Abstract
Lesbian families have the potential to create families unmarked by the inequalities of power often found in cross-sex relationships. Yet, based on interviews with 27 women with children in such relationships, we find that living in a state that legally restricts the rights of nonbirth parents to child contact if the couple relationship dissolves severely undermines this possibility. Nonbirth parents engaged in three fear-induced strategies that were at odds with these couples’ desire for equitable partnership: acquiescing to the birth mother’s wishes; making themselves financially, emotionally, and legally indispensable; and using communities to police partners’ behavior and ensure accountability. As a result, the potential for such families to model egalitarian family forms that would help destabilize established gender patterns is diminished. We conclude by pointing to the importance of galvanizing to remove the remaining laws prohibiting second-parent adoption and by discussing strategies for social change.
Planned lesbian families have the potential to undermine the one-mother/one-father nuclear family ideology and to facilitate broader gender equality. The potential for lesbian families to create innovative, nongendered, and egalitarian family models is obvious, since—unlike in intimate relationships between men and women—male gender privilege is not available to determine relational power. Lesbian couples thus potentially can elide what Connell (2005) termed the “patriarchal dividend” and what Sullivan termed the “power immanent in gender,” with the result that these couples can “profoundly disrupt” gender relations (Sullivan 2004, 8). In doing so, they could potentially be trailblazers setting the path for other families—heterosexual and otherwise—who seek nonheteronormative, equality-based relationships.
Yet, cultural and legal roadblocks impede progress toward the goal of creating diverse models of family life based on principles of relationship equality. At the cultural level, Ridgeway (2011, 185–86) points to how old practices reassert themselves at sites of innovation. This persistence stems from pioneers’ tendency to draw on already existing cultural beliefs to help organize their new projects. Thus, old-fashioned “trailing assumptions” about gender can become ingrained in the new family forms. As for legal impediments, the anti-gay backlash has directed fire at not only marriage equality but also at parenting equality and has experienced success with campaigns to restrict gays’ and lesbians’ adoption and foster care rights (Stacey 2011, 113). Over half the states in the United States have restrictions or outright bans on coparental adoption (also called second-parent adoption), regardless of whether or not they allow legal marriage. Thus, parenting protections are absent for many gay and lesbian parents, a lack with potential ramifications for relational equality in the home.
To unpack some of the structural and social-psychological forces that shape social change, we draw on in-depth interviews with 27 lesbian parents in a state where second-parent adoptions were banned at the time of the interviews. In particular, we investigate the effect of legal restrictions on lesbian families’ prospects for creating egalitarian families. This article shows how one macro-level institution—the legal system—can create micro-level asymmetrical interactional processes that reintroduce inequality (see also Schrock, Sumerau, and Ueno, 2014).
The Potential for Undermining the Heteronormative Family Model
Lesbian parenthood, in theory, poses a direct challenge to heteronormativity and to the gender inequality with which it is intertwined (Schrock, Sumerau, and Ueno, 2014), although research indicates that the story “on the ground” is more complex. The possibilities of both an equality-based relationship and a procreative family that may not include men are radically destabilizing to the gender hierarchical social order in which men are superordinate and women subordinate. We address empirical work on each of these potentially gender-destabilizing elements in turn.
One way lesbian parents can challenge the concept of the traditional nuclear family and the institution of gender hierarchy is to adopt more egalitarian approaches to combining work and parenting, a project facilitated by the lack of preexisting societal norms for same-sex partners (Dunne 2000). Sullivan (2004) has argued that lesbian couples who share primary parenting are the only group with the opportunity to truly disrupt gendered power relations, and Giddens (1992) has heralded lesbians as pioneers because they are uniquely positioned to enter into relationships for their own sake rather than for any instrumental reasons—what he advocates as a “pure relationship.”
At the empirical level, research bears out the widespread desire among lesbian couples for relationship equality and for equality in the division of labor. 1 Weeks, Heaphy, and Donovan (2001, 113) found that nonheterosexual interviewees, both women and men, highly prized equality as a key element of their value system, along with honesty, openness, and rejection of manipulation. Women in Dunne’s (2000) study spoke of seeking “integrated lives,” wherein both partners had valuable time with their children, an identity conferred by the formal workplace, and the ability to financially contribute to the household (see also Sullivan 2004). Dunne also noted that phrases such as “outreach, education, and trailblazing” were common among lesbian parents who hoped to model equitable relationships for others. Comparative research has shown that lesbians tend to value equality in their relationships more than do heterosexual or gay male couples (Kurdek 2007), and their understanding of the dimensions of equality transcends the household division of labor to include shared decision making and responsibility for paid employment.
