Single Mother
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Single Mother

The Emergence of the Domestic Intellectual

Jane Juffer

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Single Mother

The Emergence of the Domestic Intellectual

Jane Juffer

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About This Book

Long perceived as the ultimate symbol of social breakdown and sexual irresponsibility, the single mother is now, in the context of welfare-to-work policies, often hailed as the new spokesperson for hard work and self-sufficiency. A dozen years after Dan Quayle denounced the television character Murphy Brown for making the decision to become a single mother “just another lifestyle choice,” President George W. Bush applauded single mothers for “heroic work,” and positive on-screen representations of single mothers abound, from The Gilmore Girls to Sex and the City to American Idol.

Single Mother describes the recent cultural valorization of this figure that—in the midst of demographic changes in the U.S.—has emerged as the unlikely heroic and seductive voice of the new American family. Drawing on her own life as a single mother, interviews with dozens of other single mothers, cultural representations, and policies on welfare, immigration, childcare, and child custody, Juffer analyzes this contingent acceptance of single mothers. Finally, critiquing the relentless emphasis on self-sufficiency to the exclusion of community, Juffer shows the remarkable organizing skills of these new mothers of invention. At a moment when one-third of all babies are born to single moms, Single Mother is a fascinating and necessary examination of these new “domestic intellectuals.”

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Publisher
NYU Press
Year
2006
ISBN
9780814743461

PART I

Keyword: Everyday Life

Alex giggles his dark curly hair is almost shoulder length. He’s got on a Garfield the Cat shirt and a saggy cloth diaper. We’re unloading groceries from their plastic bags in the kitchen. He has developed his own game: he takes an item out of the bag, announces its name, and finds some place in the kitchen to deposit it. He can’t reach many of the shelves and cupboards. “Bananas” go not in the fruit bowl but on the shelf beneath the bowl. I follow behind, putting items in their proper places. Then he becomes wise to my corrections. “Loops!” he says for Fruit Loops, and puts them in the refrigerator with a sly smile. I smile back and patiently take them out and put them in the pantry. “Ice cream!” goes in the towel drawer. “Milk!” in the dog’s dish. Then he wanders farther from the kitchen, returning for new items, delighted with himself: cheese in the toy box, bread in the bathroom sink, a box of graham crackers on top of the hamster cage. He’s a little bricoleur, moving randomly yet with some reason throughout the house, redefining its places in his own small way. The bags finally empty, Alex smiles, “All done!” Yep, I say: thanks for the help! I set him up with magic markers and paper, and sneak around to the different rooms, gradually returning the items to the kitchen. I retrace his paths, further producing in my movement our domestic routine—closely intertwined, random, with few rules, yet still managed, to keep disorder just at bay.
Alex is a tactician, as most children are, defying the strategists who attempt to contain them, rein them in, impose a rationality on the wonderful spontaneity of their lives. In his The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau divides the world into these two camps: tacticians and strategists. Tacticians are the weak, the marginal, the mobile, the insurgent, whose unpredictable and mainly unintentional movements through time and space make brief but ultimately unsuccessful incursions on the spaces of the strategists, occupiers of the institutions of rational capitalism and property. “A tactic is determined by the absence of power just as a strategy is organized by the postulation of power,” says de Certeau (38). Does that make me the strategist in this situation? I guess I am more powerful, putting things back in their proper places, installing some order within the home. I’ve become complicit with the larger mandate of parenting: socialization of your children into the world of rules, conformity, and rationality.
Or have I? That’s the problem with de Certeau’s bifurcation of the world into tacticians and strategists: you can never acquire a stable place or you’ve gone over to the side of power. But what about stability for your kids? They require a place, stasis, property—all those things that indicate complicity but that you couldn’t raise a child without. And having a stable place doesn’t mean pleasure is negated. In fact, finding more room for pleasure within life’s everyday routines requires careful planning, constructing the places from which spontaneity can arise. The question for single mothers is how to create and maintain these spaces and times for play, how to carve joyful moments out of everyday routines, how to truly appreciate them when they happen, when the very work of managing by yourself threatens to erase the possibilities for pleasure. Perhaps I wanted to cut the game off immediately, just save time and put the groceries immediately in their place. But not really. I wanted to hold on to the pleasure of disorder even in the midst of exhaustion. The pleasure that erupts within the everyday work of mothers is not transcendent, for it is out of these very conditions of work that we find joy. It must be so, for otherwise there would be no time at all for play. How do we maximize pleasure, given the fact that, as Roger Silverstone writes in his book on television and the everyday, “everyday life is a continuous achievement, more or less ritualized, more or less taken for granted, more or less fragile, in the face of the unknown, the unexpected or the catastrophic” (165). In the rituals and routines, in the constant organization and negotiation between work and play, exhaustion and euphoria, single mothers as domestic intellectuals make everyday life happen for their children.

