Single Motherhood: A Response to Iris Marion Young

What I found most surprising in Iris Young’s analysis (“Making Single Motherhood Normal,” Winter 1994) is the radical disconnection between her policy proposals and the constraints and possibilities of our current situation. She calls for “massive increases in state support for child care” when state budgets are strapped, cutbacks are being ordered across the board, and new initiatives in health care will gobble up whatever additional revenues are available. (Presumably she supports universal health care and favors moves in that direction.) She calls for “public policy” to dispel any notion of “normality” in family structure. But, surely, we have already conducted that experiment and it has failed. It has failed for the very people it was designed to help—single mothers and their children. I will offer up evidence on this score—evidence Young systematically overlooks.

She calls for states to “force men” to “pay child support for children they have recognized as theirs.” She claims men shouldn’t be let off the hook where their responsibilities are concerned. But her formulation continues to put the onus for child-rearing and child “recognition,” if you will, on women. In fact, startlingly, her argument is a call for a return to a particularly rigid form of “separate spheres,” something I thought feminists had a strong stake in criticizing and reforming. Onc...