Exceptions to this “egalitarian ideal” (Weeks, Heaphy, and Donovan 2001, 109)—or at least different definitions of what constitutes equality—exist, however. In practice, egalitarianism is complicated by race, social class, paid employment, and other factors (e.g., the transition to parenthood and the presence of children; see Biblarz and Savci 2010). Moore’s (2011) study of black women in lesbian families illustrated that egalitarian ideals are variable; in her sample, economic independence and joint financial contributions were the most salient ideals, an orientation that contrasted with the second-wave feminist orientation among white, middle-class lesbians toward equality in the division of housework. She also found that having control over household labor and child rearing, rather than signaling lower power, could be regarded as a form of power (Moore 2011, 217). Research on class differences in ideology about equality among lesbian families is sparse (although more is known about class differences in ideals regarding their children’s education; see Nixon 2011 and Taylor 2009). Given that society generally holds working-class and poor mothers in lesser regard than middle-class ones (Taylor 2009), it would not be surprising if the importance of an equitable division of labor were superseded by other considerations, much as Moore (2011) found in regard to race.
Thus, the general tendency is for lesbian couples to place a high valuation on relationship equality, including in the division of labor, although specifics may vary based on race and class (Moore 2011; Taylor 2009). 2 In a society marked by relationship inequality based on gender category, organizing relationships to maximize equality presents a challenge to the gender order.
Ideally, lesbian families can contest heteronormative family models by creating families that throw into sharp relief the narrowness of cultural and legal definitions of “mother” and “family” (Gabb 2004). Such “social families,” “chosen families,” or “intentional families” may include, for example, multiple social mothers (not biologically or legally related to the child but engaged in mothering tasks), a sperm donor or father figure, and friends who have taken on familial roles (see Stacey 2011). Weston’s (1991) study illustrated how gays’ and lesbians’ chosen families shared meals, money, and other resources, cared for each other in illness, spent holidays together, raised children together, and regarded themselves as family.
Some scholars conclude that such variety in family composition can be a major impetus for social change, since the simple existence of lesbian procreative families marks a profound departure from heteronormative family models. Thus, creation of such social families is the second way that lesbian families potentially destabilize traditional gender arrangements, which are based on a man–woman procreative model. As Hayden (1995, 42) noted, they “challenge the (heterosexual) gender configuration that is foundational to American cultural notions of kinship.” Similarly, Gabb (2004, 590) has argued that the transformative power of lesbian families lies less with their commitment to egalitarianism and more in “lesbian maternity’s disruption of progenitor categories of parenthood which denote its radical potentialities, through resistance to simple mapping of parental categories onto gendered bodies.”
In general, we argue, by redefining the contours of who is “in” and who is “out,” intentional families call into question the prevailing gender-based definitions of family, and as they go about their daily lives in public spaces, the wider world sees that the culturally dominant version of family is not hegemonic. Moreover, the move from biological reproduction toward recognition of social reproduction marks a radical departure from the usual definition of family as nuclear and thus helps destabilize it as the only definition.
Cultural and Legal Impediments to Equity Projects
While the forces we’ve described—the absence of a partner positioned to demand a “patriarchal dividend” (Connell 2005), a commitment to relational equality, and a household structure that emphasizes social ties—uniquely situate lesbian families as pioneers, these families nevertheless face countervailing forces. In this section, we detail the broad cultural forces undermining alternative families, explain how these forces can affect intimate relationships in lesbian families, and describe how the legal system instantiates the wider cultural beliefs.
The cultural notion of family as composed of one man and one woman is a key cultural impediment that trickles down into intimate relations. Lesbian families are often met with confusion, discomfort, and outright rejection, illustrating the cultural entrenchment of a one-mother model (Dunne 2000), resulting in insecure parental identities for nonbiological parents and negative effects on the relationship (Gabb 2004; Padavic and Butterfield 2011; Sullivan 2004). In some cases, younger children can feel more positively toward their biological parent, triggering feelings of jealousy between partners (Sullivan 2004) and aggravating their already embattled parental identities (Gabb 2005). More broadly, the stress of holding unequal biological, legal, and social statuses can place lesbian parents at somewhat greater risk than heterosexual parents of splitting up (see Biblarz and Savci 2010).
Alternative families face a perhaps more powerful impediment than social disapproval. Because they have few, if any, cultural precedents to draw on in creating a new family form, they turn to existing culture for guidance, which gives the culture a chance to reassert old-fashioned norms. Lacking the freedom to innovate as they please, these families respond to the demands of the larger cultural context, sometimes by assimilating and sometimes by resisting. Yvette Taylor (2009, 25), in writing about the tension between these poles, noted that “rather than positioning parents as potential sell-outs or queer transformers (Ahmed 2004), Ryan-Flood (2005) suggests that the interest—and complication—lies in considering the negotiation of prevailing discourses of parenthood.” The result of such negotiations is that lesbian families tend to be “in progress,” becoming sites of both assimilation and resistance to prevailing family norms (Gabb 2005; Hequembourg 2007).
