Social constructions of lone motherhood: A case of competing discourses

Abstract

Since the 1980s, the media in Britain and the United States have made many negative pronouncements on lone mothers. The notion of ‘feckless mothers’, who get pregnant in order to obtain welfare payments and housing and then rear children who are likely to become criminal, has been much aired by underclass theorists (such as Charles Murray 1990). Such notions have been picked up by politicians (including Bill Clinton as the Democratic president of the United States and Dan Quayle when he was the Republican vicepresident) and by various British Conservative Secretaries of State. While many of these pronouncements have used moral arguments, of ‘responsible parenting’ and maintenance of ‘traditional families’, their proposed remedies to these ‘problems’ have been designed to reduce the economic dependence on the state of lone parents (who are predominantly lone mothers; Burghes 1993) and their children. They have produced a construction of lone mothers as ‘feckless’, wilfully responsible for the poverty that has been well documented to be a feature of lone parenting (Bradshaw and Millar 1991; Burghes 1993) and undeserving of either public sympathy or economic support.

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