This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. Baby Mama is a phrase that can diminish a woman, reduce her to a

relationship that didn't work out. And in the United States, no one has carried that label more than

black single mothers. In 1965, the U.S. Department of Labor commissioned a report from future

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan

that looked at the rising number of black households led by single mothers

and called it the root of a tangle of poverty and dysfunction,

a finding that shaped decades of public policy and cemented a cultural stigma.

President Ronald Reagan gave that stigma a face, the so-called

welfare queen. And by the time welfare reform passed in the 90s, it had heartened into policy.

Black single mothers weren't just stereotyped. They were punished and blamed. I grew up with a

single mother during those years. Our home was

full of love and care, but I know how that shame impacts both single mothers and their children.

My guest today, Jamila Lemieux, a writer and cultural critic, has lived that story too.

She said she once thought single motherhood was a fate just slightly worse than

death, and worried that writing about it could mean wearing that label forever. Eventually, over the last

decade, she has given a firsthand account of single motherhood in columns, essays, and on social media.

In her new book, Black Single Mother, Lemieux details the history of that stigma,

including the cultural significance of the Moynihan Report, and blends her personal story with those

of 21 other single mothers about love and co-parenting, ambition, and the complicated, ordinary

beauty of raising a child on your own.

Jamila Lemieux's work has appeared in the Washington Post, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Essence, and Slate,

where she currently writes the Care and Feeding Parenting Column.

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