What is the effect of assimilating and resisting on larger social change goals? Drawing on existing cultural symbols and rituals (see Suter, Daas, and Bergen 2008) can be nonproblematic. Holding public commitment ceremonies is one example (Dalton and Bielby 2000), as is incorporating the nonbiological mother’s surname (typically via hyphenation) in the child’s (Bergen, Suter, and Daas 2006; Hayden 1995). Yet, as Ridgeway (2011, 172) pointed out, families trying to innovate “may draw on established schemas of heterosexual unions even in contexts where the explicit goal is to be free of such schemas in order to innovate,” a practice that can introduce elements that both impede these families’ ability to create the new systems they are personally striving for and slow the march of social change (see Bernstein and Taylor 2013).
The common practice of choosing donors who are genetically related to or who physically resemble the coparent (Almack 2006; Suter, Dass, and Bergen 2008), for example, has the effect of reifying the importance of biology in family relations. And while some families opt for hyphenated surnames for the child, in others the use of the birth mother’s surname reifies the importance of biological motherhood (Almack 2005). In another example, some lesbian families have sought to integrate themselves into existing gendered family schemas through claims of “normalcy,” as evidenced by Hequembourg’s (2007) interviewees’ insistence they were “just Mom and Dad” (see also Hayden 1995). While certainly understandable and not necessarily harmful to individual equity projects, neither do these practices undermine larger gendered family schemas.
The law, in general, tends to deny the legitimacy of same-sex families and impedes the visibility of alternative family forms in the United States and elsewhere (see Almack 2006, for example, on the United Kingdom). In the United States, despite the 2013 repeal of a key provision of the Defense of Marriage Act and marriage-equality victories at the state level, lesbian families still face legal obstacles to full parental recognition and rights.
A major obstacle is that unless a coparent has been legally granted second-parent adoption, only the birth parent has a legal tie to the child, and in most states same-sex parents lack access to this option. Specifically, while same-sex parents can petition for joint adoption in 22 states and the District of Columbia, most states (28, including eight that either deny same-sex second-parent adoption or make it unavailable under current law) do not guarantee parental rights to the coparent. This means that in 20 states, including Florida, our study site, the law allows judicial discretion, such that some judges and jurisdictions in a state grant second-parent adoption rights and others do not (Human Rights Campaign 2014). At the time of our interviews, however, the state of affairs was even worse than this contemporary account depicts: Florida explicitly prohibited homosexuals from adopting. This context led us to ask the following questions: How does lacking legal parental status affect coparents’ interpersonal negotiation of partnership equality in planned lesbian families? What is the connection between a lack of legal standing and the potential of these families to create an alternative—more equitable—social sphere?
In sum, we see the increasing presence of lesbian families as bearing on more than the question of equality among couples with nontraditional sexual orientations. These families have the potential to radically destabilize the gender-hierarchical, men superordinate/women subordinate social order. First, by seeking to hew to an equitable division of labor—which is nonstandard in the traditional gendered household—and by creating families whose very existence challenges the hegemony of the one-man/one-woman model—they confront two linchpins of gender subordination, not just the subordination of sexual minorities. If lesbian families can successfully sidestep these elements of gender hierarchy, the implications for the gender system are profound, as they make available the possibility of living lives uncircumscribed by gendered expectations.
Methods
Data come from in-depth interviews with lesbian parents living in a midsized city and surrounding counties in Florida. Participants were members of a lesbian couple raising a child conceived within the relationship via artificial insemination and living in households with no children from previous relationships. Partner relationships tended to be long-term commitments (the minimum duration was four years), although none had sought civil unions or marriages in other states.
None of the nonbirth parents had second-parent adoption status, which was illegal in the state at the time of the 2010 interviews (the ban has since been ruled unconstitutional). Although 17 interviewees described having created coparenting agreements with their partner in an effort to secure visitation in the event of a breakup, they were aware that the courts were not required to uphold these contracts.
Of the 27 interviewees, eight were birth mothers and 17 were coparents (women who had not borne a child but coresided with the child and birth mother and were regarded by themselves and others as coparents), and two were both. For purposes of the analyses, “coparents” are the 17 women who have no birth children. Children ranged in age from newborn to 16. Three coparents described having earlier lost contact with a child because of a breakup with a previous same-sex partner. Interviewees ranged in age from 26 to 62; the median age was 36. Two had high school diplomas, 12 held bachelor’s degrees, and 13 held advanced degrees. Twenty identified as white, three black, and four Latina. Sixteen were employed full-time, four part-time, and seven were out of the labor force.
Participants were recruited through a snowball sample that originated from in-depth interviews with four women with whom the first author was acquainted. She requested referrals to women outside the interviewee’s immediate social circle to obtain a wider range of experiences. All interviews were conducted by the first author and took place in the respondents’ homes, except one, which occurred in a public park. The names of all the participants and their children have been changed, as have potentially identifying details. Interviews averaged 90 minutes and were tape-recorded and transcribed. Interviews were semistructured and focused on the couple dynamics that transpired in a context that failed to recognize full parental equality.
