Monts and Responsibilities
Steinfels, Margaret O'Brien
Fully achieved, Iris Young's proposals would be a disaster for women and children, probably for men too, and certainly for liberal and left politics. She is wrong on three points, at least:...
...A single mother's need may be great, but families have limits...
...Among others, a lot of poor people agree with them...
...But what if this, too, is a single-mother family...
...Our social experiment in single motherhood over the last twenty-five years is failing great numbers of women and children while corroding the bonds that tie men to familial responsibilities...
...The Reagan administration and accompanying pundits convinced the American electorate that the welfare system now functions as a dowry system for adolescent girls, who, becoming pregnant, are launched into motherhood and adulthood with food stamps, child support, housing allowances, and Medicaid long before they are ready to be good mothers...
...The communitarians have a slogan that we might all take to heart: strong rights entail strong responsibilities—that goes for the right to bear and raise children...
...If only Time magazine had made Marla Maples—an unwed mother—the woman of the year, we would fully realize that a mother's unwedded state is no bar to celebrity or social lionizing—and a kiss on the cheek from (former) Mayor David Dinkins...
...In the name of reform, we should not take from them the admittedly meager resources provided by the current 270 • DISSENT Arguments system...
...That changes when the individual choice of single motherhood becomes a collective responsibility...
...And it doesn't end there, the critics go on: rather than supporting people in need until they can get back on their feet, the system is failing children and undermining young men's sense of responsibility for their children...
...Young believes more money and more personnel are the answer...
...Women of any age, educational attainment, income level, or marital status should be able to bear and raise a child...
...all stand behind that once unthinkable policy of dunning delinquent dads for court-ordered child support...
...Single motherhood—though not wrong in and of itself—can undermine the well-being of others...
...Is that unreasonable...
...There is the woman's own family, which may be her surest recourse...
...not every sentence uttered in exercising that right constitutes a moral good...
...nor were they intended to make up for missing child-support payments...
...Should these be counted traitors to the liberal cause...
...Or, barring abusive or seriously neglectful behavior, take her child from her...
...Or force her to use contraception...
...It is women who have children that they can't support or get fathers to support that exercise tax-paying Americans, at least some of whom are single-mother families themselves...
...the right to conceive and bear a child is basic...
...others of withholding aid for infants born when a woman is already on welfare...
...Often they do not...
...Young refers to the "state" and the "welfare state" as if these were entities capable of delivering goods and services at will...
...First, there is the child and his or her need for care, comfort, and stability—constant attention as an infant and consistent attention as a child and adolescent...
...The press and television treat single motherhood as a variant of the American family...
...But not every exercise of a "right" adds up to a moral good...
...Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and other welfare measures were never meant to support teenage moms or help their boyfriends elude the responsibilities of fatherhood...
...But neither can opinion makers, academics, or intellectual elites, feminist and otherwise, go on arguing that this situation is normal, and will be made even "more normal" by increased welfare payments and better support systems...
...Some speak of job training, of community service in return for welfare...
...Then, consider alternative child-care support systems...
...Some speak of two-year limits...
...She is wrong on three points, at least: single mothers are not despised...
...I suspect that teachers, principals, social workers, acquaintances, and neighbors don't ask and don't care...
...This brings us to the question of the common good and the implicit social contract on which it rests...
...Other child-caring facilities—day-care centers, schools, camps— are available, but they may be overwhelmed with the needs of materially and emotionally deprived children...
...These would be a good in themselves...
...many others do not...
...Plain and simple, the problem is not single mothers but single mothers who depend on the rest of us to support them and their children...
...Nations have a right to protect their sovereignty...
...or husband and wife both work...
...And from where do these additional and abundant new resources come...
...not every act in pursuit of that right is moral...
...In that sense the mother-child relationship is sacrosanct...
...Many do...
...The system has been adapted to meet these needs on the assumption that women with children often have no other recourse...
...Iris Young wants us to assume that "there is nothing morally wrong with single-mother families...
...Individuals in our society have a right to free speech...
...Even with two (or more) adults, this is an arduous undertaking spanning more than two decades...
...But can a single mother (or father) act on the assumption that they are...
...SPRING • 1994 • 271...
...or siblings need attention...
...Can singlemother families really meet this responsibility...
...But there is reason to expect that children would have saner, more secure, and—boys especially—more disciplined upbringings...
...Underlying at least some of the critical views of welfare— which Young thinks stingy—is a sense of quid pro quo: Social responsibility ought to encourage individual responsibility, not undermine or replace it...
...I agree...
...When, however, the system itself seems to encourage unwed motherhood or male abandonment and to contribute to family breakdown, reasonable people ask their politicians why...
...This analysis has penetrated the thinking of Democrats and other liberals...
...The United States is a democracy that eventually comes to reflect—if only imperfectly—the views of its citizens...
...liberals don't view single mothers as the sole source of our social ills...
...At least I agree that no one else—the state, the father, the woman's relatives—has a right to force a woman to get an abortion if she is pregnant...
...What does she mean...
...Conservatives think that welfare is hurting poor people...
...The analogy applies to childbearing decisions: it may be a right, but that does not make it a moral good...
...Even Wisconsin, with its tradition of progressive politics, is bailing out of the federal welfare system in order to limit and control in its own expenditures...
...liberalism has not abandoned its heritage by rallying to the two-parent family...
...To their credit some liberals are reconsidering the merits of the two-parent family Were two-parent families to come back into vogue, our social ills would not disappear...
...SPRING • 1994 • 269 Arguments Those old enough to remember will recall that liberals created the welfare system to keep families together, to help tide over those in temporary trouble, and to help widows maintain a household...
...The reservoirs of social responsibility that Young wants to draw upon will be swiftly depleted in a society whose citizens, women and men alike, do not habitually feel and exercise responsibility for themselves and their families...
Vol. 41 • April 1994 • No. 2
