Reimagining Family: A Q&A with Ruby Russell, Author of DOING IT ALL: THE SOCIAL POWER OF SINGLE MOTHERHOOD
Mothers are burned out.
In the wake of the pandemic, article after article shows that parents, particularly mothers of young children, are isolated, lonely, and stressed. While the nuclear family structure may be on the way out, many parents still find themselves raising children without the benefit of a larger community network to rely on. Against this backdrop, partnered mothers can find themselves staying in relationships due to a lack of resources, and mothers who are single by choice or circumstance continue to face social stigmatization as they raise their children.
But what if there was a better way?
Ruby Russell’s Doing It All: The Social Power of Single Motherhood asks and answers this question. Russell’s book argues that, contrary to popular perception, single mothering can be a source of strength and a catalyst for change. Building intentional communities can serve as a launching point for mothers to care for each other and the planet, raising children within a larger web of interconnectedness with benefits for all.
Drawing on her background as a journalist, Russell weaves the personal with the political, researching single motherhood through the centuries and sharing stories of her own. -Jen Bryant
Jen Bryant: Doing It All uses personal stories – both yours and those of other parents – as a gateway to explore the larger structural issues faced by single mothers. What led you to choose this narrative structure for your book?
Ruby Russell: It happened quite organically. Becoming a single mother raised a lot of questions for me – like, why, having always considered myself a feminist, had I never questioned that my motherhood had to be contingent on a man? And why is single motherhood so rarely talked of in political terms? I mean, single motherhood challenges patriarchy at its core – male dominion over the family and female reproduction – so of course it has been the target of fierce political attacks. But we rarely see single motherhood asserted in positive, radical, revolutionary terms and that’s something I wanted to explore.
To understand this identity I’d fallen into, I wanted to know: who were the women who had done this before me, and how? So, it was natural to explore these questions from a very personal perspective. At the same time, I was talking to the women around me, hungry for their stories. At the heart of the book is a tension between autonomy and connection, between liberating mothering and doing our own thing, going it alone and finding support in community. So, I knew from the start that it had to include other women’s voices and experiences. And the issues I explore – about love, connection, women’s bodies and their interaction with economic systems – these are things I discuss constantly with the women in my life, whose perspectives have been essential to understanding my own motherhood, so these conversations naturally formed a basis for much for the book.
JB: Throughout the book, you examine single motherhood in different eras and cultures: Victorian Melbourne’s red-light district brothels, unwed mothers’ homes in 19th-century Ireland, the US during the Clinton-era welfare system overhaul. What surprised you the most during your research?
RR: Part of the impetus for this book was that I wanted to read a history of single motherhood and I couldn’t find one – and that in itself surprised me. Instead, I pored over histories of wifedom and histories of whoredom, looking for glimpses of an identity obscured in the shadows between these two female archetypes. And I was surprised how many histories of sex work barely dealt with mothering at all. But exceptions like Barbara Minchinton’s book on Victorian Melbourne’s red-light district confirmed what I’d been sure must be veiled behind more conventional histories: brilliantly subversive stories of women whose lives were defined as much by their motherhood as their whoredom, living and working together in spaces that blurred the boundaries between brothel and family home.
Single moms have often had to sell sex to survive, and those who haven’t have often been branded whores anyway. As society became more sexually permissive, another villain took center stage: the welfare queen. Either way, single moms are demonized for supporting their families in ways unacceptable to a society that expects women to provide care with pay – but they haven’t been passive pawns in these debates. Welfare moms and moms selling sex have actively demanded state support and decriminalization of their means of survival – and in far more radical terms than the reformers who have campaigned for welfare rights on their behalf.
Wages for Housework, which emerged in the 1970s encompassing groups including the English Collective of Prostitutes, have been framing the fight for recognition of women’s labor in explicitly anti-capitalist terms for decades. Now going under the banner of Global Women’s Strike, they are still on the front lines of battles to protect and support mothers and children. We think of unwed mothers being forced to give up their babies as something of the past – the dark days of the Mother and Baby Homes – but I was shocked by how often moms who come into contact with social services due to poverty, domestic violence or other forms of instability are still being pressured to give up their children or having them forcibly taken into care. And the Global Women’s Strike activists I spoke to very clearly articulated the bigger context of these struggles: how care not being properly valued and supported has horrible consequences from families being torn apart to the climate crisis.
