Introduction — Charting the Lesbian Baby Boom

Abstract

On February 14^th 1999, a national newspaper in the UK carried the headline ‘LESBIANS CAN MAKE BETTER PARENTS’. This claim was extraordinary in a number of ways. Firstly, in a socio-political context that is frequently unsupportive of lesbian parents, the fact that a newspaper — the Sunday Express — would carry a leading story about lesbian mothers that was very positive, seemed entirely unexpected. Secondly, the nature of the story, which referred to research by the British sociologist Gillian Dunne, suggested that lesbians could perform better as parents than heterosexuals. This appears to be a radical claim given the fact that lesbian and gay parenting is more often seen as a problematic anomaly in popular culture, particularly British tabloid press. The article loosely referred to Dunne’s conclusion that lesbians were more likely to engage in egalitarian divisions of labour in the home and to find creative ways of achieving this. She did not in fact at any time claim that lesbians could make ‘better’ parents, rather, that lesbian relationships potentially allowed for new ways of managing work and care that did not rest on a traditional sexual division of labour. The headline is also revealing for its comparison between lesbian and heterosexual parents, the latter being the norm to which other families are inherently always compared. In a sense then, the newspaper article echoes a number of questions that are also present in academic work on lesbian parenthood.