Lesbian Mothers

Accounts of Gender in American Culture

Ellen Lewin

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501720048
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Within a society that long considered "lesbian motherhood" a contradiction in terms, what were the experiences of lesbian mothers at the end of the twentieth century? In this illuminating book, lesbian mothers tell their stories of how they became mothers; how they see their relationships with their children, relatives, lovers, and friends and with their children's fathers and sperm donors; how they manage child-care arrangements and financial difficulties; and how they deal with threats to custody. Ellen Lewin's unprecedented research on lesbian mothers in the San Francisco area captured a vivid portrait of the moment before gay and lesbian parenting moved into the mainstream of U.S. culture. Drawing on interviews with 135 women, Lewin provided her readers with a new understanding of the attitudes of individual women, the choices they made, and the texture of their daily lives.

1

Looking for Lesbian Motherhood

In December 1975, in Dallas, Texas, a lesbian mother named Mary Jo Risher lost custody of her nine-year-old son after her older, teenaged son gave testimony against her before a jury. I learned about the case when the San Francisco Chronicle picked up the story; the paper’s front page ran a close-up photograph of the mother’s reaction when she heard the verdict. Her face was twisted in agony and the picture was absolutely heart-wrenching.

By the time I saw this picture, I had come to know another lesbian mother fairly well. She was a generation older than I, and she had lost custody of all three of her children in the early 1950s after her former husband called the police to report that she was sleeping with a woman. The police burst in, arrested both my friend and her partner, and removed the children to foster care, where they remained for several years. Only after the death of her former husband was she able to regain custody, and this only after managing to convince the court that the lesbian episode had represented a “phase” that had now ended.

This was the context within which I began the research that has led to this book. At the time I began this work, in 1977, lesbian mothers and their families were not commonly discussed when the topic of the “changing American family” was raised. Most of my colleagues were confused when they learned of my intention to investigate lesbian mothers. Where would I find such people? How could a lesbian be a mother, they asked; wasn’t that a contradiction in terms?¹

The years since I began this work have been a time of transition for the particular population I worked with and for gay and lesbian people in general. Scholarship on gay and lesbian issues has emerged and begun to receive academic recognition, contributing to the evolution of my intellectual and personal perspectives on these issues.² They have been years during which homosexuality gained a public face—and an increasingly respectable one, at that—and lesbian motherhood has become a far more visible phenomenon.

During this period, public concern with gender, motherhood, and sexual orientation has changed. Feminism has given way, it seems, to the pluralism of “postfeminism”;³ at the same time, in the wake of the Reagan years, much popular discourse appears to be concerned with the rediscovery of so-called traditional values.⁴ During the years I was working on this project, the feminist critique of marriage and the family as sources of patriarchal domination appears to have collapsed, to be replaced by a more civil-rights-oriented emphasis on access to the economic and social privileges associated with these institutions.⁵

This shift has also involved a heightened awareness and celebration of what are taken to be the unique psychological and spiritual attributes of mothers, a shift intrinsic to a growing acceptance of a “cultural feminist”⁶ stance in the wider lesbian community⁷ and which has been influenced by the publication of books on motherhood with a lesbian-feminist slant.⁸ Homosexuality also has moved more squarely into public consciousness and may, depending on one’s reading of current trends, be becoming more acceptable to the general population;⁹ at the very least, its increasing visibility has meant that lesbian mothers are far less obscure today than they were when I began my research.¹⁰ Technology has become a relatively routine dimension of many women’s reproductive lives, apparently expanding options and even permitting older and unmarried women—whether they be heterosexual or lesbian—more easily to contemplate not only motherhood but pregnancy and childbirth. The irony here is that while motherhood is culturally preferred and normalized, even for lesbians, mothers share with other women diminished economic options and low occupational status. At the same time that pronatalism has made a comeback, the society devotes few resources to child care, health care, education, housing, or other areas of vital concern to parents.¹¹

This changing political climate, both in feminism and in the wider society, has had troubling consequences for my work. While my earliest concern was to validate the very existence of lesbian mothers and to show that they were “good enough” to keep their children, now my findings threaten to support a trend that seems to privilege motherhood over nonmotherhood, regardless of sexual orientation. The similarities between lesbian and heterosexual mothers which I document, when considered from this perspective, suggest that motherhood, even more clearly than sexual orientation, defines womanhood, thereby intensifying the already existing bifurcation of women into mothers and nonmothers.