Everyday Life and Cultural Studies

The “everyday” and “everyday life” have been critical concepts in cultural studies for several generations, perhaps beginning, in a slightly different phrasing, with Raymond Williams’s insistence that “culture is or dinary” (1958). Elaborated through de Certeau, Lefebvre, Bourdieu, and media scholars like David Morley and Charlotte Brunsdon throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, this work helped cultural studies scholars develop a material approach to culture that did not rely on the Marxist tenet that production is all-determining. Everyday life situates consumption not in some abstract theory but rather in the material spaces where and when people watch television, cook, shop, listen to music, and so on. In its attention to the routine, a politics of the everyday allows us to deploy Foucault’s teachings on the microphysics of power as manifested in the body’s movements through time and space. It does not disdain routine and habit but rather sees them as constitutive of everyday life (Felski). It is also attentive to how power operates differently in different sites, unpredictably and complexly. It tries to discern the relationship between the macro and the micro, what Anthony Giddens termed “structuration,” the idea that it’s only through the repetition of individual acts that structures are reproduced. The question is: How much control do people exercise over those acts and their effects? De Certeau is not as interested in what people consciously do so much as what inevitably happens as people go about their lives: “People have to make do with what they have” (18).
Other theorists of the everyday have been more invested in people’s somewhat conscious transformations of the materials at hand, although not without attention to larger social forces. I would place here, for example, Janice Radway’s study of women romance readers; as she says:
To know, then, why people do what they do, read romances, for instance, it becomes necessary to discover the constructions they place on their behavior, the interpretations they make of their actions. A good cultural analysis of the romance ought to specify not only how the women understand the novels themselves but also how they comprehend the act of picking up a book in the first place. The analytic forces must shift from the text itself, taken in isolation, to the complex social event of reading where a woman actively attributes sense to lexical signs in a silent process carried on in the context of her ordinary life. (8)
Here we see another important element of the study of everyday life: the act of interpreting a cultural text must be situated, even decentered, in order to understand its effects within a complex daily routine. The act of picking up a book—of finding the time to read given the demands of housework and child care—is just as important as the content of the book. Noting the “veritable dailiness” of television, Silverstone sets out to answer how it is “that such a technology and medium has found its way so profoundly and intimately into the fabric of our daily lives?” (2). Focusing on media’s imbrication within everyday life shows the complexity of the home’s relationship with other sites; consumers use television even as they are positioned by it—both by its place within the home (the bedroom, the living room, the kitchen) and by its textual representations. Also, “everyday life” offers an alternative to various theories that assume mass media’s unidirectional effect on hapless consumers because it shows how the consumption of television is shaped by other practices.
Studies of the media, especially television, have constituted the major body of work in cultural studies—perhaps the only body—that takes seriously the domestic sphere. Within that body of work, a few of these scholars, including Silverstone, consider the labor of parenting and the lives of children. Cultural studies’ general dismissal of the domestic is curious, given its investment in the everyday as a governing concept. What’s more everyday than parenting? It may be that the everyday lives of mothers and children is simply too everyday: diaper changing and bottles, play dates and snacks, soccer practice and trumpet lessons. What’s there to theorize? The unfortunate assumption is that mothering doesn’t provide enough material for analysis, that it can’t give rise to the theories of the everyday that something like wandering the city might. Unfortunately, the elision of mothering reinforces larger cultural beliefs that mothering is not a creative or intellectual activity. The absence also points to a curious distance between cultural studies and key feminist texts on mothering such as Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born, an elaboration of the relationship between the everyday life of mothering and the institutions that shape it.
