Some unpopular views

 We are used to winter colds, they seem almost inevitable because of the cold, rain, and sometimes snow that surrounds us, and yet, summer colds can happen. I am often surprised by people's baffled looks when I mention having a cold in summer as I do now. On Monday I was at a party and I walked home with my housemates at about 3am and now I have a mild summer cold, I don't deal well with drastic temperature changes and the day had been warm so the early morning cold did not sit well.

As I nurse my sore throat I randomly listen to radio 4, a bit absent-mindedly going through emails I have forgotten to check or respond to, clicking on links for events, etc. As with so many websites, ads pop up and one of them reads fertility treatment for single women. A sad fact comes up in the ad: a quarter of families in the UK are single parents and 90% of these are composed of single mothers. 90% really?! That is shockingly high. When did being an absentee father become a trend? The ad is using it to reduce stigma and ply its trade, ie. giving women the possibility of becoming mothers without needing a man in their lives is something to be celebrated. Trying to give a positive twist to what should be a worrying trend. While women who are single mothers should not be stigmatized and should be helped out in raising their children by the community it says a lot about the state of a society when a high proportion of its children are raised without a father....and this has come to be viewed not just as normal but as almost inevitable, and something to be sought out. In this scenario, men are seen as superfluous, and unnecessary. In between the lines, the message communicated is that men are not responsible enough to be fathers and that children can grow up just the same without them. 

Children need both a mom and dad and this isn't just some attachment to tradition it comes from historical knowledge. I could cite many articles on the effect not having a mom and dad has on children (not my intention to offend widows or divorced people or people forced, out of no choice of their own, to be single parents) but it is not central to my current thinking. As a historian, I know that up until the 18th century the word gender referred more to the clan and generation was what we now understand as reproduction. This was tied to an understanding that masculine and feminine traits were held by everyone: compassion and concern for others were not seen as simply typically female. Corraling characteristics like this are a product of economic interest in the emerging bourgeois liberal industrial class, it was economically convenient (book plug I will write more extensively about this in the book I am working on). This same emerging class is the one that is actually guilty of the misogynistic structures we inherited in the 19th and 20th centuries. I think that the 18th-century understanding of the person is a more realistic understanding of the person. With this in view, it is clear that for proper development you need masculine and feminine role models to cover this spectrum and to develop more completely as a person. This is why uncles and grandfathers/ grandmothers and aunts are also central to the upbringing of children. I do know some people have no choice and out of no fault of their own, they don't have access to these relationships. There is no easy response to these situations: historically the local community, usually the parish community would step in but with the fragmented nature of today's society this is less possible. Maybe the response is to try to rebuild these communities that no longer exist, and create them anew so the children of the future can be brought up again by the community and not by one single parent, usually a woman. That so many women are bringing up children totally alone,  out of choice or not, is not something to be praised, rather it should sadden us that the society we live in has become so individualistic and broken that there is an entire generation of women and children that does not know what a community is.