In today's Dallas Morning News, there was an op-ed piece concerning the decline of two parent households in America. Nearly 40% of today's babies are born to single women. Forty percent! And 77% of them are born to women over 20 years of age, so this is not an issue of teenage pregnancy. The author laments the trivialization of fatherhood and blames the feminist movement for the decimation of the American family. While the feminist movement has contributed to the independence of woman as wage earners, that simplistic argument deserves further exploration.
The author, Cathy Young, is a columnist for The Boston Globe. In her column she states today's single mothers are a throw-back to the old-fashioned, decidedly non-feminist idea that family life and child-rearing are a female domain. In fact, until the Industrial Revolution tore fathers away from the traditional, mostly agrarian households, fathers were the primary overseers of the well-being of their children. They were highly engaged in providing for their children's education and upbringing. The Cult of True Womanhood, which came into being during the Industrial Revolution, was a concentrated effort to shift control of households and children over to women, to free up the men needed for a growing industrial workforce. When children became the primary focus of mothers, to the exclusion of fathers, men began the long descent into obsolescence in their own families.
Active and engaged fathers are still necessary to the well-being of children. A functional two parent household will always be more beneficial to a child than one in which a harried single parent, regardless of gender, is trying to do everything.
