Jenny Davidson, CEO of CSMC visits glasgow for the VOPFN's first inaugural meeting
Note* This piece was first published on the CSMC website
In September, I had the unique opportunity as CSMC’s CEO to travel to Glasgow for the inaugural meeting on the One-Parent Families and Vulnerability Network (O-PFV).
This newly minted network brought together one-parent organisations with academics working on related topics from Ireland, Scotland, England, New Zealand and Australia.
It has taken a full two years from the first grant application to the U.K. Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) to launch this project that aims to “explore the endurance of vulnerability and pregnancy/ single parenthood in Anglophone countries… involving historians and those working in the contemporary space of advocacy and policy.”
The convening of 15 professionals at Glasgow Caledonian University for a workshop was the first significant outcome for the project and took place 18 to 20 September.
The workshop included presentations from academics on historical perspectives of single motherhood, pregnancy outside marriage, forced adoption practices, and reproductive health and rights, as well as the relevant changing parameters over the last century.
This was complemented by roundtable discussions led by CEOs of our own Council of Single Mothers and their Children, Single Mother Families Australia, One Parent Families Scotland and One Family (Ireland), with the CEO of Gingerbread in the U.K. unfortunately unable to attend.
"The commonalities of women’s experiences when they became pregnant outside marriage in any of these countries post-World War two was marked, with widespread discrimination, manipulation and devastating personal outcomes across the five nations that continue to have ramifications for mothers, their children and the following generations."
Of great value as CEO of CSMC was the convening of organisations providing practical support and advocating for change for single mother families in the current context. It was very interesting to understand the size, funding, service model and development of each organisation relative to the size of the country’s population. For comparison, Victoria has close to seven million inhabitants, Scotland has 5.5 million and Ireland 5.25 million, and yet the organisations in both countries are significantly larger than CSMC, with service provision largely funded by governments, and delivered through a child poverty lens. These insights complement what I had always know about how much CSMC achieves, given our size and funding base.
The workshop exposed the common challenges single mothers and their children continue to encounter in all the anglophone countries: poverty – compounded by unpaid child support, punitive government policies such as mutual obligations, gender and societal bias, and widespread family violence. As organisations addressing these challenges, we have diverse responses and lens to our work, however the commonalities far outweighed the varied ways in which we provide support, and the relative progression made in each nation on social, economic and legal discrimination.
The opportunity to be funded to travel and stay in Glasgow was exceptional, and a week’s travel as a sole care single mother was miraculous – made possibly only through the support of my own mother, aged 80! Many of us know the challenges of just making it to the office in school holidays, so you will appreciate the enormity of this trip. The two days of solid meetings, discussions and shared meals concluded on the third day with a workshop to develop a common message to progress our global appreciation and support of single mother families. Watch this space for a shared animated message to be developed through ongoing collaboration.
My conclusions from this trip are:
Single mothers have been uniformly punished and controlled for breaching the patriarchal system (of having a husband or father in control of all families), with devastating and long-lasting consequences.
Women’s resilience and determination is remarkable, global and unstoppable, despite continued best efforts to impinge on it.
Scotland is gorgeous (my first trip) and travel without kids is fantastic, even with a six day turn around!
CSMC is doing so much with so little – just like single mothers – and we need to continue to grow to reach more single mother families and provide more diverse support (having already more than doubled in size in the eight years I have been CEO).
I am so grateful to the Janet Greenlees of Glasgow Caledonian University and Lindsey Earner-Byrne of Trinity College Dublin for securing the grant and organising the workshop. It was very valuable to bring together such disparate professionals to discuss the commonalities of the families that we work to understand, champion, support and empower.