's education. I want to quote some things I noted in a review of Kay Hymowitz's very important book, "Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marriage Age:"

For Ms. Hymowitz, the two Americas do not divide between the poor who are supposedly in need of government assistance and the rest of us. The division is best defined in another way: between those who see marriage as an indispensable condition of child-rearing and those who don't. If we are becoming two Americas, it is one America in which parents are married and another in which they are not. The Marriage Gap, as Ms. Hymowitz calls it, appears likely to have a more profound effect on the future of both Americas than the gender gap so lamented by the feminists.
The Mission [of child-rearing], notes Ms. Hymowitz, requires not a village but two married parents. And, no, cohabitation doesn't do the trick. Even cohabiters who have the education levels of their married counterparts are less effective as parents. 'As the core cultural institution,' Ms. Hymowitz writes, 'marriage orders life in ways that we only dimly understand. It carries with it signals about how we should live, signals that are in line with both our economy and our politics in the largest sense."

CNN's Paula Zahn Now: Should Muslim veils be banned in US schools, the sub-prime mortgage, a pastor hosting discussions on sex

info@iwf.org (Michelle D. Bernard) — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 16:25:00 EDT

IWF President and CEO, Michelle D. Bernard, was a guest on the CNN program, Paula Zahn Now. Michelle discussed whether Muslim veils should be banned in American schools; the sub-prime mortgage increases affecting many homeowners; and, a controversial pastor hosting a six-week discussion series on sex.

FOX's The O'Reilly Factor: Children born out of wedlock and the consequences

info@iwf.org (Carrie L. Lukas) — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 16:32:00 EST

IWF Vice President for Policy and Economics, Carrie Lukas, a guest on the FOX program, The O'Reilly Factor. Carrie discusses the growing number of children born out of wedlock and the consequences.

Charlotte Hays reviews "Raising Boys Without Men"

info@iwf.org (Charlotte Hays) — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 00:00:00 EST

IWF regrets that an event on Raising Boys without Men, by Peggy Drexler, must be moved to 2007 because of unforeseen circumstances. Please watch our website for further details.

We did not, however, want 2006 to slip away without our having addressed the issues in this book. Senior Editor Charlotte Hays reviews it below. She will be available for an online chat at 10 am tomorrow (Thursday, Dec. 21) at www.iwf.org/chat_room.asp.

Raising Boys without Men: How Maverick Moms are Creating the Next Generation of Exceptional Men, by Peggy Drexler, Ph.D, with Linden Gross. Rodale. $23.95

For Peggy Drexler, a boy's best friend is his mother, or, as the case may be, his mothers. A "former gender scholar at Stanford University," according to the dust jacket, Drexler, currently an assistant professor of psychology at Weill Medical College of Cornell University, argues that a mother or mothers are superior to the traditional mother/father family and that such "maverick mothers" are more likely to raise "exceptional" boys.

This is not an inspirational book for put upon divorced women forced to struggle valiantly to raise children alone--it is instead a tribute to "single-by-choice" women who have opted for motherhood. The divorced women in the book are portrayed as strong women who have made a positive choice, one that will be good for her children. Other mothers have used a sperm donor (or a "seed daddy," as Drexel approvingly refers to these gents, who may or may not be involved in the subsequent lives of the children). Drexler, by the way, a mother of two, is married to "a husband of 36 years." He is the CEO of J. Crew, the preppy clothing chain.

Fathers advocate and radio host Glenn Sacks has noted in a perceptive reviewthat Drexler's research is flawed. The families she studies are volunteers and therefore may be presumed to be doing well. Some of those she quotes come across as advocates for alternative "families." This is therefore not a random selection of mother-only families. Drexler admits that the "maverick moms" in the book are mostly affluent and able to do things for their children. The group also appears to be small in number for a book that makes such sweeping judgments. Even Publishers Weekly, which, predictably, gave the book a glowing review, notes that Drexler is "curiously cagey" about statistics. I don't find it that curious at all--this is a manifesto. It looks to me as if Drexler has studied approximately sixteen kids and their mothers. But I am by no means certain.

But it is not just the statistics that I don't trust. Drexler's enthusiasm, if not downright giddiness, for mothers-only arrangements is so pronounced that I simply don't trust her judgment. She asserts that "mom-raised sons are avatars of a new social moment, one that is producing boys who promise to become good, even exceptional, men." But the anecdotes Drexler cites in support of this thesis are weak. For example, there is eight-year-old Quentin, who seems like quite a charmer, and who is being raised by two lesbians, along with little brother Mac. Both boys were conceived with the aid of an anonymous sperm donor.

In one anecdote, Drexler is hurrying down the street laden with briefcase and packages. Everybody rushes past her, except Quentin, who is "concerned" and stops to help her. This leads to an epiphany: Quentin is so much more considerate than the other passers-by because he is the son of two moms. But isn't it more likely that, since Quentin was (apparently) the only one who knew Drexler, he is the most likely to stop and help her? She also quotes Gene, the product of a moms-only upbringing, saying that, when he became a Peace Corp volunteer, he could handle stress better than those who had grown up in households with fathers. Says who? Drexler takes this at face value, citing Gene's claim almost as if it were scientifically-verified.

