In an article that came out yesterday, a columnist mused on a recent study (by two economists at the National Bureau of Economics Research–the most boring club in Cambridge, MA, except when Larry Summers shows up) that showed women to be unhappier than men across the board–rich or poor, black or white, punk or prep. Here’s what the study’s authors say:
“By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women’s happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. The paradox of women’s declining relative well-being is found across various datasets, measures of subjective well-being, and is pervasive across demographic groups and industrialized countries.”
Why? The columnist offers some possible answers. But he ultimately lands on the fact that there are more and more single mothers out there, and that the single parenting gig is, if I may be a little faux-folksy here, a tough row to hoe. He writes that “the steady advance of single motherhood threatens the interests and happiness of women.” Now there’s an understatement.
What’s really interesting is what he says next. How to reduce single motherhood-ism? Public policy will only get you so far, he says. Instead, “some kind of social stigma is a necessity.” We used to have a stigma that ostracized the “fallen woman,” he notes, and that this kept a lid on what we have today. The problem, he rightly observes, was that it was unfair because it was one-sided and misogynistic: all the stigma was on women. What we need now, he says, is “a social revolution that ostracizes serial baby-daddies and trophy-wife collectors as thoroughly as the ‘fallen women’ of a more patriarchal age.” So, instead of unfairly making women feel bad for being single moms (and this stigma is still very real, I might add), we should create real social pressure on men who father these children–either outside marriage or those who father children within marriage, but then divorce their wives.
Is he right? Would this kind of social stigma work?
COMMENTS
4 responses to “The Problem: Sad Women & Baby Daddies; The Answer: Sexual Stigmas?”
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my wife thinks that forcing men to pay child support via harsher ramifications would solve many problems…
in some states, you can’t get a passport if you owe child support.
Not that you don’t know my thoughts on this…! I can’t resist a forum to ask ourselves what the church is doing to embrace single mothers. We encourage single motherhood as an alternative to abortion, but rarely do we (the church) keep up that encouragement as the child grows beyond the first year. Single mothers, especially those who are single from the start of their motherhood, are shunned in churches (usually). We only see their sin. I’d love for the church to be a place where single mothers could be loved and upheld. If the church reached out to single mothers and became a family to them, wouldn’t this make a statement to the absent fathers? Might it change the way people view single moms? It seems to me that the moms are the ones who take the heat from society after a break up (or if they were never together). People seem to have pity on the dad. I also think more pressure should be put on dads- child support reform is way overdue.
I say expose them to the gospel and let the Holy Spirit do the rest.The world seeks only to destroy all.The flesh is weak and anything we do in response to please the world is foolish.Not my will but Thy will be done.
I know Mark Driscoll caught some flack around here for his machismo act (some of that flack was well-deserved, by the way), but his series on Ruth from about two years ago essentially told single men in his church to stop acting childish (“dicking around” was his phrase, I believe) so that God might potentially use them to marry and care for single moms. That may be the third use of the law, but it makes good sense in a certain respect if we’re talking about simultaneously reducing abortion and caring for single mothers.