Reviewed by Hilde Lindemann Nelson
Michigan State University

That women, but not men, are expected to take almost cosmic amounts of responsibility for the protection, nurturing, and socialization of children is hardly news. In Narayan and Bartkowiak’s splendid collection, Having and Raising Children, Iris Young notes that "the vast majority of single-parent households are headed by women" (23), while in heterosexual two-parent households, women also assume a grossly disproportional amount of the hands-on tasks of raising children. Set these facts into a pronatalist social context in which pregnancies are publicly monitored and managed to an unprecedented degree; mix in the conflicts over parental rights that arise because of the new assisted reproductive technologies, changing attitudes about adoption, and a homophobic legal system; add the vexed question of who may terminate a parent-child relationship; and you have a fine set of problems crying out for feminist solutions.

Having and Raising Children tackles those problems head on. The collection opens with Young’s critique of William Galston’s argument that the "intact two-parent heterosexual family" is the family structure that best enables children to become independent, productive citizens (Galston 1991). Examining his empirical claims for the bad consequences of single motherhood, Young finds that the evidence is much more ambiguous than Galston allows. In addition, though, she presses him on a normative point: if, per Galston, single women endanger their children by depriving them of the economic advantages of the two-parent family and in this manner undermine their potential for independence, then children’s independence is apparently bought by mothers’ dependence on fathers. Distinguishing between independence as self-sufficiency and independence as autonomy, Young contends that respecting individuals as full citizens means fostering their capacities for self-determination. Privileging independence in the sense of self-sufficiency, she argues, marginalizes the many single mothers who find it hard to be self-sufficient when they are doubly disadvantaged by primary responsibility for society’s dependency work and by poor wages.

Mary Shanley takes up the question of an unwed father’s right to veto the mother’s decision to give up their child for adoption. Correctly pointing out that adoption is not the same thing as abandonment, she argues that mothers who relinquish children should not be presumed to have no interest in the children’s future well-being. Espousing a stewardship rather than an ownership model of parenting, Shanley urges the courts to examine evidence of parental bonding as the basis for determining whose wishes should be taken into account. If, for example, the father has demonstrated his intention to take responsibility for the child even before birth, he should be accorded more standing than a father who has displayed no interest in the child’s welfare.

The difficulty with this position is that it privileges social parenthood over biological parenthood: parental standing is a matter of how someone behaves, not biological affinity. In one of the most interesting essays in the collection, Brenda Almond argues that this gets it backwards, as familial sacrifices and hardship require permanent bonds rather than chosen ones. "Family bonds," she declares, "are the cement of social existence and are not subject to construction and destruction by something as fragile and volatile as individual choice" (116). Almond is particularly concerned about the growing consensus that assisted reproductive technologies’ ability to turn families into chosen relationships is something to be welcomed. Pointing out that blood kinship exerts a moral pull, grounding claims for care when we are young, ill, or disabled, she wonders whether a child who chooses a new social family would, when adult, "accept a member of his or her ‘socially chosen’ family for expensive or self-sacrificing care" (114), and whether, conversely, the socially chosen family would take the adult child back in if she or he fell on hard times.

To return to Shanley’s argument, then, the worry is this: if the authority to exercise your parental prerogatives derives from your choosing to accept the responsibility of parenthood, then you needn’t be a father unless you decide to. But isn’t that just the view that’s made it easy for biological fathers to evade the care of the children they sire? And, if fathers choose not to provide the care that children must have, doesn’t even more of the responsibility for providing it devolve on mothers? Rather than acknowledging that the biological tie plays some role in the assignment of parental responsibility, Shanley’s proposal uses the evidence of unwillingness to acknowledge the tie as a sign that the responsibility should be assigned elsewhere. This makes it extremely easy for reluctant fathers to walk off the job.

