Customer Reviews

On Our Own: Unmarried Motherhood in America

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I was disappointed when I read the book because the author only concentrates on teenage moms and successful older women who decided to have a baby once they achieved the highlight of their career.
I am a single, unwed mom and I don't fit in either of these two categories. I was 25 when I had my daughter. I got pregnant non intentionally but decided to keep the baby although it ruined the relationship with her father. I am neither poor nor rich. I simply couldn't find myself in the book and I believe there are many other cases like mine.

I heard about this book from a number of people before I actually read it. The premise is good - let's learn about single mothers by talking with them and finding out what they really think - but the delivery was a disappointment. Ludtke's words about teenage mothers basically serve to reinforce the two stereotypes we have of them: overwhelmed, with poor parenting skills and no hope for the future, or "supermom", working a fulltime job and going to college fulltime and getting 4 hours of sleep a night. The message, either way, is "They aren't like us", and how can we fix "them"?

The chapters featuring "older mothers", who typically gave birth in their late thirties using donor sperm, made me simply shake my head in frustration. We go from the struggling 18 year old trying to raise a child on $400 a month to the spoiled older single mother griping because her fancy private school wouldn't give her need-based financial aide - apparently her 6-figure income makes her ineligible. Puh-lease!

And, of course, a third of the single mothers in this country (like me) are left out. Women who became single mothers in their twenties are simply left out, as if our experience doesn't matter. Or perhaps we're harder to package into a neat stereotype?

This book was slow-going at times, I think the author could have cut 100 pages without any loss of information. I was also amused at her self-professed inability to understand simple statistics, it does little for her credibility. This said, there are some interesting people in this book, and perhaps reading the first 10 pages of each long chapter is worthwhile.

In "On Our Own" Melissa Ludtke, a professional journalist, sets out to uncover the experiences of "unmarried mothers" in America for a very personal reason. She is in her late 30s and struggling with the decision to become a mother herself. In a series of alternating chapters, Ludtke discusses the experiences of two disparate groups of unmarried mothers, young, poor women and older, more financially secure women. Three key questions guide the core of this book, why to have a baby, how to raise children and ways to explain the absence or anonymity of "fathers." The book is based on interviews with 30 women with whom Ludtke visited repeatedly over the course of several years. The introductory chapter and the conclusion provide an overview of the status of unmarried motherhood in America and Ludtke deftly interweaves scholarly research about unmarried mothers into her book. However, Ludtke has sidestepped many of the traditional pitfalls in discussing this controversial issue by focusing on individual women who confound ...typical generalizations. Her subjects include a teen mother attending an Ivy League school and an older professional woman whose best-laid plans go awry when she is laid off suddenly.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of this book is how unrelenting difficult unmarried motherhood really is. Dispirited teen mothers and successful professional women alike struggle to fit their families into a society that still assumes the nuclear family is the norm. While these mothers share their travails with divorced custodial parents, they live with the knowledge, and sometimes societal condemnation, that they chose this route. Parenting alone is a best second choice for almost all of the 30 women Ludtke interviewed. While few of the teen mothers desired marriage to the men who impregnated them, they work diligently to include the biological fathers in the lives of their children with varying degrees of success. The knowledge that "father" will be an anonymous sperm donor plagues many of the thirty-something women to such an extent that several have engineered ways to have a known father in their child's life while others have found father substitutes.

Ludtke avoids the question of whether women should pursue unmarried motherhood by compiling a statistical projections that show that by the year 2004, unmarried mothers will reach 50%. So whether society is ready for them or not, it needs to start preparing to meet their needs. She focuses most of her suggestions on young unmarried mothers who may be less able to care for themselves. While this approach may anger those who wish for a more polemical ending, it is very in keeping with Ludtke's balanced approach throughout the book.