Data analysis followed a three-step process to arrive at themes: open and focused coding, analytic and theoretical memo-writing, and data interpretation (Charmaz 2006). Open coding identified initial concepts, and focused coding organized the emergent themes and allowed for interrogation about strategies and processes. Analytic memos elaborated on key concepts and served as a bridge between raw data, theory, and interpretation. Using this constant comparative method led us to change the preconceptions we held going into the interviews. At the outset, interview questions had focused on the embattled parental identity of the coparent, since we had not anticipated the powerful effect of the second-parent adoption ban on intimate relationships. As interviewees repeatedly raised the issue, however, we revised the interview schedule to explicitly address the relationship-level effect of the ban, and thus, data collection and analysis were concurrent. Questions included the following: What strategies do you use to attain your goal of relationship equality? How does a lack of legal parental recognition affect your everyday experience? How do you manage fears about breaking up? How do you deal with your fears in the context of your relationship with your partner? Our analyses thus ended up uncovering ways that the legal prohibition led to corrosive relationship dynamics that undermined these families’ ability to achieve equality goals.
We entered the research site with the expectation, based on the research literature, that interviews would reveal a strong commitment to equity in relationships, and our results indeed confirm the importance of equity to these women. Despite this commitment, we also found strong power imbalances that led, in circuitous ways, to the reification of traditional patterns of inequality. The “long arm of the law” reached into these relationships in unexpected ways to disrupt attempts at equality and power-sharing, shaping family dynamics to more closely resemble the traditional, heterosexual nuclear family of an earlier era than the “brave new families” (Stacey 1998) that might generate equitable family forms as models for others to emulate.
Desire for Relationship Equality and Fear of Breaking Up
In this section, we document interviewees’ commitment to egalitarianism and their reason for fearing relationship termination before we turn to their strategies for keeping families intact. All couples in this study specifically said—and many were emphatic—that they consciously strove for relational equality and that they did not want relationships built on power relations. They described equality in the partner relationship as a core value that they made great efforts to achieve. Brittany, a biological mother, explained:
Before we even got together officially, we were both adamant about wanting everything to be equal. I don’t think either one of us realized how hard that would actually be at the time. But we do make daily efforts. I think we both try every day to make decisions with that thought in mind.
Valerie, a coparent, discussed how she and her partner tried to keep the equality goal on track:
We actually came up with a chore schedule that we post to the fridge so it is concrete and more likely we will stick to it. . . . One week she does dinner cleanup, garbage, and bathing, while I do laundry, cooking, and bedtime reading. You get the idea. If we didn’t write it down, we would fall into bad habits, I think. There is no “You do this because it’s a man’s job and I will do this because it’s a woman’s job.”
In sum, all women interviewed expressed a desire for relational equality, although they noted that it took vigilance. Their sense of its importance is highlighted by the fact that interviewees tended to speak about it at length and describe it as a core personal and couple value.
Yet, all 17 coparents expressed distress about the possibility of losing their children should their couple relationship end, since biological mothers in Florida, the study site, had the legal authority to prevent nonadoptive parents from seeing their children. Coparents varied in the extent to which this fear interfered with their daily lives. A few experienced debilitating fear. Constance, who described herself as “clinically depressed” since the birth of their daughter six months earlier, explained:
I thought I was prepared to deal with it. I trust Karen, and I feel like our relationship is strong. But nothing can prepare you for this feeling. Since the moment I looked into my daughter’s eyes I have been overwhelmed, thinking how powerless I am. They could walk out of my life and there is nothing I can do. Since Kayla’s birth, I’ve been so depressed. I can’t sleep, I can’t eat. I need constant reassurance from Karen. And it’s starting to affect our relationship, which makes me worry even more.
Other coparents better managed their anxiety, but fear remained:
Sara and I have a great relationship, but the fear is still there. The fear is always there. I know that Sara wouldn’t keep me from the kids if we split, but it’s the “what ifs” that make you crazy. I have to manage it, talk myself down, or else it consumes me. Still, every now and again I get a wave of absolute and total terror. I think, “Oh, my god, I have no rights here! I am completely at the mercy of Sara.” Yeah, it causes some sleepless nights.
Coparents’ fears of relationship dissolution were not unfounded, a fact that contributed to the anxiety they experienced. A theme that arose spontaneously in interviews was the high rate of relationship dissolution among lesbian couples the women knew. One described the situation she had observed in her community:
We’ve seen it where they [birth mothers] cut off contact completely. We’ve seen it as a phenomenon. The biological mother doesn’t want to deal with the other mother so they conjure all this stuff up in their head that justifies it. You can have a heterosexual family who breaks up and the parents may be angry as hell at one another, but they both have some legal rights there.