Drexler calls boys of mom/moms-only households "head and heart" boys because of what she sees as their emotional aptitude. But there are a number of anecdotes in the book that hint that what Drexler regards as emotional balance might seem to others a youthful and unthinking embrace of touchy feely ideals prevalent in liberal society. Indeed there were passages that left me thinking, "You can't make this stuff up." For example:

"That's not to say that dealing with these sensitive sons doesn't tax even the most patient parents. Sometimes kids are so hard to understand, and every mom can remember being ready to pull out her hair. When Bailey asked his mother, a financial manager who described herself as a moderate Democrat, about the different political parties during the presidential debates, she told him that "the Democrats were real humanitarians and that they cared about people more." Bailey promptly burst into tears.

"Son, what's wrong?" his bewildered mother asked.
"I'm afraid," the boy replied. "What if I become a Republican?"
"'Bailey's fear I think was, what if I don't care about people?' his mother explained to me during his interview."
One son does the next best thing to becoming a Republican - he joins the military, much to the chagrin of his mother, who deems it a 'godsend' when asthma finally keeps him out. Another son worries about world politics at the ripe old age of eight. As the wit Dorothy Parker once wrote in different circumstances, 'Tonstant wreader throwed up.'

Conveniently, Drexler finds that the masculinity of mom-raised boys is "hardwired" and therefore a lesbian household is unlikely to create gender confusion. This is an interesting subject, especially with the number of lesbians now raising children. We need somebody with more detachment than Drexler to investigate the phenomenon, however. Drexler also portrays that the devotion some of the boys have to sports figures is not "father hunger" but rather a healthy ability to find male role models in society at large. She also thinks that extended families, including perhaps grandparents or "seed daddies," when interested, provide sufficient male models for kids.

As befits an author with Drexler's connections, this book comes with blurbs by all sorts of famous people--the actress Rita Wilson, best-selling author Richard North Patterson, feminist theoretician Carol Gilligan, divorce scholar Judith Wallerstein, and the Washington Post's Elsa Walsh. But it is a pretend social study that will make those not too depressed by it dissolve into laughter.

Unfortunately, it is a purely ideological treatment of an increasingly familiar phenomenon. With so many lesbians opting to bear or adopt children, we need to know more about the effects of such child rearing. Drexler's blinders prevent her from evaluating these families with anything approaching objectivity.

Charlotte Hays is senior editor at the Independent Women's Forum.

That Ring Makes A Difference

info@iwf.org (Charlotte Hays) — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 00:00:00 EST

The Wall Street Journal

After Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans and introduced the public to the horrific sight of those desperate people in the Superdome, Newsweek headlined its coverage of the event "The Other America." The phrase was an allusion to the 1962 book by Michael Harrington that helped inspire the War on Poverty and perhaps also to John Edwards's "Two Americas," a book about American haves and have-nots that received far too much fawning attention during Mr. Edwards's vice-presidential run. Kay Hymowitz, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, freely admits that there are two Americas. But that is where the resemblance to Mr. Edwards's and Mr. Harrington's analysis ends.

For Ms. Hymowitz, the two Americas do not divide between the poor who are supposedly in need of government assistance and the rest of us. The division is best defined in another way: between those who see marriage as an indispensable condition of child-rearing and those who don't. If we are becoming two Americas, it is one America in which parents are married and another in which they are not. The Marriage Gap, as Ms. Hymowitz calls it, appears likely to have a more profound effect on the future of both Americas than the gender gap so lamented by the feminists.

Despite the "unmarriage revolution" ushered in by the noxious 1960s, the anti-civilization decade, marriage is again flourishing among well-educated women. Today's educated mothers may work outside the home or not, but they and their husbands are committed to what Ms. Hymowitz calls The Mission -- the project of shaping their children into adults (and citizens) who have the requisite skills and self-discipline to prosper in a complex, postindustrialist society.

The Mission, notes Ms. Hymowitz, requires not a village but two married parents. And, no, cohabitation doesn't do the trick. Even cohabiters who have the education levels of their married counterparts are less effective as parents. "As the core cultural institution," Ms. Hymowitz writes, "marriage orders life in ways that we only dimly understand. It carries with it signals about how we should live, signals that are in line with both our economy and our politics in the largest sense."

While there is more marriage among the better educated, with 92% of children living with two parents coming from families that have an income of $75,000 or better, there is less marriage among inner-city parents. "Only about 20 percent of kids in families earning under $15,000 live with both parents," writes Ms. Hymowitz. Which raises a question: "Why would women working for a pittance at supermarket cash registers decide to have children without getting married while women writing briefs at Debevoise & Plimpton, who could easily afford to go it alone, insist on finding husbands before they start families?"

