I Am Murphy Brown: Race and Class in the Rhetorics of Single Mothers by Choice

ABSTRACT

In the 1990s, “Murphy Brown” mothers—often unwed, older, white, and professional—could embrace their alliance with stigmatized single mothers or mark their difference from them, while simultaneously demonstrating their alignment with the dominant discourse of “family values.” Many opted for the latter, gathering under the label “Single Mothers by Choice” (SMC). Using an intersectional cultural rhetorical methodology, this article identifies the axioms of “family values” and demonstrates how they shaped SMC’s efforts to legitimize themselves through an analysis of Jane Mattes’s 1994 guidebook, Single Mothers by Choice: A Guidebook for Single Women Who Are Considering or Have Chosen Motherhood.

Notes

1. I am grateful to RR reviewers, Maria Novotny and another reviewer who wishes to remain anonymous, and to Marjorie Jolles, Jill Swiencicki, and Tracy Whalen. Their probing critiques of numerous drafts and suggestions for revision midwifed this article. I also appreciate the support of RR editor, Elise Verzosa Hurley.

2. For rhetorical scholarship on motherhood, see Buchanan, Demo et al., Hundley, Hayden, O’Brien Hallstein, Thompson, Owens, and, Seigel, among others. See also CCCC’s SIG Mothers in Rhetoric and Composition: http://rhetcompmothers.com/our-mission/.

3. In my monograph-in-progress, I show that there is more demographic and ideological diversity among SMC than what popular media representations and scholarly accounts suggest.

4. Edbauer’s “rhetorical ecologies,” defined as a “circulating ecology of effects, enactments, and events,” captures the various forces that shaped rhetorics by and about SMC better than Bitzer’s more static “rhetorical situation” (9). Bitzer’s “Rhetorical Situation,” however, offers methodological purchase for its precise list of contextual factors to consider, and is thus worth amending here in the service of outlining an intersectional rhetorical approach.

5. It was not until 2015 that the Supreme Court, in Obergefell V. Hodges, legalized gay marriage.

6. Advocates of traditional “family values” rightly intuited that same-sex parents would “undo gender by refusing the relationality through which dichotomous gender is defined” (Mamo 6).

7. bell hooks details the disjuncture between the demands of this model of “good motherhood” and the realities facing many working, immigrant, and mothers of color (Feminist Theory 134-46).

8. Factoring in the mothers’ intentionality complicates the picture: “In the five years before 1988, 5.5% of first births were intended births to unpartnered mothers; in the early 2000s, the corresponding figure was 6.2%, although levels were slightly higher in the 1990s” (Hayford and Guzzo).

9. See Charles Murray’s 1993 “The Coming White Underclass.”

10. In his 2016 historical profile of Moynihan, Ta-Nehesi Coates aptly asserts: “[The Moynihan Report] is a fundamentally sexist document that promotes the importance not just of family but of patriarchy, arguing that black men should be empowered at the expense of black women.”

11. A combination of racism and historical ignorance led some to claim that an intractable “culture of poverty” led to the high number of African American and Latinx unmarried mothers: “The belief that there is something about the lives and choices of Black and Latina poor women that lead them to perpetuate poverty across generations... has a long genealogy in liberal sciences and policy” (Briggs 53).

12. Jené Stonesifer’s 1994 When Baby Makes Two: Single Mothers by Chance or by Choice also addresses intentional single mothers, but neither Stonesifer nor her book received the attention and publicity that Mattes did. Until the aughts and the publication of Morissette, Mikki. Choosing Single Motherhood: The Thinking Woman’s Guide. Mariner, 2008. Sloan, Louise. Knock Yourself Up: No Man? No Problem: A Tell-All Guide to Becoming a Single Mom. Avery Trade, 2007, Mattes’s guidebook dominated the market and Mattes herself was the public face of intentional single motherhood.

13. These descriptors—“single” as well as the phrase “parenting alone”—warrant further critique and interrogation. In the life writing that I analyze in my manuscript-in-progress, mothers who are technically “single” (unmarried) and thus “parenting alone” recount the substantive role that others play in their lives, suggesting the need for a critique of language that relies on legal status—married or unmarried—or romantic status—partnered or unpartnered—to describe them and their families.

14. Until Roe V. Wade, unmarried pregnant white girls were often sent to birthing homes during their pregnancy. Their newborn children were placed in closed adoptions and the girls returned to their homes ready to have the “right” kind of family. Unmarried pregnant girls of color, for whom these homes were typically not an option, bore and raised their children in their home communities. Rickie Solinger’s Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race Before Roe V. Wade details the history of the differential treatment of unmarried mothers during this period. See also Heather Brook Adams’s “Rhetorics of Unwed Motherhood and Shame,” an analysis of the content and effects of shaming discourses around white unmarried motherhood in the 1960s.

15. This is not to suggest that some unmarried mothers of color at the time did not also seek to conform to normative family structures or that all white mothers did, nor that there were no pressures to conform to normative structures in communities of color and uniform pressures to do in the white. I refer here to dominant norms and expectations which, by definition, flatten out the diversity within groups.

16. Some SMC have heterosexual sex with the sole purpose of becoming pregnant, but the majority pursue motherhood through other means such as intrauterine insemination, invitro fertilization, and/or adoption.

17. Critics of traditional and neo-liberalism as well as “choice feminism” point to the ways these ideologies mask differences in women’s personal, professional, and political lives, which affect the choices available to them, and to their tendency to divide women into categories of “good” and “bad” choosers. Among others, see Ferguson; Hirshman; 2010; Solinger; Ross and Solinger.

18. Relatedly, Mattes cites a study that directs attention to the negative psychological effects of instability, rather than of single parenthood itself (19). Since instability often results from precarity, this assertion likewise distinguishes economically autonomous SMC from other single mothers.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katherine Mack

Katherine Mack is an associate professor and chair of English at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs, where she teaches a variety of advanced rhetoric and writing courses. Her research interests include maternal and familial rhetorics, life writing, and, transitional justice. She wrote From Apartheid to Democracy: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa (Penn State UP, 2014) and has published in RSQ, Reception, and WPA as well as in several edited collections. Her current book project is Legitimizing Single Motherhood: Contemporary Rhetorics of Gender, Race, Class, and Family. She can be contacted at [email protected].