Happy Lone Mothers Day

I know of no single instance in anthropological literature of a community where illegitimate children, that is children of unmarried girls, would enjoy the same social treatment and have the same social status as legitimate ones. The universal postulate of legitimacy has a great sociological significance ... It means that in all human societies moral tradition and the law decree that the group consisting of a woman and her offspring is not a socially complete unit. The ruling of culture runs here ... it declares that the human family must consist of a male as well as a female.


Bronislaw Malinowski, Sex and Repression in Savage Society, 1927.



The only real family is the mother and her baby. Everyone else is peripheral.

Claire Rayner, The Jewish Chronicle, 17 June 1994.



We have created the classic conditions for the emergence of a warrior class: separation of economic activity from family maintenance; children reared apart from fathers; wealth subject to predation; and male status determined by combat and sexual conquest.

Robert Whelan in the foreword to "Farewell to the Family - Public Policy and Family Breakdown in Britain and the USA" by Patricia Morgan, IEA Health and Welfare Unit 1999.