1

‘Happy Families?’:Single Mothers, the Pressand the Politiciansby Karen Atkinson,Sarah Oerton and Diane Burns

FOR THOSE OF US who have been following how lone parents are representedin media and political debates over the last few years, the shift was all tooapparent. By Spring 1997, the political scapegoating of single mothers as

being responsible for tearing apart the moral fabric of society had become lessfrequent; tabloid headlines which screamed ‘family breakdown’, ‘scroungers’ and‘welfare benefit crisis’ appeared less often; and many politicians had started toproject themselves as, at the least, concerned about the welfare of lone parents and theirchildren. Surprising really, that is, until we remember the backdrop—the UK GeneralElection and 1.3 million UK lone parent voters. By April 1997, a growing backlashagainst the more extreme and pathologising accusations against single mothers hadrendered explicit vilification unacceptable. To pull votes a different sort of languagehad to come into play—one which didn’t risk turning off the electorate but would stillallow a freezing or cutting of welfare spending on lone parent families. Since it wasnow politically inexpedient to engage in vitriolic attack, there emerged a newdiscourse—one which reappropriated and redefined lone parents as chief targets ofgovernment aid. Close scrutiny of the texts circulating from 1992 to the time of theGeneral Election offers insights of how policy agendas, political rhetoric and newsinterweave to construct a definition of lone parents which bears little resemblance tohow they may see themselves.

1993 was the year in which the pathol-ogising of single mothers reached its peak,strategically exploited to initially usher inthe freezing of one-parent benefit by theTories. It also paved the way for a proposalto scrap lone parent premium two yearslater (Conservative Party Budget, November

1996). To some extent the ground had beenlaid much earlier. Rhodes Boyson MP, wayback in 1986, had condemned single parentsas ‘evil’ in having made ‘their case so wellthey have expanded their subsidies fromthe public purse from some £15 million in1960 to £1 billion in 1983’.1 By the early

Discourses of Vilification—The Early 1990’s

1990s, a frenzy of newspaper reports spreadand heightened moral panic over thesupposed splitting of our societal seams,and as press headlines asserted ‘SingleParents Cripple Lives’,2 it was womenbringing up children on their own whowere seen as culpable. When two ten yearold boys were charged with the murder ofthe toddler James Bulgar, the issuefrequently forefronted in the media wasthat each came from a ‘broken home’. Theirmothers were smeared in the press:

Mrs Thompson worked as an officecleaner until two years ago when she gotpregnant again by another man, who alsoleft her… . When the children would beleft sitting on the red wall outside thehouse too long, one of the neighbourswould call the police to go and get herout of the ‘Top House’ [pub].3

The breakdown of nuclear family life, singlemothers and juvenile crime becameinextricably interwoven into a text ofconvenient cause-and-effect:

Following the brutal murder of two-yearold James Bulgar, we have been gripped bya rare mood of moral introspection, andwe must not let the moment pass withoutanswering the questions we have begun toask. The narrow question concernsjuvenile crime. But it belongs within thewider context of childhood and the familyin Britain today. The facts are grim. Threeout of ten children are born outsidemarriage. One in five is brought up in aone-parent family.4

The reporting of the Bulgar incidentthus materialised into yet another attackon single mothers for undercutting familylife. The voice of moral outrage character-ised lone parenthood as swamping Britain

by a tide of social irresponsibility and feck-lessness. Riding high on this wave ofscare-mongering, the then Home SecretaryMichael Howard warned that the rise insingle parents threatened the ideal of thetraditional family,5 this, despite the factthat in 1993 only 17% of British familieswith children under 18 were one-parentfamilies.6 As New Right ideologies of thefamily started to dominate public discourse,the plan to pave the way for dramatic cutsin welfare benefit meant that more strategicattacks were needed to home in on thoselone parents who were receiving most statesupport. And so, at the Conservative PartyConference in 1993 Peter Lilley attackedyoung never-married mothers as ‘benefits-driven’ and ‘undeserving’ compared tothose who had experienced a more tradi-tional relationship:

A year ago I told you my goal to closedown the something-for-nothing society…the third main area of rising spending ison lone parents… there are now 1.3million lone parents… many findthemselves lone parents against their will—widows, divorced and separated peoplestruggle alone but often successfully tobring their children up well… they deservenot blame but support… however thefastest growing group are those who nevermarried… since the sixties their numbershave risen seven-fold because throughoutthat period it has been ‘politically incorrect’to uphold the traditional family as anideal… earlier this year I decided that it wastime to break that taboo.