I hope to show in much of this book how important it is, given cultural studies’ interest in political engagement, to take seriously the everyday lives of mothers and children, in particular single mothers. Family issues are of central concern to conservatives, and without an alternative to their platform, cultural studies cedes critical political territory. How do mothers make do, in conditions not of their own making? An ethical politics of mothering and the family emerges from the everyday lives of single mothers, and this book aims to make those practices visible, to connect the micro to the macro and vice versa, thus contributing to the conditions in which domestic work and pleasure are valued and shared. The “Spaces” section describes the everyday practices of single mothers at universities, on the border, and in a Puerto Rican community in Chicago.
Despite their lip service to the value of families, politicians rarely address the details of everyday life. Recall George Bush’s praise of single mothers, which I cited in the introduction as an example of the shift from the demonization of single mothers to their celebration. Yet this celebration relies on abstracting mothers from their everyday lives at home, for it is only through ignoring the fact that domestic labor is in fact labor, albeit uncompensated, that Bush can proclaim paid work to be the moral alternative to welfare. The elision of the everyday is the ethics—or lack of ethics—of neoliberalism. As Elizabeth Walden argues in “Cultural Studies and the Ethics of Everyday Life,” “The right’s most powerful ideological tool, neo-liberalism, precludes ethical debate by being represented as part of a process of rationalization pure and simple, inevitable and incontrovertible. The right, then, eludes the ethical both by slipping beneath it, with its moralism, and by transcending it, appealing to the rationalism implicit in an economistic world-view” (2002). When it pushes for welfare reform, the right slips beneath the ethical by erasing the nitty-gritty work of raising kids. Its answer is to rise above the quotidian details of child care and transportation, favoring a reductive belief in the transformative effects of paid work. The assumption that economics provides the only basis for rational decisions and that the only moral choice is work is what Simon Duncan and Rosalind Edwards, in their analysis of welfare legislation in Britain, call “the rationality mistake,” or “the idea that people act as rational economic men, coupled with the normative stance that it is paid work which is the most moral activity on offer” (289). In their critique of British welfare reform, which assumes that getting a job will get women off welfare, Duncan and Edwards argue that life is much more complicated: “What these pictures of economic rationality gloss over is the fact that lone mothers are indeed mothers who socially negotiate particular understandings about what constitutes ‘good’ motherhood within particular cultural and neighbourhood settings. This negotiation and understanding proceeds in different ways to the process assumed in the model of individual economic rationality” (118).
The question for feminist cultural studies becomes how to counter this view of economic rationality with a careful rendering of everyday life—without celebrating everyday life as transcendent of economic forces. Duncan and Edwards argue that welfare “reform” will not work if it ignores all the factors that mothers must take into account when considering whether to enter the workforce. These factors include money-related questions such as whether wages and benefits (if provided) will offset the costs of child care and transportation, as well as noneconomic factors such as how their children are doing in day care or school, the emotional stress of putting children into a new place, the desire to spend more time with children when they’re young—all factors that middle- and upper-class moms can consider without the stigma of “welfare mom” attached. U.S. studies also have shown that “rational economic assumptions” don’t account for everyday life. Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein found in their study of 397 low-income single mothers in Chicago, San Antonio, Boston, and Charleston that “welfare-reliant mothers were able to cover only three-fifths of their budgets with welfare, food stamps, and benefits from other means-tested programs in the early 1990s. Wage-reliant mothers could cover about two-thirds of their monthly budgets with wages from their main jobs” (224). In order to survive, both groups had to draw on alternative sources, such as supplemental work, and not report the wages, which would be deducted from their welfare payments. The difference, concluded Edin and Lein, is that wage-reliant mothers had much less time to do extra work than welfare mothers and thus were generally worse off.1