My early effort to gain a rightful place for lesbian mothers in the feminist reexamination of the family was only one example of a growing concern with carving out a place for lesbians in the expanding literature on gender and the family. This was also a period characterized by continuing feminist academic concern (both in anthropology and in other disciplines) with describing the nature of women’s oppression across cultural boundaries and thereby legitimizing “women” as a domain for research. If women are a “group,” characterized by universal, defining features, then sex oppression might be understood better and eventually defeated.¹²

What establishing the legitimacy and reality of lesbian mothers seemed to mean in 1976, when I first began to think about this issue, was describing them and showing that they were not different from other mothers. What did I mean by “different”? Community concern at the time was centered on what seemed to be a growing number of custody cases, cases that lesbian mothers usually lost. The Mary Jo Risher case was only one of a number of highly publicized cases in which judges (or in the Risher case, a jury) assumed that lesbians could not, by definition, be adequate mothers, or, more seriously, that by definition they were likely to be “bad” mothers. Mothers in these cases either lost custody of their children or won custody under highly compromised conditions, often with the stipulation that they not live with their partners or not allow their children to have contact with them.¹³

The “Sandy and Madeleine case” provides a good example of the kinds of issues that tended to emerge in custody cases. Sandy and Madeleine were two mothers who met through their children’s Sunday school. Both staunch fundamentalist Christians, they never thought that their relationship could be immoral, since “God had brought them together.” In 1971 their ex-husbands joined together to try to obtain custody, going back to court repeatedly during the 1970s each time judges gave the mothers custody with various sorts of conditions. Sandy and Madeleine felt so sure that their family was wholesome and normal that they had a film made about themselves, Sandy and Madeleine’s Family, originally to be used in court, but later going into general circulation in lesbian communities around the country.¹⁴ The film emphasized the family’s strong religious values, the importance the mothers gave to (particularly outdoor and athletic) activities with the children, and the warmth and nurturance of their relationships with their own and each other’s children.

This film was only one of the indicators of the centrality of custody cases in the way the organized lesbian community approached motherhood at the time that I began thinking about these issues. For example, in a major popular collection of articles about the diversity of lesbian experience, Our Right to Love, only two out of some fifty articles deal with lesbian mothers.¹⁵ One focuses on legal, and specifically on custody, problems,¹⁶ while the other, written by a psychologist, takes up the question whether and how to come out to one’s children, an issue that derives some of its importance from the implications it may have in custody disputes.¹⁷

Given these concerns, I felt my responsibility would be to demonstrate that lesbians were at least ordinary mothers, and therefore likely to be “as good as” heterosexual mothers in comparable social and economic circumstances. It seemed to me that the basis on which custody cases were argued needed to be challenged, that the focus should be on the ways in which lesbian mother families, like other families, met the basic and recurrent needs of their children, rather than on the mother’s affectional preferences. This also meant to me that research needed to be more sociological and structural than psychological, shifting concern from how the mother’s sexuality or the absence of a father would affect the children’s development to the ways in which the daily lives of lesbian and heterosexual female­headed families would tend to coincide.

Popular Feminism and Feminist Scholarship: Assumptions about Motherhood

Though the reasons for their conclusions varied, feminists of many backgrounds and theoretical orientations had tended to view motherhood as the source of the problem we all sought to address: why women are devalued, deprived, or oppressed in so many, if not all, of the world’s societies. Some reasoned that women’s reproductive specialization, and particularly their tendency to have primary responsibility for the care of children, determined the division of labor by sex, insofar as child care was incompatible with many economic roles dominated by men.¹⁸ Other focused on the symbolic impact of motherhood, seeing it as the basis for women’s “otherness” in all cultures,¹⁹ Psychoanalytically inclined theorists called our attention to the intrapsychic level;²⁰ those more concerned with social structure looked at the ways in which motherhood defined women’s concerns on the more private level, blocking their acquisition of the tools needed for manipulation of the public domain.²¹ And many feminists, coming from less academic perspectives, also generated theories of women’s oppression which focused on motherhood or reproduction as the “culprits” responsible for women’s enslavement.²² While most early feminist analyses linked the oppression of women to the social and cultural organization of reproduction, many later “cultural feminists” instead emphasized ways in which motherhood endowed women with distinct (and possibly superior) moral or spiritual capacities.²³