In fact, in 1991 although 30.2% of allbirths in England and Wales were out ofwedlock compared to 11.8% in 1980, theproportion of such births registered byboth parents rose from 50% to 74% in 1991.Moreover, more than half of these ‘out-of-

2 Capital & Class #64

wedlock’ births were registered by bothparents living at the same address.7 Evenwhen this was recognised, it was arguedthat co-habiting couples shouldn’t expect tobe treated as ‘single’ recipients of state aid.Furthermore, lone parents were blamedfor not only increasing the welfare burden(‘Wedded to Welfare?’; ‘Do they want tomarry a man or the state?’)8 but foradditionally cultivating welfare dependencyin their children, and hence a new ‘under-class’ who would drain the public purse.As moral indignation rampaged, disturbingstrategies of shaming, ostracism, and morestringent state control were called for toforce women into traditional modes ofmotherhood:

you can have as many babies as youwant—if you don’t ask the Government totake care of them. But when you startasking the Government to take care ofthem, the Government ought to havesome control over you’.9

Nor did the stigmatising of lone parentsstop with accusations of criminalisingchildren and increasing the welfare debt. AsBritain, in the early 1990s, faced a severeshortage of council houses, resulting largelyfrom the disastrous ‘right-to-buy’ HousingAct in 1980, blame was deflected on toyoung single mothers whom, it was said,became pregnant deliberately in order toselfishly jump the council accommodationqueue. Taking up where Peter Lilley’scondemnatory remarks left off a year earlier(‘They never would be missed, young ladieswho get pregnant just to jump the housinglist’), the former minister George Younginformed the 1993 Tory Party Conferenceof new curbs to limit single mothers’ accessto decent council accommodation sopriority could be given to those intraditional relationships (‘How do we

explain to the young couple who want towait for a home before they start a familythat they cannot be rehoused ahead of theunmarried teenager expecting her first,probably unplanned child?’).

Needless to say, rhetoric like this alsocontradicted survey statistics. The Depart-ment of Employment’s own figures for 1991explode the myth of young single mothersmonopolising what little available councilaccommodation there was at that time. Just0.3% of heads of council homes werewomen under 20. Moreover, a review oflocal authorities carried out by the CharteredInstitute of Housing showed no evidencethat lone parents were treated any morefavourably than two-parent families. Ifanything, the figures showed that lonemothers in local authority accommodationtended to be older women who hadseparated from their partners and notyoung never-married teenage girls.10

Like the statistics of registered births,such surveys flew in the face of plans to cutwelfare spending and so remained out ofpolitical rhetoric. The media eagerlygrabbed hold of the debates aroundillegitimacy and championed the moralcrusade with tales of the supposed sexualpromiscuity of single mothers, pepperedwith accounts of 14 year-old girls becomingpregnant.11 When the story of a young‘unmarried mother’ jailed for leaving hertwo year-old child home alone while shewent to work hit the news,12 press spacewasn’t given over to seek answers to whyadequate and inexpensive child-care wasn’tavailable. Rather, the tabloids chose to sinkinto a wave of derogatory condemnation.The questions that were raised focused onwho is fit to parent, and Michael Howard, inhis own ‘back-to-basics’,13 way, seized hismoment to argue that it would be a goodthing if more unmarried mothers gave uptheir children for adoption.

Happy Families? 3

‘There’s not many fathers aroundhere’—The 1993 Debacle

Rather ironically, it was the then Secretaryof State for Wales’ visit to the St Mellonsestate in Cardiff in June 1993 that was key inpartially halting the more extreme vitrioliclanguage directed against never-marriedmothers. John Redwood’s intention ofcourse had been quite the opposite. Havingonly held office for a couple of weeks, andanxious to make his mark, he jumpedenthusiastically on to the New Right band-wagon of slandering never-marriedmothers. A couple of hours on the estatespeaking to a few women and a figure of‘64% of lone parents’ heard bandied aboutprovided him with enough speech fodder toput together an address to the ConservativePolitical Summer School two days later.14

