Public discourse, public opinion and private behavior: The evolution of popular and scholarly views of single -parent families in the twentieth-century United States

Abstract

Much contemporary scholarship and most media coverage of single-parent families focus on the decades since 1960 and depict this as the era when both single-parent families and social controversy over them soared. But neither single-parent families resulting from marital dissolution and non-marital childbearing nor controversy about these families is new. While the proportion of children living in single-parent families was small prior to 1960, increases in marital dissolution, non-marital childbearing and/or single-parent family formation marked every decade of the twentieth century, fostering widespread debate. Media accounts and scholarly articles published throughout the century testify to the controversy that accompanied these increases. In this study, I examine discourse about single-parent families published in U.S. popular magazines and social science journals between 1900 and 1998. I focus on single-parent families resulting from divorce, separation and non-marital childbearing. I consider how discourse about single-parent families changed over the course of the twentieth century, and I compare discourse about single-parent families in the media with discourse in academia. I use primary data and examine both the quantity and the content of discourse. I begin by establishing how the quantity and content of discourse about single-parent families in popular magazines and social science journals changed over time. Then I draw on reflection theory, production of culture theory and the social construction of problems to explore some of the factors that contributed to these patterns. These include: the demographic trends that drove increases in single-parent family formation; change in the magazine and scholarly publishing industries; change in the characteristics of the popular commentators and scholars who shaped discourse about single-parent families; and selected social and economic trends that may have influenced the quantity of discourse about single-parent families in magazines and social science journals.