Melissa Ludtke, author On Our Own, title I have found this review in Elle magazine in the september or october issue. Since I like the review and you do not have it in your system, I have decided to transcribe it. 'And baby makes two. The single woman's dilemma' As she approached her thirty eight birthday, Melissa Ludtke, A Time magazine reporter covering children's and family issues, suddenly found herself doing some difficult math. Divorced, and having just ended a serious relationship, Ludtke calculated that even if she met another man right away, fell securely in love, married him and became prgnant, she'd almost certainly be in her early forties before she could have a child herself. As she began to graple with the tough choices of whether or not to have a child alone, Ludtke looked closely at the lives of unwed mothers. In the fascinating and highly readable book that grew out of her inquiries, ON OUR OWN, Ludke deftly intermingles insightful sociological research, calid, moving interviews of young and old unwed mothers from a broad range of circumstances, and her own direct, personal struggles with the subject. If present trends continue, by the year 2004 half of all the babies in America will be born to unwed women. With absolutely no sapines or apology, Ludtke coolheadedly analyzes the hardships of potentially injurious effects of single mootherhood. But she also proposes that the standard labels applied to unwed mothers --selfish, irresponsible, immoral-- grossly discount the various ways, backgrounds, emotions, and economics affect every woman individually. Rather than penalizing single mothers and their children by ostracizing them or scaling back their assistance programs, Ludtke, who has an uncanny ability to parse out the complexities of this sensitive topic, peruasively argues that gaining "fresh undersatanding of the why their lives and mine took the various twists and turns they did" is not just the tingt thig to do, but what we are going to have to do in order to deal with radically changing family stuctures. Although it is destined to become the unwed mother's bible, On Our Own, should interest jut about anybody --no matter where you stand on this hot-button issue-- since it is, on the most basic level, about the way the vagaries of life define the relationsips that bind us. After a circuitous journey, Ludtke makes her own surprising decision about motherhood, and her readers, whom she graciously brought along with her, are that much wiser about the challanges single mothers face.

ON OUR OWN examines two groups of unmarried mothers, who are increasing in numbers every year. The author brings together solid research and some insightful interviews with Murphy-Brown older, educated women, as well as with young, uneducated women, who are choosing or have chosen to have babies out of wedlock. It's difficult to put one's emotions aside reading this material, but if you can, you'll find that the "obvious" solutions to the problem of unwed motherhood aren't so obvious after all. Most disturbing is the portrait of the teenage mothers, who feel that having a baby will be the one thing they can do right and get respect for accomplishing--and a number of them who choose to assert power over their bodies in this way are victims of sexual abuse. Clearly, until we start paying some attention to these underprivileged girls' needs before they get pregnant, no amount of "just say no" rhetoric is going to affect them. The stories of the older women having children are just as provocative, and underlying these women's decision to adopt, go to a sperm bank, or have a male friend inseminate them with no obligations, is an unavailability of eligible partners. Are these women really unmarriageable, or does their common plight point out something about American men's attitudes toward marriage and childrearing? It's unfortunate that the book is such a daunting length, but even if you find yourself skimming a bit, it's worth reading to explore this very important subject.

I found this book to be a very interesting and quick read. By looking at each group independently, Ms. Ludtke gives us both the "facts" about each group of mothers and insights into their feeling and hopes for their children. Thankfully, I read the NY Times review after I had already read the book. Reviewer may have imposed her personal feelings on single mothers instead of reviewing the book. I enjoyed this book very much and would highly recommend it.

Having written and completed a graduate level study on black teenage pregnancy, I was very interested in what this author might have to say about the issue. I thought it would help draw a bright line between the polar opposite views of Marian Elderman Wright's book, "Children in Peril;" and Leon Dash's, groundbreaking book "When Children Want Children: The Urban Crisis of Teenage Childbearing."

Naturally, after seeing Wright quoted in this book and a single reference to Dash on page 46, I turned immediately to the index and bibliography to see what the author had to say about their respective works. I was surprised and disappointed to discover that neither of these authors books were properly cited or even appeared in either the index or bibliography; and that although Dash was referenced as supposed to have appeared on page 46, no such entry about him was there?

Needless to say, these omissions set a new record for sloppiness for a scholarly work, and did so on such an important topic. After discovering this level of sloppiness, I of course could not take the author (or her book) seriously. As a result, I simply scanned the rest of the book and found it to be little more than an apologia for middle and upper class white women. It zig-zagged between rationalizations for the "super single mom" and the "single incompetent mom." All of the socially accepted and cleared rationalizations, I had heard before were rehearsed, and there was very little serious scholarly work in between. And while I can respect the author's intent "to bring the real voice to the public of unwed mothers," to ignore the role class distinctions play in the severity of the problem is just short of being academically, socially and criminally negligent.

There is an interesting subtext to the book which I do hardily endorse. It is that poor parenting, more often than not, leads into cross-generational cultures of out-of-wedlock children and a perpetuation of even poorer parenting skills. I am sure that for readers who trust this author's objectivity will get a lot more out of this book than I did. Since I found her scholarly credibility to be zero, I am giving her one star