One of the biggest social problems of ourday is the surge in single parent families.Everyone would wish to help the youngfamily that has suddenly lost the fatherthrough death, or if the mother has beenabused or badly treated by the father andthe relationship has broken down. What ismore worrying is the trend in some placesfor young women to have babies with noapparent intention of even trying amarriage or stable relationship with thefather of the child… On a recent visit to ahousing estate where I was told that morethan half the families were single parentfamilies, I asked what action if any wasbeing taken to involve the menfolk of thecommunity rather more in helping bringup the children they had fathered. Thereply was interesting. I was told ‘therearen’t many fathers around here’. In thatcommunity people had begun to acceptthat babies just happened and there wasno presumption in favour of two adultscreating a loving family background for

their children. It is that which we have tochange… The natural state should be the2-adult family caring for their children.

Such a controversial attack from thenewest member of the Cabinet was exactlythe kind of lift the media needed to enliventhe flagging ‘family values’ debate, andRedwood’s comments made prime-timeheadlines, especially since they went on toimply that some mothers and childrenshould be denied benefit. St Mellonsbecame a symbol of the collapse of thenuclear family, the erosion of moral andresponsible values in Britain and ‘scroung-ing’ single mothers who exhausted publicmoney. Redwood himself was evenheralded in some quarters as being braveenough to lay the issue bare.15 Currentaffairs programmes on radio and televisionalso took hold of the controversy, and thedebate ran and ran, so much so that even acouple of months later, BBC1’s ‘Panorama’could still open with the provocative line of‘Should the taxpayer foot the bill for womenwho have babies on benefit?’ In the wake ofRedwood’s remarks, the programme’sresearchers had visited St Mellons, seized onone man who had apparently fathered fourchildren in as many years and held him upas evidence to substantiate the MP’s assault.

This time around however, as theresidents were catapulted into the publicarena to be vilified all over again, moresympathetic voices could be heardcondemning what was suspiciouslybeginning to sound like a governmentwitch-hunt. The South Wales localnewspapers had already placed theirsupport behind the families of St Mellons,giving space to single mothers on the estatewho argued that any social problems thatexisted had their roots in the deplorablelack of resources and inadequate infra-structure which allowed communities to

4 Capital & Class #64

exist without a secondary school, leisurecentre or bank.16 The South Wales Echo17

ran an article by the rector of a Cardiffchurch which sought to explode the mythson which Tory lecturing on child-rearingwere premised:

My own dad left home for work at 6ameach day and returned at 7pm… I rarelysaw him… The upper classes never couldstand the sight of kids and shoved themover to nanny as soon as possible. Thefathers were certainly never on the scene.The middle classes packed off their overgrown babies to prep and public schooland left them both motherless andfatherless for most of their childhood…For a man like John Redwood totallydivorced from poverty and pressures, toisolate [one parent] families for attack isthe worst form of cynicism that the partyof the the rich can propagate… bothFergie and Diana are showing what singleparent motherhood can be with the properresources.

The national papers also began toproject more sympathetic attention to singlemothers, and the backlash stayed highlyvisible as George Carey, the Archbishop ofCanterbury stepped into the debate to argueagainst ‘beat[ing] these single mothers withbig sticks’.18 Hitting the headlines too wasthe National Council for One ParentFamilies who brought a complaint against‘Panorama’ for the unfair treatment andmisrepresentation of lone mothers.19 TheInstitute of Housing also announced itwould be making an official complaint tothe Broadcasting Standards Council aboutthe alleged misuse of statistics in theprogramme. With a surprising twist, somepress media even became critical of newssensationalism which had grabbed hold of‘dodgy’ figures and misrepresented the

extent of lone parenting on the South Walesestate to be 64%:

If it [the percentage] was true, St Mellonsprobably would be the single-mum capitalof Europe. It is not. According to CardiffCity Council, the figure originally camefrom one of the housing associations onthe estate. A survey showed that 64% oftheir tenants were single parents. Thenumber got into the public domain andeither because of sloppiness or sensation-alism began to be applied to the estate as awhole… The council estimates the truefigure is about 17%, about the same asin… hundreds of other places.20

