Understanding Lone Motherhood: Competing Discourses and Positions

Abstract

Lone motherhood is not neutral and apolitical; it is shot through with political and moral evaluations (Silva 1996). Britain provides a good example. In 1993, ‘the year of the demonisation of lone mothers’, lone mothers found themselves vilified by right wing politicians and the popular media as threats to the fabric of social order. Supposedly, they were rearing delinquent children while scrounging benefits and housing off the welfare state, and thus forming a dangerous underclass. Attempts were made by voluntary groups and others representing lone mothers to counter this portrayal and insert, or reinsert, a public image of lone mothers as women who were struggling to do their best in constrained and unfavourable circumstances. Lone motherhood was again a focus during 1996 as part of a national debate about British society’s ‘moral values’, again conducted by politicians and the media. Lone mothers were one of several groups highlighted as an example of where these values were somehow going wrong. Towards the end of 1997 lone mothers were again in the news. This time debate centred on whether ‘sticks’ or ‘carrots’ were required to move lone mothers off welfare dependency and into paid work, following the new Labour government’s benefit cuts and welfare-to-work strategies for lone mothers. In all these cases lone motherhood was used as a concrete symbol, or rallying point, for wider debates about the nature of society and how the state should react.