No such thing as a single mother...

RESS · (#1 (**permalink**))

Quote:

For a while I have been thinking about the term 'single mother' and the fact that I actually find it a bit disingenous. My main reasons where that:

1. As a mother, you can not be 'single' if you have children.

2. Even though a woman does not live with the father of her children, if he is playing a role in their lives, can she really be seen as a 'single' parent.

Recently, I re-read an article that really summed up this up perfectly from an African perspective:

Excerpt:
"...The problem is not that feminist conceptualization starts with the family, but that it never transcends the narrow confines of the nuclear family. Consequently, wherever woman is present becomes the private sphere of women’s subordination. Her very presence defines it as such.

Theorizing from the confined space of the nuclear family, it is not surprising that issues of sexuality automatically come to the fore in any discussion of gender. Even a category such as mother is not intelligible in white feminist thought except if the mother is defined first as the wife of the patriarch. There seem to be no understanding of the role of a mother independent of her sexual ties to a father. Mothers are first and foremost wives. This is the only explanation for the popularity of that oxymoron: single mother. From an African perspective and as a matter of fact, mothers by definition cannot be single. In most cultures, motherhood is defined as a relationship to progeny, not as a sexual relationship to a man. Within the feminist literature, motherhood, which in many other societies constitutes the dominant identity of women, is subsumed under wifehood. Because woman is a synonym for wife, procreation and lactation in the gender literature (traditional and feminist) are usually presented as part of the sexual division of labor. Marital coupling is thus constituted as the base of societal division of labor.

Feminist sociologist Nancy Chodorow argues that even an infant experiences his or her mother as gendered being—wife of the father— which has deep implications in regard to the differential psychosocial development of sons and daughters. She universalizes the experience of nuclear motherhood and takes it as a human given, thereby extending the boundaries of this very limited Euro/American form to other cultures that have different family organizations."

- Just wondered if anyone else had any thoughts.

No such thing as a single mother... - Ligali Forums

Correct.

Thank you for this observation/revelation.

By using the word "single" logically makes the White Supremacist Racist infested state the invisible father.