Insisting on the givenness of the child-parent relationship doesn’t entail that social parents’ claims must go unrecognized, a point which Uma Narayan makes forcefully and persuasively in her essay on surrogacy and custody. Arguing that "gift" surrogacy is just as much a commodification of pregnancy as is commercial surrogacy, Narayan notes that gender-role exploitation might make a woman feel strongly obliged to bear children for infertile relatives—a pressure that is especially troubling when the surrogate postmenopausally gestates her own grandchild, since age increases the risks of pregnancy. Nevertheless, since intrusions on autonomy and economic exploitation are not limited to surrogate arrangements but are features of pregnancy that are shared by women who give birth the old-fashioned way, Narayan favors permitting both commercial and gift surrogacy. Disputes arising from these arrangements ought, on her view, to be treated as custody disputes—but only if we rethink the norms for custody arrangements. Narayan calls for the courts to consider genetic, gestational, and rearing parents’ relationships to the child as conferring legal standing prima facie, and to resolve disputes among these parties on the best interests standard.

Narayan’s recommendations would make it easier for the courts to recognize the claims of gay parents who are not genetically related to a child. In "A Parent(ly) Knot: Can Heather Have Two Mommies?" Shelley Gavigan argues that these claims tend not to be recognized because courts are held captive by the ideology of the traditional family. She examines two lines of legal argument that have been employed by lesbian litigants in custody disputes. In one line, the nonbiological parent seeks to avoid parental responsibility by contending that she was never a mother to the child. In the other line, the biological mother, seeking sole custody, argues that the nonbiological parent was never a mother to the child. Gavigan contends that both lines of argument exploit discriminatory laws that prohibit same-sex marriages, as well as the traditional family’s norm of one mother and one father per child, in ways that enable the litigant either to block her former partner from exercising her parental responsibilities or to slide out from under the litigant’s own responsibilities to the child.

Hugh LaFollette also worries about custody arrangements, arguing that even young children are capable of participating in these decisions. Distinguishing between descriptive autonomy (the capacity for self-determination a given child actually possesses) and normative autonomy (the treatment by adults that fosters the child’s descriptive autonomy), LaFollette believes that acting toward children as if they have no autonomy hampers their becoming autonomous adults. He therefore calls for granting even young children circumscribed normative autonomy, training them to become autonomous by treating them "in some respects as if they were already descriptively autonomous" (139). Taking issue with Francis Shrag’s argument that giving children autonomy rights would produce bad consequences for parents, society, and the children themselves (Shrag 1980), LaFollette offers the consequentialist rejoinder that withholding normative competency from children whose parents are divorcing is likely to be as onerous as extending it. Indeed, "it may be more problematic if the children know that their opinion will simply be one opinion among many and far from determinative. Then they might say what they think these officials want them to say, rather than what they really believe" (147). From a Kantian point of view, of course, this is the wrong argument. If we have a duty, regardless of the consequences, to respect a person’s capacity for self-determination, then presumably the consequences are equally irrelevant to our duty to foster that capacity. Still, LaFollette rightly points out that children are more capable of judging on their own than is generally assumed.

Anita Allen’s discussion of the privacy argument as a ground for abortion rights, Laura Purdy’s argument for recognizing children’s right to "divorce" their parents only when there is no other good means of protecting their interests, Ellen Feder’s fine essay on the impact on children and their mothers of medical treatment for "gender identity disorder," Lynn Pasquerella’s somewhat troubling call for repealing exemption clauses in child abuse and neglect statues that pertain to parents’ religiously motivated denial of medical care, and Julia Bartkowiak’s claim that mandatory world religion courses unconstitutionally interfere with parents’ ability to teach their children particular religious views—these essays too are lively, engaging, and thought-provoking.

Feminists have often hesitated to write about the legal and moral questions surrounding the rearing of children, fearing perhaps that doing so might be seen as underscoring, rather than interrogating, the patriarchal expectation that child rearing is women’s work. We seem, however, to be overcoming this fear. With the publication in 1999 of not only Narayan and Bartkowiak’s excellent volume but Julia Hanigsberg and Sara Ruddick’s Mother Troubles, it is becoming increasingly apparent that while feminists continue to resist the idea that they should bear all the responsibility, they see the need for a careful examination of child-rearing practices and the public policies that support them. Having and Raising Children speaks eloquently and intelligently to that need.

Works Cited

Galston, William. 1991. Liberal Purposes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hanigsberg, Julia, and Sara Ruddick, eds. 1999. Mother Troubles. Boston: Beacon Press.