The tide had definitely turned and thenewsworthiness of the debate remained highas well-timed disclosures about the privatelives of Tory MPs came under publicscrutiny. Effectively, both tabloid andbroadsheets cross-cut their reports of leakedCabinet documents proposing punitivemeasures against lone parents withsensationalist revelations about Tim Yeo,the junior environment minister who hadfathered an ‘illegitimate’ child born just sixdays after Redwood’s tirade against singlemothers in Cardiff. As the backlash againsthypocrisy grew, John Redwood was forced tocome out with a U-turn statement, arguingnow that he’d never ‘suggested we watchevery bedroom door and have views on howevery relationship should be conducted’.21

Palatable Policies?: The May 1997General Election

Although discourses of pathologisationagainst lone parents hadn’t been completelyeradicated by the time of the May 1997General Election, it had become fairlyobvious that the type of vilifying attacks

Happy Families? 5

characteristic of much of the earlier rhetoricrisked losing crucial votes. In the monthbefore the election, the views of singlemothers were being given copy space toassert ‘I’m afraid the parties are just goingto have to fit new policies to suit new familystructures’, and ‘I really resent all that stuffabout scrounging single mothers—especially in the light of cash-for-questions’.22 In broadening out the issue,the Guardian concluded that ‘the entirefamily values debate seems to have struck asour chord with women voters’.23 As itturned out, the few politicians who didpersist in employing the language ofcontempt didn’t fare too well. The Labourcandidate, Melanie Johnson, for instance,won the Welwyn Hatfield seat fromConservative opponent Nigel Evans after hehad derided her single mother status.

All political parties were now in nodoubt about how discourses of vilificationcould backfire, being aware that any policiesproposing public spending cuts had to berepackaged for sale. In other words, a newmantle had to be found with which to clotheNew Right ideologies of the family. In anattempt to deflect heat away from the earlierlone parent fiasco, key Conservativepoliticians judiciously distanced themselvesfrom the explicit slurring of single mothers,and tactically thrust educational policy intothe debating arena as an alternative focusfor public attention. October 1996 saw thecirculation of a consultation document bya group of Government curriculum adviserswhich proposed that a moral code be taughtin schools. This being a relatively lesscontentious vehicle for the denigration ofsingle motherhood, it was at once hijackedby traditionalists in the Tory partydemanding that children should be taughtthat the nuclear family structure is morallysuperior. However, careful of repeatingpast mistakes, the Conservative Secretary of

State for Education, Gillian Shepherd,refused to comment on whether shethought the document should upholdmarriage. More euphemistically, sheventured to advocate a stronger emphasis inthe report on ‘family values’, and promisedconsideration of the traditionalist view.24

While some press still backed the morehard-line Tory demands, the fact that otherperspectives were being voiced at this time isperhaps indicative of how much the groundhad shifted towards recognising familydiversity. In contrast to their pejorative slantthe year before where teenage mothers found‘the free-and-easy life of a state handoutpreferable to a low-paid job… They werewilling to have a baby because they knewthey could cash in on it’,25 the Daily Expressnow commented: ‘There are some schoolswhere six out of 10 pupils live with singleor cohabiting parents. Should we really tellthem that they’re living in second-classrelationships? And if we do, isn’t there adanger that they will resent our whole moralmessage?’.26 The following day it ran a threepage article poignantly picturing a smiling 13year old schoolgirl with her new-born babyunderscored with the comment, ‘Purity,innocence and protectiveness shine fromthe photograph… Given the beauty of theimage, just how can society condemn Sarahand her feckless young partner-of the-moment?’

Evidently, it had become important toproject more caring attitudes towards singlemothers, and in the run-up to the GeneralElection, the parties almost fell over eachother to articulate their concerns topurportedly ‘help’ women re-access thelabour market through ‘Parent Plus’(Conservative) and ‘Welfare-to-work’(Labour) schemes. Lurking behind therhetoric however the same old fiscal policiesheld the reins even more tightly than everover how lone parents ought to be defined

6 Capital & Class #64

and circumscribed.27 For instance, bothLabour and Conservative Party Manifestosfor Wales, awash with glossy photographs ofmum, dad and two kids paraded the nuclearfamily structure as ‘ideal’. Both exploitedthe residual discourses that linked singlemothers with benefit fraud and crime. Andboth parties embedded proposals for stricterstate control over lone parents withinideologies of ‘common-sense’ (Fowler,1991). In a pre-election document onparenting,28 Labour’s plans to bring inparental responsibility orders which wouldforce parents of offending children to ‘attendcounselling and guidance sessions’ were veryclearly articulated. In this report, representa-tions of single mothers were still beingpathologically tainted as could be seen froma section entitled ‘Children living with loneparents’. This was textually organised as oneof the ‘Parenting Problem Areas’ alongside‘Children in Public Care’ and ‘Children with“attention-deficit” disorders.’

