Rocking The Cradle: Lesbian Mothers by Gillian E. Hanscombe; Jackie Forster

Rocking The Cradle: Lesbian Mothers

Lesbian Mothers: A Challenge in Family Living

Gillian E. Hanscombe; Jackie Forster

This book would be a useful addition to any library used by the ‘caring professions’ and is written in an easily readable style. Quotations from various women and their children, as they talk about their lives, are interspersed between discussions of the issues involved. Books about minority groups often arouse feelings of guilt in the majority-group reader inasmuch as s/he feels uneasy about not having thought enough about the problems facing the authors or group. Also the criticism of the unhelpful or discriminatory attitudes encountered makes one feel uncomfortable. The chapter on legal cases in which women have left their husbands for a lesbian lover show how much the prejudices of society as upheld by the legal system may militate against the welfare of the children.

Isn’t it time that children had a larger say in where they lived once their parents had separated? However, the idea that a man should support a woman underpins the risk of loss of social security entitlement that a woman in such a position faces merely because she shares her bed with a man on occasions. In this respect lesbian couples are at an advantage. Maybe because it is so much more difficult to arrange conception in a lesbian situation, the women quoted had all thought deeply about their reasons for becoming parents and the effect of their lifestyle on the children.

Little research has been done on children reared in lesbian households but that quoted is reassuring, as are the attitudes expressed by the older children interviewed. As an increasing number of divorces involve young children – almost 25 per cent of families are headed by a single parent who is usually a woman – our society may feel more able to accept lesbian or male homosexual couples as parents. Love for children and an ability to cater for their needs is not a monopoly of heterosexual couples and sometimes as one hears of the violence, the unthinking sexism and the misery which many couples experience in marriage one wonders how it is that conception is so easy and birth and childrearing so hard!

Apart from the occasional statement likely to alienate married people such as ‘that state of legalised prostitution called marriage’ the book is remarkably free of what I call ‘Agit-Prop’ prose and what comes across strongly to me is how necessary it is that we have a realistic education for life, human relationships, parenthood etc both in schools and at home so that people will learn not to treat homosexuals as aberrant members of society, but as human beings with a sexual orientation which, while differing from that overtly expressed by the majority of society, is equally valid and good. ~ Wendy Savage, Obstetrician and gynaecologist, The London Hospital, Journal of Medical Ethics, 49.1

Check for it on:

• Amazon
• Goodreads
• Google Books

Details

Genre	Parenting; LGBT Studies/Social Sciences
Publication Date	May-82
Publisher	Alyson Books
Format	Trade Paperback
No. of Pages	153
Language	English
Rating	NotRated
Subject	Artificial Insemination, Human; Custody Of Children; Lesbian Mothers; Lesbians; Social Science / Lesbian Studies
BookID	10805