Many interviewees personally knew coparents who were denied any contact with their children after a breakup. In fact, three coparents were themselves kept from seeing their children from a former relationship by an ex-partner. One explained:
I thought our relationship was stable before she had Michael, but not long after he was born the threats started. It seemed like every time I moved the wrong way, she would threaten to leave with him. I was constantly on pins and needles. Eventually, she did leave, and now she won’t allow me any contact with Michael. . . . I dream about him constantly. I dream that I put him somewhere and I can’t find him.
Some interviewees felt that the bad breakup outcomes they knew of called into question the sincerity of claims about nonbirth mothers’ supposedly equal status, a doubt that may further enhance worries. Said one coparent:
I don’t think lesbians want to talk about it. We like to talk about equality and think our relationships are equal. But as soon as there’s a breakup? That goes out the window. If we can so easily cut off the coparent, what does that say about us?
In sum, legal vulnerability created one partner with power over the other—the power to deny child visitation—introducing a pervasive fear among coparents about what might happen if the relationship were to end and introducing questions for some about the depth of the egalitarian ethos underlying such families.
Coparents’ Strategies to Keep Families Intact
This section documents how coparents’ legal vulnerability translated into insecurity in their relationships, leading all of the 17 coparents who lacked birth children to engage in at least one of three strategies—acquiescing, creating dependency, and activating community accountability—to minimize the likelihood of relationship dissolution and thereby reduce the chance of being kept from their children. These actions, often acts of intentional manipulation, had the unintended result of shaping family dynamics to more closely resemble those of a patriarchal, heterosexual relationship of a bygone era rather than the equitable planned lesbian families they desired to be.
Acquiescing
Six of 17 coparents said they often acquiesced to the wishes of the birth mother in many aspects of their relationship in an effort to minimize conflict that might upend the relationship. These patterns were not characteristic of the normal give-and-take of a relationship, but rather constituted intentional compliance that the coparent would not have engaged in had she not been fearful of relationship dissolution. One explained,
Darla and I talked endlessly before Matthew was born about how we were going to raise this child as equal partners. Now that Matthew is here, it doesn’t feel like we are equal partners at all! It feels like she calls the shots. . . . I find myself afraid to disagree because I don’t want to start an argument. I disagree with many of the things she’s been doing with Matthew’s feeding schedule, but I don’t want to anger her. Since Matthew, I am constantly thinking, “What if she gets angry and leaves with Matthew?”
Another described the changes in her relationship:
I jump through whatever hoops she tells me to. We haven’t been getting along well lately, and I am scared to death. I try to be nice and agreeable and do whatever I can to make her life easier.
Coparent Sophia likened herself to a wife from her grandmother’s generation:
I used to watch my grandmother nod and agree with my grandfather when I knew she didn’t agree at all. You didn’t “backtalk” the man back then. When he left the room, I would ask her why she did that, and she would say, “Oh, honey, it’s just easier.” I feel like that now. . . . My grandmother was scared of angering my grandfather. I guess I’m scared of angering her too, really, but it’s because I don’t want her to leave.
This pattern of avoiding conflict by deferring to the wishes of a partner brings to mind patterns of an earlier era that predated second-wave feminism, as Sophia also noticed. Lipman-Blumen (1984) argued that by virtue of their often invisible control over institutional resources, men as a group were able to “macro-manipulate” women. In an attempt to offset this power, she argued, individual women engaged in “micro-manipulation,” by which the less powerful use the devices at their disposal—“intelligence, canniness, intuition, interpersonal skill, charm, sexuality, deception and avoidance”—to try to neutralize the control of the powerful (Lipman-Blumen 1984, 8).
One would expect such patterns to be relics of the past, certainly in households that contain no men and are committed to equality. But when the legal situation creates “macro-manipulation”—whereby the state asserts its control over women’s lives—it is unsurprising to see powerless individuals resort to such techniques. In this instance, we found women trading their voice in the relationship for a measure of power or control over the success of the relationship. To lose one’s voice, even by choice, however, is a hallmark of powerlessness in a relationship, and is at odds with these couples’ professed equality goals.
Creating Dependency
Fourteen of 17 coparents sought to create conditions in which their partners, the birth mothers, were financially, emotionally, or legally dependent on them in the hope that it would make the partner less likely to leave, thus reducing the risk of losing their children. We address these three dependency-creating tactics in turn.
Nine coparents admitted they were intentionally creating financial dependency, and the key mechanism was by securing a position as sole breadwinner, which made them feel less expendable. One explained,
I took a second job so she could quit hers. It’s hard, and I’m tired all the time, but I figured it was one way I could contribute. It’s a sacrifice but it makes me feel like I am important to this family.
Another deliberately attempted to secure her place in the family by insisting on sole breadwinner status:
She wanted us both to work part-time after Jacob was born so that things were equal, but I refused. I told her I wanted to work and be the breadwinner and for her to stay home. I told her honestly that it would lessen my anxiety because it makes me feel needed. You know, she couldn’t do it without me. She can’t just walk out on me because I am supporting them. I mean, she could, but this way it’s more difficult.