Defining Themselves

What was markedly missing from this moreeasily digestible rhetoric, were the voicesof single mothers themselves. Rarely offereda consistent public platform on which toarticulate their own views, prioritise theirconcerns and set social policy agendas, theyhave been persistently disenfranchised fromparticipating in political discourse. Ofcourse, this is not surprising since whengiven license to talk, lone parents’representations of themselves oftenappeared significantly at odds with theprevailing politically convenient images.In an ongoing project29 conducted byourselves to explore how single motherssee their own identities, the followingcomments were made by Joy (aged 35),one of the women interviewed:

I got a circle of friends that are all strongindependent females several of them loneparents but none of them conform to theassumptions..most of them far preferbeing on their own… given the space anda chance to redefine as not part of acouple… most of them far prefer being ontheir own… I’m enjoying this space todiscover who I am and there is not roomfor a man in it… for the most part they arewomen getting on with their lives andsaying “right this is where I am”… andenjoying the space the energy that wasdevoted into a relationship you’ve nowgot for yourself and that is such a luxury asa woman when you’re giving out all thetime to other people you know you areother people’s property and at otherpeople’s disposal all the time… to thenfind you’ve got some of that to turn backon yourself why the hell should you give itup’. (p.20)

Joy wasn’t deluded by the electioneeringveneer strategically employed by manypoliticians. Pathologising might well havegone underground during the election butshe knew that it hadn’t disappeared.Refusing to see herself as either ‘victim’ or‘problem’ parent, her comments sit ratheruneasily with how the vote-pulling rhetoricpositioned her:

if you decide to lead an autonomous lifewithout a partner of any sort you’re seen asabnormal deviant [but] … I like being onmy own I relish having the responsibility forthe decisions… I like deciding where mylife course is going… I enjoy the autonomyand for me it [single motherhood] is morepositive than it has ever been negative

Society decides what is right for you andwhether you are being responsible to yourchildren or not… if you’re on your own

Happy Families? 7

you are not being responsible because allkids need two parents that is the assump-tion isn’t it… you still are identified as aproblem you are seen as a problem first…the assumption is your kids are going to gooff the rails or they are going not to dowell educationally at school

Yet like many lone mothers, Joy is alsonecessarily sensitive to the politics ofrepresentation. She is in no doubt that, atleast in the past, her economic survival wascontingent upon whether she fitted existingprescribed categories which rendered hereligible for income support or other means-tested benefits. Certainly under the formerConservative government, single mothersreliant on state aid had no ‘rights toprivacy’. What’s more, in the prevailingclimate of suspicion about benefit fraud,demands were made on them to discloseintimate information about their personalrelationships. Refusing to turn their livesinto ‘open books for bureaucratic gaze’(Sarangi and Slembrouk, 1996:130) meantthat their access to income was jeopardized.Additionally, the Child Support Agency(CSA)—the structure set up to operation-alise the 1991 Child Support Act30 —hadthe power to levy financial penalties onthose claimants who withheld informationabout their child’s father. Welfare benefitreduction was used as a weapon to threatenfurther poverty if single mothers chose notto conform to the traditionalistprescription of dependency within aheterosexual relationship. Joy commentsthat she has ‘known some women whochoose to be totally independent of theirex-partners but of course you are not giventhat choice any more you know with theCSA you don’t have that choice’.Moreover, because absentee fathers wererequired to fill in financially whereGovernment aid stopped, many lone

mothers experienced a withdrawal ofinformal support (such as fathers’contributions towards clothes, schoolexpenses, and their children’s Christmasand birthday presents). As it stood, theChild Support Act not only paidinsufficient attention to the complexity ofinterpersonal relationships negotiatedbetween mothers, fathers and theirchildren, but in reality, ‘brought littlefinancial benefit to parents with care whilstcausing real financial problems to manyabsent parents’.31

