Carolyn Baylies
The percentage of single female-parent homes is featured in a table entitled ‘weakening social fabric’ in the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Report 1994, alongside such other measures of presumed social dissolution as intentional homicides by men, asylum applications received, and juveniles as percentage of total prisoners. Data in the table refer exclusively to industrial countries and the column on single female — parent homes only to OECD countries.1 While this reflects the dearth of comparable statistics cross-nationally on such measures, the fact that data on households headed by women should be placed under this title at all suggests some curious presumptions about the directions of social change and the nature of idealized norms. Such presumptions, however, belie a diversity of experience, the dimensions of which will be explored in this chapter.
In the UK, the proportion of all families with dependent children headed by a lone parent rose from 8.6 per cent in 1971 to 19.2 per cent in 1991, with the parent being female in nine cases out often (Haskey 1994:7).2 There are some who see these figures as very much a measure not just of the weakening but of the renting of social fabric, with particular concern being expressed over those regarded as flaunting an aberrant status and scrounging off the state. State policy providing support for lone parents has been criticized as misconceived, far too generous and as contributing both to a decline in marriage and the creation of a ‘warrior class’ among youth practising predatory sexual behaviour (Guardian, 3 January 1995).3
Anxiety over increases in lone-parent families, involving not just an appeal against what is believed to be misconceived policy but also worry over a more general post-industrial malaise as the dominance of the nuclear family is perceived to be slipping away, is frequently premised on a particular interpretation of the historical relationship
between the family’s structure and function on the one hand and economic change on the other. Goode’s (1963) attempt in the 1960s to provide a comprehensive, cross-cultural, historical analysis of the family, albeit within the context of modernization theory, acknowledged vast differences in type but also specified certain continuities and commonalities—among them the tendency for industrialization to have as its correlate a transition to the conjugal family, characterized by monogamy, bilateral descent, relatively free choice of partner and the nuclear family household as the normal residential unit for the rearing of children. While much challenged, these generalizations have a strong hold on the collective imagination. Should the conjugal family be posited as characteristic of modernity, at the very pinnacle of the developmental process, then any evidence of its apparent disintegration may assume the basis for disquiet. Thus while all lone mothers may be tarred by the same brush, it is those regarded as voluntarily placing themselves in this category—by having children outside of marriage or being divorced or separated—who are particularly scorned. Such condemnation appears to rest upon the assumption that successful, adequate or ‘good’ parenting involves parents being married to each other as well as their ensuring proper socialization and the private provision of emotional and financial support for their children. It assumes, moreover, that such support and socialization can only occur where both parents are resident in the same household, despite the questionable elision between parenting, household and family that such logic implies.
Imputed meanings and understandings regarding patterns of parenting and household formation need to be closely examined. In practice, innumerable variations are possible and invariably occur. The presence of two parents in the same residence gives no guarantee of either financial or emotional support, let alone effective socialization, nor that parenting will in fact be a joint, shared enterprise.
The relationship between economic change and family forms also requires careful consideration. In Guadeloupe in the Caribbean, a single parent allowance has excited similar outrage from some quarters to that in the UK, with recipients of state funds having been accused of… symbolically and in fact throwing out their men in order to become eligible for the allowance, of preventing men legally recognizing their children and even of conceiving babies for the sole purpose of benefiting from the allowance’ (Dagenais 1993:102).
However, these apparently similar reactions to lone parenthood, elicited by similar policies of state support in the two countries, obscure their very different histories of parenting traditions and household formation, which are associated with differing experiences of economic and social development.
In grappling with commonalities and differences, a number of questions can be raised. Are there several trajectories of family forms and household development in evidence throughout the world or variations on a universal theme? Under what conditions is the lone — parent household likely to emerge or its prevalence to increase? Does an increasing proportion of lone mothers or female-headed households within a country or community signal the breakup of the nuclear family or, on the contrary, the breakup of the extended family? Does it reflect increasing exercise of choice and volition, or the abandonment of women by partners and kin, with extra and unwanted burdens being thrust upon them? Is it a measure of increased autonomy or the substitution of one form of dependence for another, with lone parents being assisted by, but also subjected to the surveillance of, the state? Or does such posing of alternatives itself obscure the situation, with divergent and contradictory processes operating not just between countries, or at different times, but for different women, differentially situated, within the same country?
In exploring diversity of family formation and parenting, this chapter will first consider cross-national variation, with reference to aggregate data for a set of selected countries. Differences in the composition, as well as the proportionate significance, of lone parents (or female-headed households) will be emphasized. Factors of variation apply not just between but also within nations, and, in order to examine their impact more closely, two cases—the UK and Zambia—will then be turned to. In attempting to make sense of diversity overall, reference will be made to patterns of economic development as well as to culture and religion. Consideration will also be given to the role of the state, not just in respect of the policy environment it creates, but also to its ideological orientation. Finally, factors particularly facilitating an increase in the proportion of lone parents or female-headed households will be reviewed.