Unsurprisingly, some birth mothers reported feeling manipulated by this insistence. In their efforts to reduce the likelihood of relationship dissolution, some coparents unwittingly created tension. Justine, a birth mother, reported:
Katie insisted on me staying home while she works crazy hours to support us. I don’t like that she works so much, but I also don’t like feeling dependent on her. I feel like I have to ask permission to spend money or something! It bugs me.
Whether or not such attempts at indispensability are successful—and Justine and Katie’s situation raises the question of effectiveness—coparents who positioned themselves as sole breadwinners created relationships reminiscent of the traditional, nuclear family in which male breadwinners were “heads of household.” Since financial dominance in a relationship can translate into greater power whether or not the participants are the same sex, such attempts do not bode well for the equitable relationships that interviewees valorized.
Eight coparents described creating situations that would evoke feelings of emotional dependency in their partners. Amy, a coparent, tearfully reported her moral dilemma:
I am so ashamed of myself. I make Tonya feel guilty when she wants to go out with her friends to get out of the house. She needs time away from the baby and wants to get out so bad sometimes. [She sobs.] I always ask her how she can leave the baby, I tell her it’s not good for the baby, or whatever I can think of. Really, I don’t want her to go out with her friends because I want to be her support system. I want her to need me. If she has her friends to go to, I am more replaceable.
3
Some coparents justified such manipulation by pointing to the benefit:
I know I am manipulative, and yeah, I feel bad about it. But I also know that ultimately it’s what’s best for Kyle. Kyle and I are tight, and I make sure that Betty knows how important I am to him . . . . I say to Betty, “You know, we could never split because it would kill Kyle. He needs me.” I just like to make sure that she knows that. Makes me sleep easier at night, you know?
Thus, coparents who engaged in emotional manipulation struggled with the ethics of their actions but felt they had little recourse. It was clear that these confessions evoked feelings of shame—even if, as in the last example, defiance was also apparent. If Weeks, Heaphy, and Donovan (2001) are correct that lesbians are committed to principles of honesty, openness, and rejection of manipulation, acting duplicitously might be particularly wrenching. It is testimony to the overwhelming strength of their fear that these women were willing to personally endure this level of emotional distress—and to inflict distress on the women they loved. Their fear made them willing to trade a sense of moral uprightness for a sense of safety.
The final dependency-creation strategy was creating legal dependency. Perhaps coparents’ most overt attempt to create security out of vulnerability was the plan on the part of six to give birth to a child in order to gain a legal advantage over their partner, effectively leveling the playing field. Six of the 17 coparents planned to become birth mothers in the future. Coparents and birth mothers alike noted that when each partner was a birth mother, relationships seemed more equal and healthier. Coparents offered an additional reason: When each partner had birthed a child they were equally at risk of losing rights to a nonbiological child, and in the event of a split, the birth mother would be unlikely to deny involvement to the coparent for fear of facing a similar fate. Indeed, the two coparents who reported no sense of vulnerability were birth mothers as well as coparents. Interviewees were quite frank in describing their strategic orientation toward becoming biological mothers. According to one,
I had no desire to carry a child until my partner, Jessica, had our daughter, and then I felt so damned powerless. I decided that the only way I would ever have any power was to be a birth mother. It’s sad to think of a child as a bargaining chip, but these laws force you to do it.
Coparent Harper shared her ambivalence about her motivation for being a birth mother:
I feel compelled to do it, but not for the right reasons, I know. It’s not like my biological clock is calling out to carry a child. I read online that lesbians who do this stay together. It’s not good, I know.
While understandable and possibly effective in individual relationships, this strategy, besides being manipulative, reinforces the traditional, nuclear family by devaluing social mothering and underscoring the importance of biological relatedness, just as the state does by failing to recognize coparents as legitimate parents.
In sum, to minimize the chance of a breakup, coparents engaged in strategies to create conditions in which their partners would find it financially, emotionally, or legally difficult to leave. Since financial and emotional dominance in a relationship can translate into power, breadwinning coparents and those who created emotionally dependent partners reported experiencing greater control over their futures than they had initially. Especially likely to feel secure were the women who were coparents as well as birth mothers. Yet, as with the acquiescing strategy, there was a downside. Treating the relationship so strategically imbues it with opportunism and distrust, relationship characteristics at odds with both what these couples intended and equality goals. We now turn to the final strategy coparents employed in an attempt to prevent relationship termination.
Activating Community Accountability
More than half (9 of 17) of the coparents relied on social pressure to help keep their families intact by deliberately integrating themselves into the lesbian community in hopes that community recognition as an engaged parent would raise the specter of social disapproval and even shunning if their partner were to quit the relationship and deny visitation rights. By arranging play dates and generally befriending other lesbian families to create a social support network, coparents made themselves visible to other parents in the community. Interviewees were upfront in explaining that community accountability was a powerful force in keeping their families intact. Kimberly, a coparent whose ex-partner had kept her from seeing their daughters, spoke of her experience:
Elaine grew up here and we were friends with everyone in the lesbian community. In fact, we were one of the first lesbian couples to have a baby so everyone knew us, came to us for advice, and whatever. Then one day, Elaine took off. Everyone was shocked and I think scared, too. It really provided a first-hand account of what can happen, what’s allowed to happen in Florida. But she could never come back here now; she would be lynched. It’s sad, really, because she’d been here her whole life. This is where her friends and family are. Everyone really rallied around me, thankfully.