But it’s not just the obvious discrimin-atory practices and procedures whichimpair single mothers’ quality of life, butmore broader policies impinge too. Forinstance, with less local authority housingavailable together with the previousgovernment’s policy of prioritising marriedcouples, it’s become increasingly difficultfor lone parents to access decent accom-modation for themselves and their children.There is a tendency for one-parent familiesto be offered smaller-sized properties, andnearly one fifth of local authorities requirea lone mother and child to share abedroom. The 1996 Housing Act advocatedthat lone parents were only to be given helpto find temporary accommodation withmost being encouraged to take on privatetenancies with little security. Compared to24% of other families in the UK, 65% oflone parents live in rented accommodationwhich is often of the oldest property type inthe poorest state of repair. Such housingtypically has the poorest standards of energyefficiency, which makes the impact of VATcosts on fuel even more severe. Thenumbers of lone parents without centralheating has reached 22%, nearly twice thefigure for other families.32 Furthermore,often without access to a family car, aninaffordable and deteriorating publictransport system restricts single mothers’

8 Capital & Class #64

mobility and curtails spontaneity withchildren, as Joy points out:

transport is so bloody expensive that’s avery big issue for me if I go anywhere withfour kids I have to first think can I affordthe bus fare… I’ve realised I don’t miss myhusband as much as I’ve missed the car …anything I do now has to be planned youknow you can’t spontaneously say to thekids lets have a day out because you haveto plan it in terms of the timetables oftransport which is a nightmare.

Conclusion

It remains to be seen whether things willchange for the better under the currentLabour government. Indisputably, womenhave become more visible in politics. Theirnumbers in both Parliament and theCabinet have dramatically increased: a fifthof MPs are women and there are now 19female government ministers. A Women’sUnit has been established and a Women’sMinister, Harriet Harman, with a deputy,Joan Ruddock, have been appointed. In anattempt to consult more, ‘juries’ are to be setup consisting of women randomly selectedfrom the electorate who will evaluategovernment proposals. This could soundpromising. Yet closer inspection revealsthat being Women’s Minister is one of twojobs managed by Harriet Harman, that JoanRuddock’s position is unpaid, and that theWomen’s Unit lacks a spending budget.33

There is also ongoing concern about NewLabour’s capacities to deliver bold andinnovative family policies. Despite fightingagainst Conservative proposals to phase outLone Parent Benefit, and considerableLabour backbench disagreement, theCabinet plan to continue with the samestrategy. While the present government

argue that the setting up of homework clubsand ‘encouraging’ lone mothers to visit jobcentres constitute a Welfare-to-work policywhich will help find routes out of poverty,Karin Pappenheim, director of the NationalCouncil for One Parent Families is waitingto see how such plans will materialise beforejudging them as solutions, noting that ‘it’snot possible to achieve a national childcarestrategy overnight’.34

If Labour’s purported commitment tolone parenthood is to be realised assomething more than tokenistic, it isessential that all discriminatory practiceswhich systematically inhibit single mothers’independence are tackled more effectivelythan in the past. Moreover, there is a needto move away from political rhetoric whichstill stigmatises as it links ‘the welfare debt’with what is referred to as the ‘lone parentculture of welfare dependency’. Anyconsultative process must include lonemothers’ own voices, not only to set theagenda and prioritise their needs, butcrucially, to define how they should be seen:

I love being a single parent I do I love it Ilove having autonomous self… I lovebeing part of what is to me a female spaceyou know I don’t have to have anything todo with men I don’t wish to… I don’t seeit as being problematic lone parentingyou know’ (Joy).

____________________________________AcknowledgmentsThe authors would like to thank Joy (apseudonym), lone mother and participant inthis research; Emma Teagle for providingdocumentary data; Deborah Painting forundertaking transcription; and the reviewersof Capital and Class for their constructivecomments. Interviews were conducted byDiane Burns. This research was funded bythe Regional Research Committee, Universityof Glamorgan, Wales.

Happy Families? 9

10 Capital & Class #64

Notes

1. Reported in The Guardian 10/11/96.2. Daily Telegraph 2/8/91.3. The Guardian 25/11/93 David Sharrock, Maggie

O’Kane, Edward Pilkington, ‘Two Youngsterswho found a new rule to break’.