All of these perspectives tend to conflate motherhood and womanhood, as though they were interchangeable, mutually defining, and as though the status of woman could be entirely understood with respect to the meaning of motherhood in a particular situation. In the early period of feminist theorizing, the assumption that women’s oppression was universal was accompanied by the notion that women must be viewed as victims of cultures they did not devise. Male dominance, or patriarchy, was simply there (and probably always had been), and women had to live with its consequences, somehow finding a way to manage their devalued situations.

It seemed to me, however, that motherhood, rather than being a unitary phenomenon (a misapprehension further enforced by the single word we use to describe “mothers”), could also be viewed in a more dynamic fashion. I began to think of motherhood as a strategy for dealing with devalued status, at the same time that it might be one of the causes of that status, and I approached motherhood specifically as an economic strategy. My early work on lower-class Latina immigrants, for instance, indicated that they tended not to see motherhood as a choice. Nevertheless, once women were mothers, their ongoing strategies all began from the resources offered by motherhood, sometimes involving highly self-conscious manipulations of ties with children.²⁴

Lesbian mothers, I reasoned, would differ from the Latina mothers in that they could not avoid being more purposeful and self-conscious about their situations as mothers. In particular, those who had had their children outside of marital situations—that is, the women who had become mothers through donor insemination or adoption—probably had entered into motherhood voluntarily, despite its supposed negative effects on future opportunity and access to the public domain. A central question, then, was why, if motherhood is the source of women’s devalued status, do women become mothers? And why, more to the point, do women who perceive themselves as having other options, especially women who cannot become mothers by accident, purposefully propel themselves into this problematic situation?

At the time I began to plan my research, virtually nothing apart from limited clinical reports had appeared on lesbian motherhood in the scholarly literature,²⁵ though several psychological studies got under way about the same time I began. These few were all tightly controlled comparatives studies of children of lesbian mothers and matched samples of children from “father-absent homes,” all of which isolated variables presumed to indicate emotional adjustment or “normal” sex-role learning.²⁶ What little I could find in popular sources mainly took the form of personal narratives appearing in feminist and gay media as well as in Mom’s Apple Pie, the newsletter of the Lesbian Mothers National Defense Fund.²⁷ I also located numerous accounts of custody problems,²⁸ and a small body of more polemical writing about the place of motherhood in a future Lesbian Nation.²⁹ Discussions of motherhood appeared with some regularity in radical feminist/separatist publications such as Off Our Backs and The Furies, with debates frequently focusing on the “problem” of male children and on the need for more collective forms of child rearing.

Since there were so few scholarly works on lesbian mothers, I depended heavily on scholarly (and sometimes popular) writings on divorce, unwed mothers, matrifocality, and single mothers in poverty.³⁰ On the basis of reports of custody problems and anecdotal material on lesbian mothers in popular works, I anticipated a range of problems and issues likely to be significant for lesbian mothers. The literature on lesbianism available during this period either was silent on the subject of motherhood or mentioned it only briefly; far more attention was devoted to questions of etiology and debates about pathology, along with speculation about sexual behavior and psychological status,³¹ though an important article by John Gagnon and William Simon placed great emphasis on pervasive similarities in the socialization and emotional experience of lesbians and heterosexual woman, thus indirectly suggesting that lesbians could be mothers.³²

The research design I finally settled on, organized as a comparative study of single mothers and developed to meet the requirements of a federal funding agency, was grounded in a growing conviction that lesbian mothers were really “just” single mothers who faced some additional challenges. (The Appendix provides details on my research design and methods.) In other words, I could pursue my desire to demonstrate the lack of significant differences between lesbian mothers and others by framing lesbian m...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• 1 Looking for Lesbian Motherhood
• 2 Becoming a Lesbian Mother
• 3 “This Wonderful Decision”
• 4 Ties That Endure
• 5 “This Permanent Roommate”
• 6 Friends and Lovers
• 7 Life with Father
• 8 Lady Madonna in Court
• 9 Natural Achievements: Lesbian Mothers in American Culture
• Appendix
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index