All the interviewees knew of Kimberly’s experience or ones like it and generally heaped condemnation on women who denied former partners’ rights to the children. Coparents said such stories reinforced for birth mothers the catastrophic implications of breaking up the family. One explained:
Being a part of the community is necessary anyway because we are all in this together. You know, we share information. But it was really important to me because I wanted everyone to know that we are a family. I can’t say I feel good about what happened to Kimberly. I mean, because it could happen to me too, but you know, it shows. . . . Well, Brittany knows that if she did that to me, she would lose all her friends, everything.
Another way to deploy the community was by holding commitment ceremonies, which coparents said served to create accountability. Nancy discussed her decision to hold such a celebration:
I never had any desire to have one before Gwen was born. Then after she was born I felt panicked and wanted to do anything to feel more connected to them. Even though it wasn’t legal, standing up in front of our friends and family and pledging our commitment made me feel less vulnerable, like we were a real family.
Coparents recognized the importance of their social networks in all aspects of their lives, and their reliance on them was not typically instrumental. But almost half pointed out that they purposefully used their networks to police the behavior of their partners, even though using social opprobrium as a threat would seem to be at odds with egalitarian principles.
Historically, marriage served to publicly legitimize a relationship, and entering into the institution signified the intention to at least nominally comply with certain expectations (Coontz 2005). Marriage, in short, was far more than an affair of the heart; it was a public commitment that the community monitored, and husbands and wives were held accountable. Our results revealed the usefulness of such community accountability to coparents. Despite the commonly held belief that coercion should play no part in relationships, we found that coparents relied on the community as an implicit threat to birth mothers. Tales of birth mothers ostracized for preventing coparents’ involvement with the children were a powerful tool for enforcing accountability. Coparents, while frightened by these true stories, nevertheless invoked them to remind birth mothers that such a decision was not without consequence.
In sum, our results indicate that, in sharp contrast to these couples’ egalitarian ethos, the relationship dynamics they described more closely resembled time-worn, nuclear family–era ones than liberatory ones. The fear accompanying the lack of legal rights facilitated the recrudescence of old-fashioned practices whereby women’s voices were muted, where women sought to tie partners to them out of need rather than desire, and where relying on the community as a social control mechanism was one of the few levers women could pull to control their own fate.
That such classic examples of female subordination appeared in the face of avowals of equity principles and in the absence of men is testimony to the strength of the cultural and legal impediments such families face. The lack of cultural and legal acknowledgement ensured that coparents felt insecure in their parental identities, leading to behaviors with negative effects on their primary relationships, although no conclusions can be drawn about children’s well-being. Our interview schedule contained no questions about parenting practices or children’s welfare, although nationally representative studies have shown no differences between children raised by female same-sex couples and those raised by male–female couples in regard to anxiety (van Gelderen et al. 2012), levels of self-esteem, depression, or the number and quality of their friendships (Wainwright, Russell, and Patterson 2004).
As for assimilation and resistance, our results again show the power of cultural and legal impediments. Despite interviewees’ professed desire to resist pressures toward unequal relationships, the culture offered the option of assimilating to backward-looking templates in which women manipulated men, and the legal system provided a reason to act on that option. These findings beg the question about prospects for social change both for lesbian families and for gender relations more generally, the topic to which we now turn.
Conclusions
Given the recent Supreme Court rejection of a key DOMA provision, the explosion of gay and lesbian marriages, and the increase in planned lesbian families, reasons for hope about egalitarian family relations seem appropriate. In addition to these politically-based reasons, there are also scholarly-based reasons to expect egalitarian family relations in unions where gender power cannot be directly wielded (i.e., where the patriarchal dividend cannot be cashed in). By pointing to one set of mechanisms, those arising from the legal system, we have added to the understanding of how macro heteronormative arrangements (in this case, the legal system) can subvert progress in the gender arena. 4
These families actively sought equality and nevertheless produced an inequality reminiscent of earlier times. Why? We point to two reasons. First, innovators, by definition, are ahead of the cultural curve and thus must conduct their change projects in less than ideal circumstances. As Marx (1972, 15) noted in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please . . . but [rather] under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.” So it was with these couples. Ridgeway (2011, 159) refers to the tendency of gender norms to reassert themselves in new situations where they are no longer appropriate as “cultural lag.” Heteronormative principles of gender inequality, of biological relatedness, and of the “one mother/one father” template are embedded in the institution of family law and inform the interactional behaviors of all families, even those who seek to repudiate them. Research has shown results similar to ours at other sites of innovation around gender. Ridgeway (2011) noted, for example, how the egalitarian potential of the college hookup is undermined by still existing gender frameworks that militate against equality (by reifying the imperative of male pleasure and the notion that women having sex outside of the relationship context are sluts; see Hamilton and Armstrong 2009). Hookups are uncertain new encounters, so it is unsurprising that people import old gender norms. Similarly, in our case, the cultural blueprint about how women can act to minimize the potential for a breakup (see Lipman-Blumen 1984) is still culturally available for a woman who feels she has little recourse, and drawing from that cultural source countervails attempts at change.