4. ‘Save the family to save our children’ JonathonSacks, The Times 6/3/93.

5. Quoted in the Daily Express 7/10/93.6. The Economist, Oct 16-22 1993 ‘Single Parents:

the facts of life’.7. ‘Young Single Mothers… ’ National Council for

One-Parent Families, 255 Kentish Town Road,London NW5 2LX.

8. Sunday Times 11 July 1993 quoted in K Mann& S Roseneil ‘Some Mothers do ‘ave ‘em’:backlash and the gender politics of theunderclass debate in Journal of Gender Studies,Vol 3, no. 3 1994.

9. Daily Mail 11/5/93.10. ‘Young Single Mothers… ’ National Council for

One-Parent Families, 255 Kentish Town Road,London NW5 2LX.

11. Daily Express 21/7/93.12. Daily Express 3/8/93.13. John Major launched his ‘back-to-basics’

agenda in 1993. Cross-cutting a number ofsocial policy areas, it was premised on aharking back to an idealised ‘golden age’ ofeconomic self-reliance, prescriptivist moralityand traditional family values. Following 1993,it particularly emerged as a recurrent themeduring educational debates where ConservativeParty policy demanded a narrow returning tothe “three ‘r’s” of reading, writing andarithmetic.

14. John Redwood MP. Speech to the ConservativePolitical Summer School, Trevithick Building,The Parade, Cardiff 2/7/93.

15. The Sun 3/7/93; The Times 3/7/93.16. Western Mail 5/7/93.17. South Wales Echo 8/7/97.18. Western Mail 12/10/93.19. Report of the Broadcasting Complaints

Commission 1995, HMSO: London.20. Western Mail 7/10/93.21. The Guardian 27/12/93.22. The Guardian 24/4/97.23. op.cit.

24. Gillian Shepherd ‘We owe it to our children toteach morals at school’. The Sun, 29/12/96.

25. Daily Express 24/8/95.26. Daily Express 28/10/96.27. By way of contrast, the Liberal Democrat

Manifesto 1997 proved to be progressivelycritical of the prevailing trend to pathologiselone parents, commenting that ‘individualfamilies in all shapes and sizes have comeunder a sustained attack from the Governmentin the last sixteen years. Unemployment, thehousing crisis, the implementation of Care inthe Community and the work of the ChildSupport Agency are just four of the many waysin which Government policies haveundermined family life in recent years… TheGovernment launched a “back-to-basics”campaign in an attempt to reassert its viewof “traditional” family values. This has led to analmost unrelenting attack on lone parents andon people in non-traditional relationships. Anattack which senior members of the LabourParty have not been reluctant to join… Thestate should not dictate what families should belike’.

28. Straw, J & Anderson, J (November 1996)‘Parenting’. Labour Party publication.

29. Lone Parents and Identity: Young Women andthe South Wales Valleys. Karen Atkinson,Sarah Oerton & Diane Burns. 1996-ongoing.

30. The Child Support Act 1991 was brought into reduce Treasury expenditure by effectivelymaking ‘absent parents’ financially responsiblefor their children until they are 18. The Actset up the Child Support Agency (CSA)designed to chase ‘recalcitrant fathers’ (largelypost-divorce) in order to shift the ‘burden ofdebt’.

31. ‘Child Support One Year On’. Report of theNational Association of Citizens AdviceBureaux, 26/4/94.

32. National Council for One-Parent Families, 255Kentish Town Road, London NW5 2LX.

33. Yvonne Roberts ‘Has women’s ship come in’ .The Guardian 4/8/97.

34. Quoted in The Guardian 4/8/97.35. op.cit.

Happy Families? 11

ReferencesClarker, K, C. Glendinning and G. Craig (1994)

Losing Support: Children and the Child SupportAct. The Children’s Society, London.

Fowler, R (1991) Language in the News: Discourseand Ideology in the Press. Routledge, London.

Glendinning, C and J. Millar (eds) (1987) Womenand Poverty in Britain. Harvester Wheatsheaf,Hemel Hempstead.

Sarangi, S and S. Slembrouck (1994) ‘Rounding upsquare pegs: client construction in bureaucraticsettings’. Paper presented at SociolinguisticsSymposium 10, Lancaster University, 23-25March.

__________ (1996) Language, Bureaucracy andSocial Control. Longman, London.

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