Single Motherhood as a Site for Feminist Reimagination in Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip and 'Other People’s Children'

Abstract

By investigating the worlds of single mother protagonists in Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip (1977) and Other People’s Children (from Honour and Other People’s Children, 1980) this essay reflects on how Australian single mothers and their lived experiences were fictionally depicted in the decade the Supporting Mothers’ Benefit was introduced by the Whitlam Labor Government (1973).¹ Much has been written about Garner’s variously-constructed collective households and the young, inner-city types who inhabited them. This essay focusses on how Garner’s single mothers negotiate the private and the political while negotiating maternal and erotic desire in the aftermath of the gains made by second-wave feminism. Contemporarily, despite these gains and the rise in and acceptability of SMC (single mothers by choice), ‘the family’ as an ideological construct, together with the predominance of phallogocentric logic continues to inhibit single mothers’ rights, equality and agency. This is one of the great contradictions of single motherhood: that while patriarchy enforces gendered and repressive values upon single mothers and their opportunities for transcendence, as a liminal, ‘in-between’ space, single motherhood presents a site for resistance and re-imagination, as well as an escape from domestic violence. I contend that in these early works Garner teases out this contradiction of constraint and freedom, similarly to how she famously examines the fault lines that exist in the ‘gap between theory and practice’ (OPC 53).

Keywords

agency; Australian literature; becoming; choice; desire; feminism; Helen Garner, single mothers; non-normative families

1 Original Enabling Legislation: Social Services Act (No 3) 1973 (No 48 of 1973). From July the Supporting Mother's Benefit (SMB) was payable to unmarried mothers, deserted de facto wives, women whose de facto husbands were in prison and other separated wives not eligible for Widow Pension Class A (WPA). A biological child of the beneficiary or a child of whom she had the custody, care and control prior to the date on which she became a single mother, including an adopted child, was a qualifying child. However, in the case of an unmarried mother, only a biological child could be a qualifying child. This act was brought about after much lobbying by the Council for the Single Mother and Her Child and influenced by the activism of feminists as shown in the documentary Brazen Hussies (2020) which outlined gendered inequalities and encouraged women to leave violent relationships.