Single Moms Are Not a Monolith
- Savannah Sisk
- 16 hours ago
- 5 min read
Why do we fail to take single motherhood seriously?
By: Savannah Sisk
“Single mother raises teenage daughter” is a premise ripe with comedic potential. Don’t believe me? Stream “Gilmore Girls” on Netflix. “Single dad raises teenage son,” on the other hand, feels much more serious. Introspective, even. Why?
For starters, stories about single mothers are usually stories about young single mothers. In season one of “Gilmore Girls,” Lorelai is 32. In “Erin Brockovich,” Erin is 31.
As a college student, you probably think that sounds ancient. It isn’t.
32 is only two years after your brain fully finishes developing. 32 positions a woman at the cusp of her adult life. Will she marry? Will she have children or focus on her career?
Yet so much of single-mother media posits that by 30, these women are fully mature if not world-weary, and raising the children they had in their early 20s. Of course, they’re portrayed as silly and infantile. They’re barely adults themselves.
Look, I understand the premise of “Gilmore Girls" is an inversion of the typical mother-daughter dynamic. Rory acts like an adult, and Lorelai acts like a child. But why? Why the urge to depict feminine relationships as silly?
Generally, father-son relationships are afforded much more seriousness. In “The Notebook,” Ryan Gosling’s character, Noah, is raised by a single father. So far so good! Young dad, teenage son — cue the laughs… Except that never happens.
The movie takes their relationship incredibly seriously. Although Noah’s father provides guidance and love, friendship is not necessarily a part of the equation. Their onscreen relationship feels real, deep and complex in a way that few mother-daughter ones do.
Don’t get me wrong, Lorelai and Rory’s relationship is certainly complicated, but it definitely isn’t realistic.
I am the teenage daughter of a single mother, and I got the idea to write this while participating in my annual rewatch of “You’ve Got Mail.”
In “You’ve Got Mail,” Meg Ryan plays Kathleen Kennedy, a bookstore owner and daughter of an ostensibly single mother. I use “ostensibly” because the only representation we get of their relationship is a memory in which Kathleen recalls dancing with her mother as a child.
The scene is quite literally vapid: Kathleen and her mother appear as smiling, vaporous ghosts of the past and twirl a few times before vanishing into thin air. I mean, look at that picture. You can barely see their faces.
Meanwhile, the male love interest, Joe, shares a scene with his father in which they grow closer while discussing their previous romantic relationships. We learn that Joe’s father has been married multiple times. It is implied that this instability negatively affected Joe’s childhood. Despite this, their conversation comes equipped with an easy, respectful sense of camaraderie. They’re not friends. They’re father and son. Their relationship feels realistic. As a man onscreen, Joe’s father is allowed to be simultaneously flawed and likeable.
Kathleen’s mom? Not so much. “Plenty of people remember my mother, and they think she was fine, and they think her store was something special,” says Kathleen. But that is all we ever hear. Her mother was fine. Her mother was kind. Her mother was a pillar of the community. Kathleen’s mother — faultless, sexless, selfless — is society's vision of the perfect single mom. She is an ideal, made of smoke and lies and sexism. She is for the screen.
I’m not saying I wanted to see Kathleen and her mother fight. I’m not saying I wanted Kathleen’s mother to be depicted negatively. I’m saying I wanted depth: something more than tepid depictions of long-abiding friendship. Something real.
Amy Sherman-Palladino pitched Gilmore Girls as “a show about a mother and daughter, but they’re more like best friends.” This reveals, more than anything, that Lorelai and Rory’s relationship was more of a lighthearted concept than a genuine examination of single motherhood. Which is fine. But it also begs the question, why not?
From “Mamma Mia” to “Ginny and Georgia,” why are we so afraid of depicting the oftentimes contentious relationships between single mothers and their daughters? Although Erin Brockovich (frequently ranked first in lists with titles like “The Best Movies About Single Moms”) strives for authenticity, Erin’s children are little more than glorified setpieces. Realistically, her children should be one of the most important parts of her life. In the movie, they are reduced to sources of conflict that distract from her ability to find and keep a job.
In many scenes, her kids are just kind of there. She picks them up. She puts them down. Yes, she feeds them. She folds their laundry. She kisses them goodnight. However, she spends no quality time with them. She talks to her hot biker boyfriend more than she does her own children. She runs around the desert in stilettos.
“Erin Brockovich” is not a movie about a single mother. “Erin Brockovich” is a movie about a young woman defending a small town against an insidious corporation. She only happens to be a mom. Although “Erin Brockovich” succeeds in providing audiences with a female protagonist untethered to social convention, this liberation comes at a cost — her relationship with her children is sidelined. This is the final form of the Single Mom, Onscreen: a woman who is barely a mother at all.
Research has found that “negative views about single motherhood tend to stem from a conviction that there is something inherently wrong or damaging about a single mother as a person.” Interestingly enough, participants in the study used words such as “irresponsible”,“immature”, “stressed out” and “promiscuous” to describe single mothers. Sound familiar?
For decades, movies about women were written by men. Men who, consciously or not, infantilized and objectified their female characters to the point of incompetence. Consequently, women’s feelings, struggles and relationships were minimized to the point of becoming inherently comedic.
These misogynistic portrayals of women were projected onto the silver screen, indirectly influencing the later work of female writers and directors. Some older movies manage to escape the male gaze, but unfortunately, most repackage it for female audiences. Across the board, filmmakers fail to portray single mothers realistically because they neglect to conceptualize them as complex individuals who have intricate relationships with their children. Kathleen’s mother is not feminist. She is fake. Erin’s motherhood is sidelined in favor of more interesting pursuits. Lorelai is a caricature of our anxieties about single motherhood. Unfortunately, these fictional women have colored our impressions of single mothers everywhere.
Of course, father-son relationships are routinely depicted as deep, complex and meaningful. We live in a society where the male gaze reigns supreme, where the mere idea of a woman raising a child alone is, at best, slightly concerning.
I hope that increased inclusivity in the film industry will lead to more realistic stories about women, written by women. I want to see feminine relationships that are taken seriously.
Naturally, it’s ridiculous of me to watch Gilmore Girls, a sitcom, and expect an in-depth dissection of the relationship between a single mother and her daughter. The problem is that I don’t have a lot of other options. It gets to a point where rewatching “Ladybird” for the tenth time doesn’t fill the void anymore.
Single moms are not a monolith, and they should not be depicted as such, especially when those depictions are deeply rooted in misogyny.
Savannah Sisk is a first-year Advertising major at the University of Florida. This is her first semester writing and editing for ROWDY. Her hobbies include reading, thrifting, and writing about herself in the third-person. This article was edited by a variety of women on the ROWDY staff. Single moms are not a monolith, and neither is Savannah’s opinion.
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