Images of Mothers in Poverty Discourses

This Essay focuses on the construction of the concept of Mother in poverty discourses. It addresses the role of patriarchical ideology in the process whereby a characteristic typical of a group of welfare recipients has been selected and identified as constituting the cause as well as the effect of poverty. I am particularly interested in those political and professional discourses in which single Mother status is defined as one of the primary predictors of poverty. This association of characteristic with cause has fostered suggestions that an appropriate and fundamental goal of any proposed poverty program should be the eradication of the status and practice of single motherhood. This goal is to be accomplished through appropriate coupling of the single mother with the child\u27s father- who would thereby assume his rightful place in the family and fulfill his financial obligations. By his so doing, the paramount welfare reform objective-letting the state off the economic hook-will have been achieved

States of Being: Response Piece

Professor Huntington’s exploration of the potentially positive role for emotion and social norms in rethinking the place of the state in family regulation is an important contribution to the field. However, in order to accomplish the ambitious tasks she sets out for herself, I suggest that she should give more attention to clarifying the meaning of key concepts. Elaboration of certain assertions and terms would strengthen her observations and arguments, making both more persuasive. In the following Parts, I raise some key issues and questions regarding the concepts and terms that warrant further development and articulation

The Family in Civil Society

Civic societarians view deviance from the traditional two-parent family as the root of all social problems in the United States. Growing income inequality is central to understanding social decline as many families with young children are struggling financially to provide for their families. The real problem, then, is not with family form, but with the lack of support for dependency relationships

Beyond Equality and Discrimination

The societal frame of the “economically disadvantaged” is rooted in a distinction between a conceptual status of equality and the actuality of discrimination and disadvantage. This paradigm provides the governing logic for both criticism and justification of the status quo. This Article questions whether and to what extent this equality/antidiscrimination logic has lost its effectiveness as a critical tool and what, if anything, should be the foundation of the rationale that supplements or even replaces it

Intimacy Outside of the Natural Family: The Limits of Privacy

In this paper I undertake a very pragmatic and focused consideration of whether it is possible to rework existing legal concepts of privacy in a way that would be ideologically compatible with dominant social norms in order to shield single mothers from excessive state regulation and supervision. I ultimately conclude that my desire to protect the decisionmaking autonomy and the dignity of poor and/or single mothers cannot be satisfied by resort to this area of law. At the constitutional level, this is so because notions of privacy are typically articulated as rights belonging to individuals, not family entities. And in the common law, the concepts of family or entity privacy similarly fail to protect poor and single mothers because these concepts have been developed and employed in the context of widely shared ideological constructions of what constitutes the natural family. This image of the natural family in turn serves as the norm in our understandings of intimacy in discussions of the family. For the law to assert that poor and/or single mothers are, or should be, included within the realm of normal and natural families, and therefore entitled to privacy, would require a leap of legal imagination not likely to be undertaken without the safety net of dominant social and cultural concurrence. The development of privacy doctrine has thus been limited by societal assumptions about intimacy, families, and individuality, and by ideas concerning fairness and just deserts. The question arises, however, whether privacy, even if it is a concept embedded in social and cultural presuppositions, could be rehabilitated or reworked to include single mother families? There are both ideological and doctrinal barriers to this endeavor. As things now stand, it does not seem likely that an emphasis on privacy will do anything other than further reinforce the ideology of the natural or normal family. In fact, it may be that continued emphasis on privacy as the concept to constitutionally protect certain sorts of intimate behavior will serve to deter the development of other legal principles that might help to limit state regulation of poor and single mother families

Why Marriage?

Reflection on the prospect of varied, individualized possibilities for the meaning of marriage suggests, that in order to answer the question why marriage? we must first consider what marriage? or more succinctly, what is marriage? Questioning what marriage actually is calls attention to the institution\u27s individualized and malleable nature. By contrast, a focus on why marriage highlights the societal function and rationale for the institution. I will discuss each question-the what as well as the why of marriage