Sinners/Scroungers/Saints

eddie — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 20:19:53 +0000

“People’s understanding of lone mothers have been dominated by myth and misrepresentation,” asserts one display in the Women’s Library’s current exhibition about the history of lone mothers in Britian.

Along with Muslims, Gypsies, asylum-seekers and black youths, single mothers have been fair game for the British press for many years, their punchbag status peaking in the late 1980s and early ’90s.

Who can forget John Redwood and Peter Lilley’s infamous vitriolic attacks on single mothers when they were members of John Major’s cabinet?

Drawing extensively on the records of the organisations One Parent Families and Gingerbread and using photographs, pamphlets, audio testimony, films, timelines and a visitor comments board, Sinners/Scroungers/Saints aims to right some of the popular myths surrounding lone motherhood.

Although lone-parent households have existed in substantial numbers throughout history, in Britain, their numbers, in common with other industrialised nations, have increased, with an estimated 1.9 million lone parent families caring for 3.1 million children today.

And, while lone parents are not exclusively women, historically, the majority of lone parents have been, with 91 per cent of lone parent families today headed by a woman.

“Few women choose to become lone mothers because to do so usually results in increased poverty,” the exhibition argues. Indeed, the poverty associated with lone parenthood is exacerbated by the many thousands of fathers who fail to provide for their children.

“Only around one in three lone parents receives maintenance from their child’s other parent,” reads one display. The testimony of the now best-selling crime novelist Martina Cole provides an interesting insight into coping as a single mother.

“I remember being so hard up that I had to sell the tumble dryer in the middle of winter,” she remembers. Following her mother’s advice, she would post herself “£5 with a second-class stamp at the beginning of the week and, that way, I’d always have a fiver for the weekends.”

Insightful statistics are dotted around the walls, but, if anything, the exhibition is a little too soft. Where are the killer facts that would slay, once and for all, the pernicious myths that surround this issue?

For example, while it is a popular assumption that there has been an increase in lone mothers because they have access to relatively high rates of benefits, in their book Lone Parent Families, Karen Rowlingson and Stephen McKay explain that “the US has the highest level of lone parenthood in the Western world,” but “its level of social assistance is among the lowest.”

Sweden, on the other hand, “has the largest proportion of lone parents in paid work but the benefit replacement rate is also the highest.” They conclude that “this therefore contradicts a narrow rational economic model of behaviour that assumes people weigh up the financial costs and benefits of a particular course of action and then act accordingly.” Take that, John Redwood!

The two academics also question the supposedly “high rates of benefits” that single mothers can receive. “Numerous independent academic studies have been carried out into benefit levels and they all show that those levels are woefully inadequate to allow people to participate in society in any meaningful way.”

Furthermore, while it is often assumed that lone parenthood has detrimental effects on children, Rowlingson and McKay note: “The research that has been carried out suggests that, once poverty is taken into account, there is little, if any, independent effect of lone parenthood on outcomes for children.”
Again, Sinners/Scroungers/Saints fails to correct this popular misgiving about lone parent families.

Despite these criticisms, an hour or two spent here will provide visitors with an informative and balanced corrective to the often disgusting representation of lone parenthood in Britain’s gutter press.

As “Lone Mother, 2007” says, “Working mothers this, working mothers that. You’re either a benefits scrounger or you’re a man-hating career woman who neglects her children. And, actually, most of us are just trying to do the best we can.”

Sinners/Scroungers/Saints: Lone mothers, past and present runs until March 29. ian_js@hotmail.com.

exhibitions | ukwatch.net

Sinners/Scroungers/Saints