JB: Despite the prevalence of single-parent families, which are often led by those who identify as women, single mothers often describe feeling stigmatized and stereotyped. You mention that single mothers may even face the notion that “a single parent family isn’t a proper family at all.” How might this belief become dangerous when it intersects with policy and legal precedent?
RR: This is another thing that surprised me (and another issue Global Women’s Strike are very active on). There’s a common misconception that mothers have an unfair advantage over fathers in custody disputes, and until I became a single mom, I think I vaguely believed this myself. In fact, the assumption that a child needs both a mother and father can result in moms being forced into contact with domestic abusers, or courts telling them to stop breastfeeding so an infant’s residency can be split with the father. If society really accepted single-parent families as complete and stable – their integrity worthy of the same protection as any nuclear family – we wouldn’t be imposing arrangements that unleash so much disruption and pain. But the prejudice that the two-parent model is best often results in custody decisions that try to fix our ‘broken’ families by emulating the supposed balance of the bi-gender nuclear unit as closely as possible.
JB: In Doing It All, you draw connections between capitalism and the heteronormative nuclear family structure prevalent in Western societies. You state that in this model, “Heterosexuality itself becomes transactional,” with love and sex as a means to security and social acceptance. Mothers are often at a disadvantage compared to fathers in nuclear family structures, both at home and in the workplace. By contrast, I was struck by the examples you provided of “decoupling romantic love and family” through intentional community-building, such as multigenerational child-rearing, “othermothers,” and queer chosen family systems. What are the benefits of reimagining what a family can look like for single mothers and their children?
RR: There are so many benefits! I mean, for women, bigger support networks to share the load make motherhood less lonely and can ease its impact on our careers. If we expanded our idea of family, mothers would be freer to leave relationships they’re unhappy in. More women could actively choose single motherhood instead of settling for an unsuitable partner because they’re running out of time to have kids – or missing out on motherhoods altogether. And I think this would have a pretty profound impact on heterosexual dating: would women still be cast as the needy ones, would men still be running away from commitment, if we didn’t see husbands and fathers as essential to our families?
But more importantly, I believe moving away from the insular nuclear model would be good for society as a whole. When couples settle down and have kids, their social circles contract – whereas in most societies throughout history, children (and the amount of care they need) have been a locus that draws extended families and wider communities together. The nuclear family is the building block of an atomized society that expects people to look after ‘their own’ in the narrowest possible sense. If we want more connected communities, more social responsibility and cohesion, then it’s time to reimagine family: not as a self-contained little brick, but a porous, dynamic nexus of connection – a hub in flexible networks of care that defy rigid gender and family roles.
And you can see this working in experiences of single mothering, particularly in Black communities with traditions of othermothering – which refers both to the care women give to children who are not biologically ‘their own’ and to mothering as the political work of community-building – but it’s something most single moms I know have experienced to some degree, as we’re forced to depend on one another, and out of this need develop intensely supportive friendships.
JB: The financial considerations of solo parenting under capitalism can be daunting. You write that when single mothers receive financial assistance from the government, the state often assumes “the role of patriarchal authority over the women’s bodies and homes.” From home inspections to interrogations about sexual histories, the involvement of the state can increase psychological stress on single mothers even as it purports to help them. How might a universal basic income, such as the Guaranteed Adequate Income proposed by Black community leaders like Johnnie Tillmon during the welfare rights movement of the 1960s-70s, ease this burden?
RR: Welfare has traditionally been a ‘safety net’ to catch those for whom the proper means of support – waged labor or a male benefactor – have failed. In Guaranteed Adequate Income, the National Welfare Rights Organization was proposing something quite different: as a form of UBI, it was based on the principle that everyone is entitled to the means to raise a family comfortably. UBI can stand for universal basic income or unconditional basic income, and I like the latter definition because it stresses recipients’ autonomy over their work and living arrangements – i.e. freedom from the conditions and coercions used to control the lives of welfare recipients.
