Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice: How Women are Choosing Parenthood Without Marriage and Creating the New American Family By: Rosanna Hertz

Excerpt

In Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice, 2006, Rosanna Hertz examines single motherhood in the lives of middle class women. Interviewing 65 single mothers, Hertz found that many of the women believed in marriage (or committed partnerships) but found themselves single when, through age or circumstance, they reached a critical decision point in having children. Some chose to become mothers through the fairly conventional means of adoption. Others chanced pregnancy or became pregnant through insemination. Although the book’s focus is on the choices these women made to have and raise children outside of marriage, it also explores broader cultural tensions around marriage and childbearing. Most provocatively, Hertz suggests that the women’s stories are a part of a larger social shift away from the centrality of the husband/wife bond and toward a new family form based on the mother/child bond. …