Too Rational?

For de Certeau, it’s not just economics that imposes a rational order on everyday life. Almost everywhere you turn, order is being imposed: city planning, science, medicine, education—all try to regulate the body’s movements in punishing and predictable ways. Capitalism tells us you can master these spaces, and that doing so proves your “success”—your ability to become autonomous through rational decision making. For critics of this “invasion” of everyday life by rational structures, then, the objective seems to be to reveal people’s general inability to see what pawns we’ve become.
Yet for de Certeau, the body resists, and this resistance is captured in a poetics that eludes rationality. Institutions oppose creativity; the body somehow expresses it, but not intentionally. De Certeau speaks of the “reminiscences of bodies lodged in ordinary language and marking its path, like white pebbles dropped through the forest of signs. An amorous experience, ultimately. Incised into the prose of the passage from day to day, without any possible commentary or translation, the poetic sounds of fragments remain” (163). This is actually a wonderful description of single mothering. It is in fact an amorous experience; you fall in love with your child. Yet you also lose touch with your own body, its pleasures become a kind of memory lodged in the routine of the everyday. There are times to remember it—occasional love making, when you find someone who understands, and other moments of stolen pleasures. But mainly you find your pleasures through your child’s. His body is my body, I strive to feel what he feels, a practice that begins in infancy when he can’t talk but continues throughout childhood when things are still hard to explain and into preadolescence when desire becomes inexplicable. Of course this is all wonderful and moving and powerful: the opportunity to become one with another person. Yet it is also exhausting and cannot be continued for many years without a cost to the mother’s body and soul. To alleviate this burden, you need support; if you don’t have it, you must become an organizer extraordinaire, constantly maneuvering routines in order to have a little time for pleasure at the end of the day. And here’s where de Certeau’s theory breaks down again: single mothers must be rational to manage everyday life. There is no easy divide separating pleasure and bodies from rationality.
The positing of the everyday as simultaneously the repository of the rational forces of capitalism and the possible site of resistance has kept the “everyday” from being a really useful category for cultural studies, argues Tony Bennett. He finds in de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, and other theorists a tendency to figure the everyday as
the source of a tension between, on the one hand, the oppressive stultification arising from the routinisation of everyday life that is dictated by the invasion of system and, on the other hand, the sources of renewal—provided they can be identified and tapped into—derived from the residues of a pre-modern period in which everyday life was inherently authentic and whose traces have been carried organically from the past into the present. It is this fracture within everyday life that allows its analysis to serve as a privileged locus for engaging with the dynamics of the everyday. (2004, 26)
How does one tap into these authentic residues, or perhaps, better stated: Who gets to do the tapping? It would seem the only way is for critics to position themselves as somehow outside the everyday, so that they can act as the agents of defamiliarization, able to show how the everyday has become defined by rationality. Yet how does the critic break free of the everyday that is so all-determining for everyone else? This “radical politics” is rather ineffective, suggests Bennett, for it rests largely on a false claim of transcendence from the quotidian; it becomes a purely critical move, even as it harkens back nostalgically to “the subterranean history of the body,” a desire expressed in both de Certeau and Lefebvre (Bennett 2004, 29). The critic of the everyday thus gets to have his cake and eat it too, to claim freedom from his body in the ability to see how other bodies move through space and at the same time to disdain rational self-reflexivity in favor of a nonrational bodily and creative practice. One wonders what were the everyday conditions in which de Certeau wrote: did he care for a child in between writing the paragraphs of The Practice of Everyday Life? Surely the rational planning and management of everyday life done by most women facilitates the intellectual production of many male writers and critics.
It is certainly tempting to adopt the position of the tactician, always operating outside power, as a transgressive and insurgent force. Who wouldn’t want to count herself among the “unrecognized producers, poets of their own affairs, trailblazers in the functionalist rationality”? (de Certeau 34). Yet in this formulation, the everyday has to exceed rationality, routines, and normativity. Its resistance lies in its transcendence. By contrast, says Rita Felski, the everyday must “make peace with the ordinariness of everyday life” (31). This entails seeing that routines, while they may sometimes be “personally constraining and socially detrimental,” says Felski, can also produce comfort and security rather than being the source of alienation and dehumanization. When applied to housework and child care, Felski’s words seem right: the endless routine of diapers and dishes is in fact personally constraining, especially when done all alone. Yet that routine also produces the comfort of knowing you’re providing for your child’s security and well-being. Out of these everyday conditions emerges the recognition for a new kind of family, one in which single mothers could be supported in expanding possibilities for comfort, security, and even creativity within these same routines—in which other people will also someday participate.

The Critique of Transgression

The everyday, in other words, need not be celebratory in order to present an alternative to an abstract politics, whether that be George Bush’s abstraction of mothers from everyday life or feminist critics who sometimes argue that single mothering inherently transgresses patriarchy. I addressed this tendency in the introduction and argued that a transgressive politics articulated mainly for the sake of resistance may not address such mundane chores as cleaning hamster cages; it may transcend the details of everyday life—and thus offer no effective alternative to the conservative idealization of mothers that also divorces mothering from work.
Domestic intellectuals are defined by the everyday; they don’t rise above but remain firmly within, and it’s the movement within that allows possibilities for rearticulation. As Bennett argues, everyday life is not a homogeneous force but a complex and shifting ensemble of forces, and this complexity is what gives rise to agency: “There is sufficient potential for the dissonance and clash within the multiplicity of powers that are at play in the everyday to suggest that everyday life is more pertinently viewed as the source and site of incessantly transformative social mechanisms than of a seamless structure of habit and repetition that has to be transcended in some general way” (2004, 32). In this formulation, no one is either purely victimized by everyday life, unable to see their place within it, nor able to step ...

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