Few Now Quail at TV’s Unwed Moms

Each week, more than 29 million people tune in to NBC’s “Friends,” making it the most watched show on television, but the program’s newest story line--Rachel’s decision to have and raise a child alone--has evaded scrutiny from conservatives, a group who spent considerable political capital on the same issue less than a decade ago.

When Rachel’s pal Joey asks her to marry him so that she will not face this “scary” world as a single mother, Rachel squeezes his bicep, thanks him and replies warmly, “I’m not looking for a husband.”

Rachel is not alone. On prime-time television this season, there are single mothers by choice on ABC, NBC, the WB and HBO. These are not divorcees or widows. These are women making a conscious decision to go it alone, and their convictions have drawn nary a peep from the likes of former Vice President Dan Quayle, who skewered the fictional newswoman Murphy Brown nine years ago when she decided to do the same. At the time, Quayle said Brown’s story line glamorized out-of-wedlock births, and when Candice Bergen won an Emmy for her portrayal of Brown she made a point of mentioning the veep in her acceptance speech. (Quayle was out of the country for most of this month and unavailable for comment.)

“The professional, single mother is no longer the pariah,” said Sheri Annis, a media and political consultant in L.A. who thinks the dialogue about single-mother households has changed radically since Quayle used Murphy Brown as an antithesis of his family-values platform. Partly, Annis said, it is due to the sheer numbers of single mothers compared with 10 or 20 years ago. But it is also because many of the women on TV choosing to raise kids are well-educated, wealthy and eager to assume the responsibilities of parenthood.

Those story lines reflect a cultural shift among a portion of the television audience that advertisers want to reach. This past decade’s booming economy produced unprecedented numbers of well-educated women with disposable income. Suddenly, placing commercials on programs targeting that “modern woman” seemed savvy, not risky.

“These same women are reaching their late 30s now and thinking [about their] biological clock. TV’s answer has been single parenting, [which is] non-disruptive to story lines and programs,” said Tina Pieraccini, professor of communication studies at the State University of New York at Oswego. “Remember when Rhoda got married--it didn’t work!”

As with Rachel, marriage for most TV single moms is not even a consideration. Last season, Ellenor on ABC’s “The Practice” went to a sperm bank and eventually won full custody of her child, whose sperm-donor father sought equal parenting rights. Miranda on HBO’s “Sex and the City” conceived during “pity sex” with her bartender ex-boyfriend, who felt sexually inadequate. Determined to abort the fetus, Miranda sits in the waiting room of a clinic, but then decides that her “lazy ovaries” might be offering her her one chance to have a child.

Less than 10 years ago Miranda would have been criticized for her casual approach to starting a family, to say nothing of her abortion stand. But now, according to Parents Television Council director L. Brent Bozell, there are more urgent causes to press.

“The top three issues are the graphic and gratuitous violence on television; the sheer promiscuity of sex; the raunchy language,” he said

Annis offers another theory. “People aren’t looking down on single motherhood, because it’s everywhere,” she said. “They’re concerned about the children who don’t have the access to education and health care.”

Those quality-of-life questions were part of Quayle’s argument--that far too many real-life single mothers didn’t have the advantages of Murphy Brown.

Typical of the way the single-mom story lines play out over time is Roz, the articulate, savvy assistant to Dr. Frasier Crane on NBC’s well-watched show “Frasier.” Roz conceived her baby during a tryst with a teenager several seasons ago and decided to raise the baby alone. She never mentions the child’s father and does not appear to have any relationship with him. Parenting in Roz’s world comes with few problems.

But situations such as Roz’s are ridiculous, according to Don DeVine, vice chairman of the American Conservative Union, the country’s oldest and largest grass-roots conservative organization. DeVine attributes his colleagues’ silence to disgust rather than acceptance. Rather, DeVine believes there is no need to lash out at the producers of these images on television because America has realized the fictional scenarios have no relevance to their own lives or values.

“Most people have figured Hollywood is irretrievable and have tried to go about living their lives around it, or without it,” DeVine said. “No matter how much brainwashing Hollywood does, those conservative values stay there. It’s hard to find a liberal these days that doesn’t see a single mom as a problem.... Conservatives still don’t like what’s going on in Hollywood and New York.”

And most observers agree he’s got a point about “what’s going on in Hollywood.” Television seems to be imitating real life for stars, not real life for ordinary people. Here, wealthy, white actresses such as Diane Keaton, Calista Flockhart and Jodie Foster have made single motherhood look manageable and hip.

“As you count it up, [the Hollywood single-mom phenomenon] certainly is an over-representation of the general population,” said Pieraccini. “It looks like a more common, widespread choice on television with the well-to-do mother. But in real life, the more common thing is the divorced single mother.”

As a group, single mothers in the United States grew by 27% from 1990 to 2000, producing an estimated 7.6 million single mothers today, census figures show. (That represents a significant drop from the previous decade, when single-mother homes increased 46%.) There is no data that breaks out whether the women within that group choose to have or adopt a child without a partner or whether they are single mothers as a result of widowhood or divorce. But individuals familiar with the culture of single mothers by choice say television’s inclusion of single moms is probably showing a disproportionate number of these women.

Jane Mattes, head of Single Mothers by Choice, a 20-year-old worldwide membership organization that helps single mothers find information, agreed. “It’s always going to be a small percentage of people who choose to have a child alone,” she said. “All of the prophesizing--that marriage would go out the window, that women wouldn’t ‘need’ men--that didn’t happen. Most women would still prefer to have a child with a man they love and respect. But it doesn’t always work out that way.”

Still, some find it impolitic for groups to fault female TV characters who are clearly intent on creating a nurturing atmosphere for the children they’ve consciously chosen to raise. That extends to such story lines as the WB’s “Gilmore Girls,” which does not fall neatly within the confines of “better late than never.”

“Gilmore Girls” centers on a mother and a daughter who are only 16 years apart. The mother, a member of a wealthy family in Connecticut, has never been married, although the father has a warm relationship with both of the women. The show’s creator, Amy Sherman-Palladino, said “Gilmore Girls” writers are continually discussing the standards of a “proper” upbringing.

“Our main character was raised by the most moral, upright, wealthy people, and [yet] their daughter still ended up getting pregnant at 16,” she said. The show has not merely avoided criticism--it has been lauded for its wholesome content, with endorsements from the Family Friendly Forum and Viewers for Quality Television. That reception seems like a dramatic departure from the climate less than a decade ago, but to Sherman-Palladino, it makes perfect sense. She said the growing number of single mothers on television indicates that an expanded definition of family values has gained integrity.

“Family values means you love and take care of the ones around you,” she said. “It got turned into a judgmental thing where a group of people tell you if you’re moral. After a while, frankly, I think the country got creeped out by that.”