Drawing Distinctions: Managing Stigma as a Single-Mother-by-Choice

• In Event: 1554 - Parenthood

Abstract

Despite increasing family diversity, single parents still occupy a stigmatized position in American culture. Women who elect to pursue intentional single motherhood through adoption or reproductive technologies experience distinctive challenges and resources when addressing the stigma of single motherhood. Data were collected from in-depth interviews with thirteen single-mothers-by-choice. Through inductive analysis, I identify techniques that individuals used to manage stigmatized identity and protect and repair self-concept. Strategies included impression and information management, justifications and accounts, and rhetorical stigma management through appeals to financial self-sufficiency, intentional motherhood, the absence of marital conflict, and family diversity. The single-mothers-by-choice draw on class-based resources to distance themselves from marginalized single mothers, trading on the stigmatization of young and poor single mothers to secure a privileged position in the moral hierarchy of single motherhood. In accounting for their fertility trajectories they also affirmed the superiority of childrearing within a married nuclear family, even as they pursued alternative family formation. The complex combination of resistant and reproductive agency that single- mothers-by-choice enact when managing stigma highlights the inherent linkages between stigma and power.

Author

• Kit Myers, Roanoke College