Are single mothers the New American Family?
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 single motherhood 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 Without Marriage and Creating the New American Family.” Certainly one can sympathize with those single mothers whose husbands or lovers abandoned or mistreated them, and who soldiered on in the raising of their children without the father those children should have had.
