Raising Boys Without Men: How Maverick Moms Are Creating the Next Generation of Exceptional Men

Keep mums

Until very recently, males guaranteed the legitimacy of a child. Without male ownership, a child was a bastard -- and its mother either a hapless victim or a harlot, depending on one's viewpoint. The mother was all too likely to slip down the socio-economic ladder; the child was likely to grow up in poverty; both mother and child were marginalized by society. In addition, modern conventional wisdom has it that a fatherless male child is also compromised psychologically: that a boy without a father figure is in a fundamental way psychically unmoored, resulting in perpetual immaturity, irresponsibility, gratuitous aggression, criminality and a host of other ills that affect society at large.

Currently, in the United Kingdom, nearly 25 per cent of families with children are headed by a lone mother, and in the United States that figure is moving towards one in three. That makes for a great many boys potentially marred for life. For some leaders, these figures evoke the spectre of civilization careening to ruin via youth violence and instability. Raising Boys Without Men could thus hardly be more timely. In the US, it has already received a great deal of media attention -- in part because it so cheerfully and expertly dismantles several centuries' worth of conventional wisdom on the subject of fatherless boys.

Peggy F. Drexler argues that, in the modern world, boys may do just as well in fatherless families as in conventional ones -- with the caveat that other things (such as income and mothers' level of education) be equal; this is of course a huge caveat -- and one that is often overlooked. Most single-parent families are still poor. Compare them to two-parent middle-class families and there is a big difference. However, compare middle-class families headed by one or even two women with conventional middle-class families headed by a father and mother, and most of the differences evaporate - that is, in terms of children's psychological well-being. Drexler goes even further. She argues that boys coming out of some family configurations have an edge in the races of the twenty-first century. According to Drexler, female-headed families created by design (rather than default) are predisposed to produce the considerate problem-solving men of the next generation.

Over the course of several years, she followed the lives of over thirty boys and their families (and of a group of controls of the same socio-economic class but raised in traditional homes with both a mother and a father). Her boys' families were headed by single mothers "by choice" and lesbian mothers -- both small but growing demographic groups, especially in San Francisco, where Drexler conducted her research. These boys were on one level privileged: their mothers were mostly older educated professionals who could afford to give their sons music and chess lessons, and who could raise them in classier neighbourhoods. The fathers, however, were absent, in most cases known to these boys only as anonymous sperm donors, in other cases as actual people but far removed from the current of their own lives.

Drexler mixes jaunty descriptions of the boys and their families with sociological, psychological and demographic analysis. Her book is lively. She describes kneeling on toy-strewn floors with the younger boys to play with Lego, and picking up older boys from school while surreptitiously observing playground dynamics. Her subjects are garrulous -- on the page they seem remarkably perceptive. Drexler's overall verdict is that, compared to her controls, these boys were more emphatic towards others, more likely to engage in negotiation over aggression, and more aware of their own strengths and weaknesses.

At times, Drexler makes lesbian motherhood sound like the forerunner of the most evolved kind of parenting. (Drexler describes herself as a heterosexual happily married mother of two.) The "maverick" mothers in her sample, she writes, were more "deliberate in how they responded to their sons and more thoughtful about the constraints of society" than her controls. They were not passive women, and this was reflected in their mothering styles. At young ages, the boys were knowledgeable about the constructedness of familial relationships, particularly their own. Raised to embrace difference, they were, predictably enough, more flexible in their identities, more likely to think it was fine to sport fingernail polish at the age of five, or to be a good cook and gardener at ten or fifteen.

And yet, as Drexler repeatedly insists, her subjects were "all boy", as if impelled by an inalienable biologic imperative. The sons of lesbians in particular had a heightened interest in sports and sports heroes. Some of the boys felt the lack of a father, others did not, and one or two noted that fathers could be a liability. Clearly, identifying with or trying to please a father, especially a violent or authoritarian one, has its downsides; it would seem that the boys in Drexler's study had greater freedom to follow their interests and to choose role models with desirable traits.

This does not mean that their family configurations did not produce problems of their own. Some of these are minor (these boys are vulnerable to teasing), and some are comic. Consider twelve-year-old "Kenny", who was sent away to camp only to promptly acquire a girlfriend (sons of lesbians, it should be noted, are heterosexual in the same proportion as the population at large). This girl came from a devout Southern Baptist family, and Kenny had deduced that, given the girl's background, his chances were better if he discreetly elided one of his mothers. Family mayhem ensued when both mothers found out. Duly contrite, he eventually told the Southern Baptist family the truth, but only after the girl had visited with her family and the two mothers had strategically turned themselves into gracious hosts and perfect tour guides. The relationship weathered full disclosure -- to Kenny's family's evident satisfaction. Drexler's book is full of vignettes like these, mostly with happy or at least satisfactory endings; and they are satisfactory precisely because these "maverick" mothers seem, almost by definition, to have an independence of spirit and an enterprising attitude.

What about more serious problems? I wondered, for instance, about the break-up of lesbian households, but in Drexler's study the families remained intact. I also wondered about the perhaps stifling over-involvement of single mothers by choice; many of these mothers, however, seemed especially eager to establish patterns of independence -- perhaps for their own sanity as well as their sons'; they also actively cultivated extended family members.

At the end of each chapter, Drexler makes simplified statements about how "maverick mothers" parent their boys and what they can teach the rest of us. But this heavy-handed attempt to translate some fascinating and accessible material into "teachable" or "media-ready" nuggets is too didactic. Nor are all these insights and understandings the exclusive province of non-conventional mothers.

Clearly the ranks of alternative families are destined to grow on both sides of the Atlantic, especially as women gain ever greater professional footholds and thus the wherewithal to make economically viable families on their own. Drexler's book provides more evidence that poor single mothers may not be suffering so much from lack of a father, as from lack of emotional and practical skills needed to parent effectively. In short, in poor families, financial resources and education may do more than a man in the house; moreover, a violent antisocial father can be far worse than no father at all.

Drexler is anxious to make the point that fathers do matter enormously -- but, no longer, it would seem, as holders of a name or of legitimacy or as fixed models of manhood. Rather, they matter for their parenting, not for their gender. If Peggy Drexler's book is any indication, boys raised in alternative families -- in which relationships are not given but actively forged -- will be particularly well equipped to fill these parenting roles in the future. Raised to be flexible, emotionally intelligent and socialized to connect rather than to dominate, these boys may well prosper better on average than their peers.

Michele Pridmore-Brown is a scholar at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Stanford University. She is working on a study of the biopolitics of late fertility.

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