The answer, in Ms. Hymowitz's view, is that many among the urban poor have lost the "life script" for future-oriented child-rearing. Policy makers may assume that the problem is a shortage of employed, marriageable men. But the problem is more existential, a loss of a sense that marriage and children are connected.

The most fascinating (but grimmest) sections of "Marriage and Caste in America" deal with child-rearing skills in the unmarried America. Children of single mothers on welfare, for instance, hear their mother use fewer words. (According to one study cited in the book, the average words heard per hour are 2,150 for a professor's children, 1,250 for working-class children and 620 for children in welfare families.) What is more, the talk of the welfare parents in the study "was meaner and more distracted." It is not that these parents don't love their children; it is that they do not have a "script" for being parents. Thus they find it particularly difficult to rear children capable of thriving in a knowledge-based society.

According to Ms. Hymowitz -- and this is the scariest part of the book -- most social analysts ignore the root of the problem and therefore end up prescribing "solutions" that actually "smooth the way" for single parenthood. "To listen to some policymakers," she writes, "one might think that wanting to become a lawyer or anchorwoman -- and possessing the requisite orderliness, discipline, foresight, and bourgeois willingness to delay gratification -- are natural instincts rather than traits developed over time through adults' prodding and example."

Optimism is always more appealing than pessimism, and Ms. Hymowitz tries to be hopeful, proclaiming a renewed stature for marriage -- in the culture at large -- as the key institution in child-rearing. She may be right about middle-class parents, but it is not clear whether the message has yet reached unmarried America. If policy makers heed the arguments and analysis in "Marriage and Caste in America," then Ms. Hymowitz's optimism will at least be partly justified.

For myself, I feel certain that the next time one of my friends can't meet me for lunch because she is ferrying her offspring to yet another life-enhancing lesson, I won't be annoyed. I'll know that she is nobly engaged in The Mission, important not just to the edification and college-admission forms of her offspring but also to the health of the republic. It is a Mission, too, that she can best perform with a man who is her husband.

Ms. Hays is senior editor at the Independent Women's Forum.

Rebuilding Civil Society: Marriage

info@iwf.org (April Lassiter) — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 00:00:00 EDT

Marriage has traditionally been viewed as the bedrock of family and society, the framework within which individuals are nurtured and supported, providing a social safety net for family members. Marriage has lately generated common interest and public concern, and has been recognized by the state as greatly important for our country. And research clearly shows that marriage is beneficial to children, adults, and to our society at large.

Over the past 40 years, however, there has been a shift in the way society views marriage. Theories about this phenomenon abound. And it is somewhat difficult to indict any one source of causality in a dynamic society influenced by a wide range of ethnic, religious, and generational histories, not to mention a powerfully pervasive media culture with varied commentary on marriage and its meaning.

The impact of declining marriage rates on the welfare of our society has become more visible. Sadly, its effects are devastating. With the growing body of research linking declining marriage rates and decreased welfare, it's impossible to ignore the political and socio-economic factors that impact the institution.

Religious and social conservatives tend to promote marriage and stay-at-home moms as the answer to our welfare crisis. Liberals tend to argue that government can pick up the pieces. Meanwhile, the public has become increasingly acclimated to the idea that the government should care for the disadvantaged.

In the political arena, we see a similar partisan dichotomy, with political leaders catapulting the discussion into extremes: conservatives focus on government rewarding marriage through tax incentives, while liberals tend to promote the expansion of governmental care to help single parents and children. At times, advocates of either approach have vastly exaggerated their capacity to address what is primarily at its roots, a complex cultural issue and social dysfunction.

Whether or not one believes that the government should be involved in promoting marriage at all, the reality is that the government is permanently in the business of trying to address the social consequences of marital and family decline because family breakdown remains the largest source of our nation's most daunting social problems.

If marriage is the best welfare program we know, then it is worth examining the facts and assessing them with an unbiased eye in order to develop real solutions to social problems. Until we outgrow the extreme and facile notions that government is either evil or the only safety net, and acknowledge that it simply cannot do the work of the family, we will not be able to address workable ways to strengthen the welfare of our society.

This paper explores the interplay between marriage and the welfare of our society. Section One identifies the consequences of the declining marriage rates in relation to illegitimacy, to the extent it can be isolated as its cause. Section Two explores social trends that impact the decline of marriage, including government's role in displacing marriage and family as the primary social safety net. The third and final section of this paper explores possible public and private solutions to strengthen social ills.

A growing body of research shows the impact and possible causality of the decline of marriage. For the purpose of this paper, I have drawn on a number of resources, ranging from the U.S. Census Bureau to conservative and liberal policy publications, in an effort to bring all the information we have to the table and draw fair and unbiased conclusions about what is occurring today and what can be done with respect to the issue of marriage and the welfare of women and children.

I do not believe we are doomed to a downward spiral. Since who we are as a society is merely a function of agreement, there is hope for us. Whether we are traditional, progressive, liberal, conservative, heterosexual or homosexual, religious or agnostic, we must find a way to put the needs of our children first and find ways to strengthen families, or we will not be the strong America that we once were and still are.