The problem is not only that such families must contend with lingering cultural attitudes—codified in laws and cultural belief systems. Because of their status as pioneers, they also must forge their own path, a task made harder when few alternative visions are available. This is our second reason for the behaviors we observed: Revolutionary change requires a vision of alternatives, of how things could be, of how women can construct an egalitarian relationship, and lacking relevant examples inhibits formation of such a vision. To take a historical example, writing about lesbian sexual identity in postwar Buffalo, New York, Davis and Kennedy (1986) noted how this pre-Stonewall local lesbian community enforced rigid butch–fem role behaviors, and only later—with the advent of the liberation movement presenting a range of relationship behaviors—did sexual expression become more expansive. Observing a variety of ways to enact lesbianism effected positive change in those women’s lives, and we suspect that having the opportunity to observe a variety of lesbian families enacting equality would have had the same liberating effect for our families. Indeed, gay-friendly regions have been the sites for much of the research indicating positive relationship outcomes among gay and lesbian families (see Dalton and Bielby 2000; Sullivan 2004).
What do our results portend for social change? While it is easy to be pessimistic, reasons for optimism also exist, since forces for change, not just forces for persistence, are afoot. The dramatic upsurge in public acceptance of gay and lesbian marriages is one example. The sincere dedication to equality on the part of the families we studied and others like them also bodes well for the future. What if the law had allowed these families the freedom to construct relationship intimacy as they saw fit, without forcing one partner to contemplate the possibility of losing access to a child? It would have meant more families deviating from time-honored but narrow gender scripts. It may not seem much—more families who repudiate the heteronormative model—but it would add to their number, which matters for social change. Ely and Meyerson (2000) refer to this social change tactic in gender relations as the “small wins” approach. Ridgeway and Correll (2000) use a metaphor of ocean waves moving a sandbar: One set of families embodying egalitarian relationships—one wave—has little effect; but if the waves of change keep pounding—if other families follow—the old gender beliefs will be worn down to the point of irrelevancy. The potential for major change is here. Had the law not stood in the way, these lesbian families might have been another ocean wave helping move the gender expectations sandbar.
Such undermining of the prevailing ideal would have been a boon to anyone—not just lesbians—who seeks gender equality in intimate relationships. The gender system is propped up partly because it is taken for granted: When gender is operating smoothly, there appears to be no other way to organize family life than according to its principles. Once that taken-for-granted quality is eroded—which is what would happen with the existence of well-functioning alternatives—it creates a crack in the edifice of gender and weakens its foundation. Such a weakening might have created the possibility for new kinds of families—not just for sexual minorities, but for heterosexuals, as well—that are unblemished by gendered expectations.
Yet, as we have shown, laws restricting second-parent adoption mean fewer successful alternative families for others to model, and thus, our results highlight the importance of the availability of legal second-parent adoption for achieving equality in lesbian relationships. We acknowledge that the small and geographically limited sample narrows the generalizability of our findings. Nevertheless, the process we uncovered may be relevant to lesbian families in the 29 states that do not necessarily grant this right, as well as in the numerous countries that do not permit such rights. We concur with Judith Stacey (2011, 202): “The state’s mandate should be to facilitate—or at the very least not to thwart—individual commitments to give love, care, and support in however many guises they appear.” The liberatory potential of the home is obviated when the state squelches alternative ways of organizing family life. It is important to understand the real-life effects of discrimination on same-sex families because perhaps a deeper understanding of how same-sex families are hurt by social and legal discrimination will galvanize social change.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank J. Sumerau and Annie Tuttle for constructive comments on previous drafts. We also thank Joya Misra and the anonymous Gender & Society reviewers for their helpful suggestions.
Notes
Jonniann Butterfield is an associate professor of sociology at Austin Peay State University. Her research primarily focuses on gender and sexualities. Previous research addressed gender and power in lesbian families, while current projects examine feminism among millennials.
Irene Padavic is Mildred and Claude Pepper Professor of Sociology at Florida State University. Her research lies mostly in the areas of gender and race in organizations. Her gender research has also addressed sexual harassment, women veterans’ earnings, the race wage-gap among women, and women’s underrepresentation in blue-collar occupations and in scientific ones. She has written two editions of Women and Men at Work, with Barbara Reskin.