When, at a 1968 congressional hearing, a female representative argued that welfare recipients should be required to work so that moms wouldn’t be trapped at home, NWRO Vice Chair Beulah Sanders challenged the idea that participating in the waged economy was inherently empowering: Mothers like her shouldn’t be wasting their talents cleaning rich white women’s homes, she told Congress, when they could be “out into the community, mixing with the people, finding out what their problems are and trying to help solve those problems.”
This argument is still so powerful today because the demands of work barely leave enough time to care for our own immediate families – let alone to nurture more expansive networks of interdependence. Many different UBI models are debated these days, but in the book I champion Global Women’s Strike’s proposal for a ‘Care Income’ to “support the work of all those, of every gender, who care for people, for the urban and rural environment, and for the natural world” – because it explicitly recognizes not just we do in the home, but also “out in the community” and as part of greater ecological systems.
JB: You describe environmentalism as a form of care work, writing that motherhood can be “a point of connection into something bigger.” This mindset, you wrote, can be particularly impactful when enacted at the local level as a response to immediate community needs. From this point of view, reliance on others can be a strength instead of a vulnerability. For those who want to get more involved with this type of embodied care work, what’s a good place to start?
RR: I’d love to live in a ‘mommune’ with other single moms, but I’d also find it hard. I like my space. A lot of us aren’t used to asking for help, or sharing what we see as the very personal, intimate labors of mothering. But it doesn’t have to be all or nothing – there are lots of smaller ways to spread the load, like setting up a babysitting circle. Community gardens and food-sharing projects are great. And just being more aware of the people around you, checking in on neighbors, means so much. Even if we don’t share our homes, we can still share the school run with neighbors, or pool together to buy shared appliances. And maybe if our kids get used to being sent next door to get the hoover and taking a neighbor’s bins out while they’re at it, they’ll find sharing and opening the boundaries of domestic spaces a little easier than we might.
And we have to use and defend the community spaces and resources we have. I can’t afford a membership at a co-working space, but I wrote a lot of my book in public libraries – which are also somewhere I’d take my daughter when she was little, especially in winter: they are warm, fun and free. There’d be older kids there for a quiet space to do their homework, people getting online to figure out their benefits or asylum rights – and I’ve heard of libraries in the US running seed-sharing projects, which is a wonderful idea.
JB: What’s the most important takeaway you’d like readers to carry forward with them after finishing this book?
RR: For moms reading my book, I guess my message is: it’s not you, it’s capitalism. The exhaustion, the overwhelm we suffer – it’s a microcosm of what’s happening to the whole biosphere. We’re running the economy on models that don’t account for full cycles of life. That treat people and the planet as resources to be used up in pursuit of profit. We live in a society that values individual striving and success and doesn’t make room for care. So, if your life is centered around doing things for other people – and doing so without pay, quietly, in your ‘free time’ around waged work – the reasons you feel worn to shreds has screw-all to do with poor life choices or personal failings.
Raising kids is something human beings are supposed to do collectively. Mothers were never meant to carry this much responsibility alone. But we’re not just responsible for our children’s health, wellbeing, happiness, social and intellectual development, their future psyches and success as productive members of society. Single moms are blamed for child poverty, social unrest, youth crime and unemployment. Welfare moms are held responsible for inflation. We’re even told it’s our job to avert climate catastrophe by managing our homes and consumption more responsibly.
Like nature itself – the ecological systems we’re depleting at fatal speed – moms are expected to keep giving, keep nurturing, providing and replenishing, and to expect nothing back. I don’t know if there’s any comfort in experiencing burnout as a kind of intense empathy with Gaia – maybe that only makes it more depressing! But I hope it might make us angry enough to ditch some of the mom guilt and demand change and fight to wrest a bit of power back from those who take no responsibility at all.
Cover photo by Mike Erskine on Unsplash
About the Author
Jen Bryant is a writer, perpetual student, and stray cat whisperer. Her work has appeared in Ms., BUST, The Sun Magazine, Hipmama, and elsewhere. Jen is an editor at MUTHA Magazine and a creative nonfiction reader for Mud Season Review. A native of the South, she currently resides in the Midwest.
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